The way I see it that instinct is the cause behind so much suffering and injustice in the world.
Many of us have already overcome it! All of them are holding us back though.
FFS this is the most ignorant comment I’ve ever read. YOU all are the ones holding us back.
Anyone know a Lemmy equivalent of r/woosh?
I think they’re continuing the joke
It’s a double whoosh.
God damn. Hoisted by my own petard!
Like a good portion of all wooshes were in the old place.
woosh-woosh
The fun thing is I can’t tell if this comment is ironic or not.
I think it was irony, bro.
I think it was irony, bro.
I think it was irony, bro.
Pretty funny ngl
underrated comment
It’s literally the top comment. Can we leave “underrated comment” comments back on Reddit?
We also had backseat modding and obnoxious rhetorical questions back on reddit, if you really insist we have this discussion
Underrated response.
All the Great Apes (probably, definitely), including us, have an instinct and built in skill at identifying snakes.
Researchers did experiments with both humans and other apes where they were shown progressively less obscured images of different predators and without fault we and our relatives were able to identify the snakes faster than any other creature.
This means that the instinct to find, and kill snakes goes back millions of years. Yet now when I encounter a snake my instinct is to move it to a safer spot so it doesn’t get hurt or hurt me.
I think that if we can get over such a deep rooted instinct, we can get over the ‘Us Vs Them’ instinct too.
Wow, good argument. But did you really overcome the instinctual fear for snakes, or do you winch first, before rational takes over to tell you to move the snake to a safer place?
If wincing is all that happens before treating others with respect and rationality, then I’d call that a success.
Touché
When I see a snake my first instinct is to try to touch it. We don’t have them in my country, so it feels like meeting a magical creature.
Man I already posted it in my own comment in this thread, but you should read the lyrics to this song from rapper Eyedea of Eyedea & Abilities. Dude joined the 27 club over a decade ago, such a bummer.
But the vast majority of people don’t.
As long as power hungry people exist. It is basically easiest thing to implement in your politics and get people behind you.
Looking at any kind of politics and how it changed over the last 10 or so years, it’s a clear no from me.
Even reddit event is an example of us vs them that happened between those that stayed and those that left. Lot of actions seem to be made up of small acts of us vs them to drive forward decision making.
Hey man, we’ll quit fighting when they do.
Humans are reactionary and emotionally driven. Thats why empty hot button issues are such a trigger for people. We need to learn to ignore those things and work together, but the pessimist in me doesn’t see it happening. Thats a massive shift and based on what I’ve observed in the US, that divide is doing nothing but widening.
All we can do is be aware of it, not get roped into manufactured propaganda, and unionize.
empty hot button issues
Agree for the most part but this here is also part of the issue. What one considers an “empty hot button topic” tends to be based on what directly affects them. I’ve routinely seen people on both sides use this exact same label to dismiss things like LGBT rights or abortion access. To the individuals that actually suffer, those are not “empty hot button topics”.
Like I very distinctly remember a time when the debate around gay marriage was called a distraction from Iraq. It was a frequent applause line in many, many straight cis comedian’s sets. It may have been convenient in that way, but to the LGBT community, it was real oppression and a real fight for equality. It also wasn’t some facade that was being put on by the right, they were genuine about it. That fight needed to be fought at the same time as the fight to end the war in Iraq, or the recession, or any of the “bigger” issues of the 2000s.
Hopefully the poster is referring more to topics like Hunter Biden’s laptop that take up a significant amount of time on the most watched cable news channel. Or when Hillary Clinton was investigated eleven times with nothing to show for it simply to keep her in the news.
Yeah, this is what I was referring to. Things that can’t be directly attached to a person’s experiences or well being. I’d never willingly dismiss a person’s struggle or needs. Thanks for summarizing better than I did.
@[email protected] summarized this below better than I did. Here’s my reply that has a little more nuance.
“Ape alone… weak. Apes together…. strong”
So no, it’s baked-in the DNA of how we survive. We group to fight threats. Early days, that threat is protection from hostile wildlife like bears.
