Will humanity ever be able to overcome that tribalistic instinct of "us vs. them?"
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.
Pretty funny ngl
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?
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.
@notacat@mander.xyz summarized this below better than I did. Here’s my reply that has a little more nuance.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
Us ve them is just a convenient cover for me me me, so I doubt it
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.
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.
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.
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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Not entirely, but we can control it. I would absolutely argue that we live in some of the least tribalistic times in history (though I will say that I worry that it's now on the rise.)
But it's their fault!
But how would you define the point at which our material needs are met? It feels like it's an intrinsic desire for humans to gain an advantage over other people. Or at least we want the illusion of being able to gain an advantage through either hard work or gaming the system. For me it seems like capitalism lies in our nature and it requires a complete change of our societal values to move to a different system. Not saying that I think capitalism is a good thing.
Arguably we're doing a decent job right now. I'd say a majority of people in the West think genocide is bad, no exceptions made for any particular case. We'll never move past the tendency, transhumanism aside, but with enough education we can learn to identify it in ourselves and recognise it's wrong and bad.
No because there is no natural selection happening for that trait. But in once case aliens. If there where aliens discovered and they where hostile maybe even not I could see humans banding together as a group but it would still be an us vs them situation.
I bet I could kill more aliens than you.
Ever is a long, long time. We won't live to see it, but I'm not confident that it will never happen.
Now that's a great question!
We do need a slightly better tool than democracy, for sure
it's what kept us alive during our early days as a specie. I think is it baked into our essence as a human. but if it can be controlled or diverted then yeah. fund us an alien and we'll be an earth tribe against aliens.
Ozymandias was correct
Yes, because it has for thousands of years. Sure, it draws new lines, but then it overcomes them. It's almost like human history is the history of social and political progress.
We get tribal over everything. Countries, gangs, skin color, sexuality, religion, even bloody brand of smartphone makes us bicker or call the other person dumb. And the budding optimistic globalism that was happening have totally reversed in the last few years, it was an illusion.
I've stopped watching/reading news. I can't take it anymore. I lost hope.
Maybe in the extreme future but right now we've just barely started as a species, will we exist long enough to grow up?
Only if we were forced to and had our free will taken away.
No, not if we existed for another million years. It seems pretty fundamental to how we work, and how animals work in general. We basically discriminate along most possible lines. Few enough people even aspire to anything else.
One thing I read in Sapiens that has stuck with me is that a natural group/tribe size is only 40 or so. Anything above that needs a common belief/god or a common enemy. God/religion served that purpose for a long while, then philosophies like communism/capitalism/marxism/liberalism/conservatism, etc. took over. Hitler/nazism is an example of a common enemy uniting people. More recently, and more relatable, you can see how lemmy itself grew exponentially because of the common enemy reddit. All this to say, tribalistic behavior can never be overcome as far as homo sapiens are concerned, because that is what defines us as a species.
I think using a political philosophy or a common enemy to unite a society is more harmful than it is good, since those things will inevitably be held sacred, and it becomes impossible to think rationally about them. Religious people are able to disagree on things like economics because the things that they hold sacred are supernatural sky gods, instead of things which are of this world (Americans are an exception due to the polarization of the two-party system and the compelling force of American Civil Religion, which makes freedom, democracy, and the Constitution into sacred things), but people who hold a political ideology like Marxism or Liberalism to be sacred (Tons of people, many of them on this very website) cannot tolerate disagreement and will ignore facts that might disprove their ideology. This is manageable when it involves nothing more than a sky god, but when it involves the very basics of how society should operate, it gets bad, quickly, which is how you get thousands of dead dissenters and a permanently stagnant society. Using a common enemy is even worse since it leads to an irrational hatred of said enemy that drives people to do horrible things to eachother, with the most infamous example being the Holocaust. The Nazis also held their political ideals to be more sacred than their religious beliefs, coincidentally.
The late rapper, "Eyedea" of Eyedea & Abilities had a really memorable verse in a song that always comes to mind when I hear this discussed.
Grinding my teeth as I’m peddling uphill / The fight against ape-hood is fate versus free will / We think we've advanced but there's nowhere to go / Mammals stay captive to animal actions / So slowly we climb up this DNA brick wall / Addicted to emptiness, anger and pitfalls / Desire for space, territory, or lust / We'll eventually turn this whole planet to dust
Doubtful. Climate change and our own ignorant stupidity will wipe us out long before we’ll ever evolve past idiocracy.
