From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@rogers.com)
Date: Sat 19 Apr 2003 - 20:12:54 GMT
At 02:42 PM 18/04/03 -0700, Grant wrote:
>>This psychological trait needs a name like other evolved
>>psychological characteristics such as capture-bonding (Stockholm
>>Syndrome) and the attention-reward (status) mechanism cults use.
>>Both of these mechanism are behind the spread of certain
>>classes of memes. Privation driven memetic dehumanization
>>kind of captures the essence but doesn't even make a good
>>acronym.
>>Any thoughts?
>>Keith Henson
>I see an evolved characteristic here but I don't see it necessarily
>linked to privation. People do and always have found reasons to
>divide themselves into groups that then separate themselves from
>others. We divide ourselves into management and labor, upper
>and lower class, educated and ignorant, protestant and Catholic,
>uptown and downtown, Irish and Italian expats, etc., etc.
>These divisions lead to conflict and often war. Gangs of New York
>is a movie based on historical reality. Both gangs in the movie were
>equally deprived and fighting to improve their social status at the
>expense of the other. But even the richest people in the country
>(U.S.) do this when a rich WASP finds reasons to exclude a rich
>Jew from inclusion in his club and in his business. Privation, to
>my mind, is not the cause. Tribalism is a more likely culprit.
I won't argue against tribalism causing the kind of problems you
mention. But excluding someone is a far cry from Kosovo or the Hutu/Tutsi
clashes. And even there, there were decades where there was relatively
little animosity. We know what event set off the Hutu/Tutsi convulsion,
but what was it that created the tension that was released in an orgy of
killings? If you can come up with something better than resources getting
tight every few generations, something else that is rooted in several
million years of evolution in tribal units, I would like to hear about
it. Those kinds of events are so typical in our history that they must be
part of the standard psychological response people have. All I am
proposing is that this response manifests in situations of perceived
resource shortages. I.e., falling per capita income.
This is actually a prediction. You will not see wars or warlike conflicts
(in the historical record) started by a society in a time where there is a
rising per capita income. Of course you don't have to have both sides in a
resource crunch to start a war.
Another prediction: the side perceiving it has a population-to-resource
crunch will be the one who starts a war. (Might be *both* sides!)
And I should note that while the current situation is driven by
psychological traits evolved over millions of years, the physical
(technological) situation is unlike anything bands were faced with a
million years ago. Even there, a weak tribe might have been better off
(from a gene's viewpoint) attacking a strong one than just starving. If a
weak tribe attacked a strong one and all the men were wiped out, at least
some of the female children might be incorporated into the tribe they attacked.
Now, I know we just *had* a war. I think it is obvious that the war in
Iraq was part of the US response to 9/11 and *that* in turn was the result
of falling income in Saudi Arabia and worsening economics all over the Arab
world. The causation is that such conditions turn on human psychological
traits that were evolved to survive the periodic hard times of our
ancestors clear back to the point they split off the chimpanzee
line--because chimps also make war on neighboring groups. Third
prediction. Chimpanzees start attacking their neighbors when a growing
band's needs outstrip the local food supply.
To keep this focused on memetics, the effect of turning on these
psychological survival traits in humans is to make fanatic memes more
likely to thrive.
I should add that privation is not the only way for fanatic memes to do
well in a society. Being attacked may invoke the same or a related
mechanism. You can certainly make that case for the US since 9/11.
Keith Henson
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