You scale that to a modern civilization - and you have groups of people fighting for resources, food, money, opportunities, land, etc. Sometimes they’re gangs. Sometimes they’re entire countries. Sometimes they’re groups of allied countries.
And heck, you see it in stupidly small scales too. “Coke v Pepsi”, “N64 v PlayStation”, “Rock Fans v Disco Fans”.
Sunni and Shia believe 98% of the same stuff. But the bit they don’t agree on pushes fringe lunatics to terrorism, war, ethnic cleansing, etc.
Same deal with Protestants and Catholics.
The only thing could make us drop “us versus them” mentality is a giant alien force more violent and sick than anything you can imagine.
Then maybe, humanity will be the “us” finally.
The only thing could make us drop “us versus them” mentality is a giant alien force
That you, Ozymandias?
The only thing could make us drop “us versus them” mentality is a giant alien force
Mankind, that word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it’s fate that today is the 4th of July and you will once again be fighting for our freedom not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution but from annihilation.
The only thing could make us drop “us versus them” mentality is a giant alien force more violent and sick than anything you can imagine.
Even if this’d unite humanity, it would in the end still be us vs. them (us being humanity).
Also disagreements over what programming language to use. Disagreement is a part of normal decision making that leads to diverse outcomes as opposed to being part of a single minded hive mind.
It’s okay to disagree or have differences. The problem arises when the response to disagreement is vilification and violence. Sadly, tolerance and tribalism don’t exactly go hand-in-hand.
In my opinion, the result of our tribalism tendency that we are currently discussing has very little to do with “instinct”, and it is rather the result of generational social conditioning we are exposed to since the day we are born; values and biases adopted unquestioningly from our caretakers, educators, and the culture and political reality that we grew up and associate with.
If a child without preexisting established knowledge or exposure can naturally make friendly associations toward an abstract-looking plushie that has one big eye and 10 legs, which has nothing similar to the appearance of a human, then the reason they would fear or hate people of different skin color or cultures is apparent.
I don’t quite agree because children will also readily make other children or trees or stones or the sky their enemy if they feel like it. And they will go out of their way to recruit other people to fight against said perceived enemies.
I’ll get more basic than everyone else here:
Unless the human brain collectively evolves in a very short period to function differently than it has since we first started throwing shit at other hominids, no. We, collectively, as a society, can aspire to be better than our animal nature but that hardware is still there and it will never, ever, stop pushing people to tribalism, selfishness, and aggression.
We can’t fix us. We can only do the best with what we have and keep moving.
So you essentially claim humans are basically “bad” (willing to harm others for unnecessary gain), and maybe there are a few good people but it doesn’t matter?
I think you can more accurately say that human nature is to cooperate and share and there are a few psychopaths that fuck things up when allowed to gain power (and implement their extractive tooling like capitalism).
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity-david-graeber/15873078
That’s a bit of a reductive take on the parent comment.
Human nature to cooperate and share is not mutually exclusive with forming in-groups and out-groups.
Isn’t the internet wild?
The product of literally 1000 generations worth of human cooperation, asking if humans will ever transcend tribalism on what is arguably humanity’s most collaborative innovation?
Depends how we define ‘overcome’ really. I mean, if cooperation is evidence of overcoming it then the question doesn’t need to be asked.
If we’re talking about our biological instinct for tribalism, well that’s why we’re having the conversation isn’t it.
That’s a bit of a reductive take on the parent comment.
Sure, but that was my intention, to distill the essence which I think I did fairly well. Was I wrong?
Human nature to cooperate and share is not mutually exclusive with forming in-groups and out-groups.
Agree, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t in our nature to also cooperate and trade amongst groups rather than default to making enemies. Humans forming groups/tribes etc doesn’t imply that those tribes have to have exploitative interactions.
As a maybe silly analogy, thing of two families visiting Disneyland together. They maintain group membership, the parents only buy lunch for their own children, as the other kid’s parent’s can provide for them fine. But they enjoy the day together, and maybe buy each other treats. Then they go home to their separate homes, to maybe cooperate on another day.