Bold to assume that it's an instinct and not a taught and learned behavior.
The way I see it that instinct is the cause behind so much suffering and injustice in the world.
That's just what they want you to think.
Outside perspective. Only when we meet another other.
I don't think it's an instinct, because it can absolutely be taught.
I encourage my kids to get along with everyone, but at the same time I can see how some of their peers are taught to be racists and other clique behaviours from home by parents who are just like that and don't even think about it when they pass it on.
But by default, nobody is like that from birth. Babies aren't racists or afraid of different kinds of people. The fear of others is taught.
It will take many generations to change.
when aliens arrive
Us (humans) vs. Them (aliens)
Cowboys vs Aliens.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
The "Us vs. Them" mentality is also called the "in-group bias", in which you tend to align with other members of a perceived group (with little to no logical reason, it can be as simple as belts vs. suspenders). Like many other fallacies or biases, it is a built-in feature of our caveman-brains that no longer benefits us. When used in propaganda, it is often paired with the "strawman fallacy" to build the perception of an enemy that is barely even human.
You can learn to recognize these biases in yourself and in others - This is called critical thinking. I recommend the podcast "You Are Not So Smart" to everyone to get more insight on this subject.
There's a book I read a few years ago named "Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging" that delvs into this a bit and why humans are so tribal instinctively. Would highly recommend.
I just finished this one today! Introduced me to a lot of new ideas and contexts. Good read
This current version of humans? No. But could it ever happen? Absolutely, if we assume our future evolutionary human descendants survive and provided we can supply everyone's needs.
It will never happen as long as there is injustice in the world. Also, there isn't a perfect world where justice is 100% served. A good book to read about that (political book, but goes through the us vs them) is "why we are polarized" by Ezra Klein.
I hope so. Knowledge and curiousity feed intelligence feed knowledge feed curiousity. A highly educated society with healthy education sytem and good working socioeconomy (concurency in news coverage) can theoretically get over "us vs. them". Until we someday maybe lose it as evolutionary trait.
The news feeding propaganda over and over isn't helping.
I think we could if enough effort was put forth into making it happen. The problem is that very same "instinct," or rather the plethora of different experiences and ideals held by individuals seems to make it harder if not impossible to ever come to a global united consensus on anything.
No
No. That is human nature. In order to overcome that, we would have to evolve into a different species, which I would argue is less appealing than it might sound on the surface.
Instead of trying to overcome it, it makes more sense to build a society that directs that energy in a positive direction.
Maybe a solution could be getting rid of some tribes entirely, so that we're not so divided? We can still have tribes, but we really don't need this many of them
Are you from the future? It says this will be posted in 2 hours. Am I from the future??
Seriously though I think your admin can fix that, I've seen similar things before and it may be a configuration issue.
I'll just assume you're not talking about the people themselves, but rather the institutions that funnel people into modern day tribes. And in that case, I would agree with you, currently people are getting funneled into extremely niche groups that are inherently going to come into conflict. It might be necessary to reduce the granularity of human communities in order to arrive at a more cohesive whole. And doing that would not necessarily involve violence, but rather shutting down many of the commercial influences that create certain mindsets and desires in people that they wouldn't otherwise have.
No. There will always be another “them”. That’s what makes humans so great, but also so destructive. We never settle, and will always look for division, even if we need to create it.
It's a good question. I think it's been shown it's in our DNA to have a tribe that we associate with, and anything outside that tribe is a threat. Used to be a literal tribe, now I think it's mostly based on race. Can this be overcome with education? Unfortunately I'm really not sure.
I don't think it needs to be overcome, just applied differently. A more global "us" vs problems like global warming or poverty would be fantastic.
It's also a self preservation instinct - sometimes there's just too much going on and you gotta narrow your focus to the people around you.
Not unless the fundamentals of human psychology change. Forever is a long time to say that won’t happen but certainly not in the foreseeable future.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be worked on or mitigated. But it’s not going away completely.
Not as long as capitalist nationalism is the dominant economic system. It's just tribalism on a global scale.
Not so long as there are “haves” and “have-nots”.
As long as politicians exists no. People need something to have control on group of people. So this exists for long. Hope it gets over when robots take over.
Maybe if some mad scientist releases a virus with some CRISPR in it to edit our genes and snip out some of the tribalism drive. Otherwise, I doubt it.