The concept of "mutual aid" as put forward by folks like Kropotkin is basically we should build communities that help one another, offering our communities excess when we have our, and gracefully accepting aid when we need it.
It's also the fundamental error that all of the "self reliant, self sufficient" doomsday prepper types make. When the apocalypse comes, your little homestead will be nothing but a supply cache for raiders. It doesn't matter how many guns you have. Without a functioning, hierarchical, tight knit community to aid in defense, you and your family will be sold off to the first band of roaming slavers that come through.
some sort of reciprocal/mutual aid economy -> exchange (usually external) -> joining in with currency and capitalism
In my view the clear main factor is external disruption that forces groups into the market/currency based economy. That, plus the difficulties to control bad actors if you had a more informal system at huge scale (millions of people).
Without the external economic disruption you simply just don't get much diversity.
As far as specific events, things like disaster assistance volunteer operations in the West tend to be both religiously and ethnically diverse yet performed independently of expected remuneration. Otherwise it's not like we're observing huge samples if we restrict ourselves to looking just for communities that have both been religiously and ethnically diverse. Is the failure of any such alternate community to last for centuries - when the opportunity has barely even been there for that long - conclusive at all?
We choose to downplay our common dependencies and exaggerate the differences. Its a social game we have learned to play when the stakes for our collective survival were lower.
We clearly cant be "best buddies" across all 7bln x 7bln pairs sharing the planet at any given time. Nor is it needed.
The minimum common ground needed for long term sustainable survival is just that. A minimum. But it has not been reached and time is running out. Our numbers and techological progress are outgrowing our social adaptations for containing conflict at the fastest pace ever. Unless we address this imbalance things will not end well.
Imo it's naive to think that this is ever achievable given how powerful the human nature to find an in-group is.
this is true as a general behavior, but its practical relevance is highly variable and culture dependend. For the longest span of our existence tribes routinely attacked eachother, decapitating for fun, enslaving for profit, and it was deemed ok.
by and large we dont do that anymore, though this is the instictual behavior being tapped to support, e.g., organized large scale war.
anything as large scale as organized war, any form of economic and political organisation might be building on primal behaviors but is not equivalent to them. a lot of cold calculation, ideology and even trial-and-error is involved and the end result is highly variable.
education, factual information and candid discussions between people is what will help us ensure in and out-groups are confined to sports and games and do not put our collective welfare at risk
exactly that. but also, finding an in-group really just means that we want to have a social environment where we are recognized and supported. there need not be any out-group. the goal here is to develop relationships such that neighbors and the local community become that group (or one of them), which again, as the article suggests, can be achieved by helping each other out.
You just have to look at pretty much any disaster. Communities come together. They do not become cannibalistic hordes like peppers think. This has been proven again, again, and again. There's entire studies on it.
At least that was the experience in Chile in the most affected localities of the 2010 magnitude 8.8 earthquake.
We called down the breakdown of social order that happened "the social earthquake". Eventually the military had to instate curfews to restore public order, though it was taken to be a display of cracks existing in society that the looting happened in the first place rather than just taken for granted as what will happen in face of disruption of social order, which is the prepper view.
There needs to be some organizing principle for it to work though - some shared belief in a greater good everyone works towards. Similarly, this is how communism could work without bloodshed (some of those hippie communes are close to classical Marxism).
Plus, something like Mondragon exists with a large scale. It's less commune and more workers coop at the billion dollar scale, but it's nevertheless a useful reminder that we can scale up non traditional models.
But they drank all the Western kool-aid they could, though and it slowly shows.
Do unto others how you want others to do unto you. If you want to judge strictly, you shouldn't ask to be judged with leniency.
For example see which political party gave handouts too banks, or which party created a cottage industry of fraud during a time of economical and existential chrisis (COVID) to the tune of trillions of dollars. It wasn't the "democrats".
You can judge me as you wish, I have no interest in controlling that.
The point of my reply was "this is how you deal with these people". You make it clear they have been sucked into propaganda, and you give them no quarters for their "views" because doing so legitimizes the sudden rise of fascism in the United States.
Fairness and tolerance is fine in civil society. When incivility reigns, well you can call a turd a turd. It's really the least you can do given what's at stake.