But then think of two families where each has a psychopath that has effectively gained control of the family. Then the Disneyland trip is less likely to happen, especially being fun, even if the rest of the family is the same. Instead, there might distrust, competition, and attempts at exploitation between the families.
Which one of the above scenarios is “human nature”? Both? What’s the difference? Resource contention and/or effective psychopaths preventing cooperation IMO (sorry I keep editing).
Yes. Reductive in a crude way, not clarifying. I don’t think the parent comment at all implied humans are inherently bad and the occasional good doesn’t matter.
Rather inversely, humans are tribalistic but achieve good in spite of tribalism.
Ah, maybe so, I’m definitely not immune to mischaracterizing on occasion.
Ahem, we can champion a culture that teaches us to resist the negative aspects of our nature and embraces the positive aspects. Victory over our nature is celebrated, and when nature wins it is understood and dealt with, but with understanding and reasonable consequences, not vengeful malice.
Some day…
I don’t think so. I think the universe is too harsh for a complex, truly altruistic species to survive. But it is possible for us to get to a point where socially we’re better than our base instincts. We’re partway there, although we’ve been backsliding lately.
So you think if we all cooperated, made sure everyone was safe and healthy, ended war, and devoted all our time to ensuring each person reached their potential (whether that be scientific, artistic, etc) it would make us less likely to survive?
I think they’re saying if you start out that way naturally (like a peaceful sapient race on a peaceful planet) they’d be an easy resource for something less peaceful (it would just take one aggressive race to extinguish them). If peacefulness and powerfulness scale together during a species’s development, they may learn to learn strategies for peaceful coexistence before the stakes are too high for screwups.
No. The very tribalism that has allowed us to survive now works against us because we were too successful at survival. The solution is to be aware of and constantly fight against our base selfish instincts through things like what you said. The problem is that we seem to always go back to “fuck you, got mine” as a species. Perhaps the great filter is that a species that’s successful enough at survival to get to the point where space travel is possible will always be betrayed by the tribalistic behavior they needed to survive the harshness of life.
Ok, I agree it’s not likely we’ll get there. That’s certainly and sadly true.
We will not evolve out of our petty differences until we have UtopiaTech like Star Trek Replicators that can satisfy every basic need, and allow people to pursue dreams, ideas, and hopes, free of the burden of having to run the orphan crushing machine just to desperately survive another day.
Never. We will even discriminate against people with different ear length if it get that’s far. Conflict is inevitable, it’s in our genes, our memes.
Remove? No. Overcome? We’re already doing it.
Our society is far more accomodating than it has ever been. Different sexes, ethnicities, skin colors, religions, sexual orientations, gender identities and whatnot enjoy more acceptance and equality now than ever before. Something like the EU - a voluntary alliance of this size - would have been unthinkable probably just 100-200 years ago. And for all its flaws the participating nations have grown closer through it.
We still got ways to go particularly internationally and we must be ever vigilat against those that want to drag us backward but the progress is undeniable.
Us ve them is just a convenient cover for me me me, so I doubt it
Yes and no.
The reason why we form societies this to look after one another, make life easier and safer for us, and find mates.
We have successfully gone from the days where not having kids was a literal death sentence in old age, where a small scratch could easily get infected and kill you, and where starving to death was a frequent occurrence (interestingly enough, your body has all sorts of anti-kill-yourself measures built into your BIOS, such as exercise optimization curves so you don’t burn up all your calories exercising (hunting), and starving yourself causes your body to do its damndest to keep as much fat as possible to keep you alive through famines, but I digress).
In some ways, we are at the highest peak of not being tribalistic. But people also invent new ways to create us vs them situations, such as worshiping a gourd vs beating up the shoe worshipers for being blasphemous. You see this often and it’s the dumbest shit in the world, lol. Though that particular one skewers it well, haha.
Eventually, I think stuff like race and sexuality will be behind us largely, and it will be the latest minor thing.
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