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Your understanding of tribal psyche is wrong. 1) Human bonding (mother-child, family, and extended, symbolic tribes) is mediated in the brain by oxytocin. It t
by pygy_ 10y ago
Your understanding of tribal psyche is wrong.
1) Human bonding (mother-child, family, and extended, symbolic tribes) is mediated in the brain by oxytocin. It turns out oxytocin also boosts xenophobia. Someone who claims to hail patriotism without being racist is therefore full of shit. They are two sides of the same coin, enlarging one enlarges the other.
2) Stigmatizing people for belonging to a group strengthens their tribal attachment to said group [a]. By punishing or threatening to punish a group of people, you enhance their tribal bonds and, per 1) their xenophobia, the very thing you're trying to rein in.
It's not about being moral, it's about effectiveness.
The only way to dispel tribal identity is to dilute it in a larger, weaker one, by being open to their members.
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a. Which is why laws against "the public display of religious signs" are counterproductive. Likewise, ostracizing people who vote for extreme, hateful politicians is counterproductive.
- thriftwy 10y agoYou are right about "punishing or threatening to punish". However, the goal of genocide or ethnic cleansings were not to punish, it was to make said people go away from you. To make them physically disappear. Turks has no problems with Armenian tribal attachment because there are no longer any Armenians in Turkey (They however still have the problem with Kurds). The same thing with Croatia and Serbs. We have to admit that the plan worked.
- pygy_ 10y agoThe problem here is that tribal attachment among Turks got haywire. I don't know enough about the tribalism tendencies of Armenians at the time. Victim groups can have developed a strong tribal identity, but that's not always the case (tribalism was strong among Jews and Gypsies, but AFAIK being gay was quite confidential during WW2). Regardless, the story is the same all over the place. People's tribal instincts are amplified and manipulated by a few hateful/interested people, which turns peaceful crowds into genocidal herds. The danger is the potential for excess that we have when thinking in terms of ingroup/outgroup, not a specific group (which is why it keeps happening all over the place, and sometimes victim tribes later become perpetrators of bigoted violence). A desire for justice/vengance is understandable, BTW, but our intuitions are wrong when dealing with populations rather than individuals. See also: http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html Edit: Whether strong tribal identity among small groups lead larger groups of otherwise neutral people to resent them is an interesting question as well, BTW. I don't know if it is the case. Gypsies and Jews are historical examples, I don't know if there are counterexamples.
- thriftwy 10y agoI don't understand what point you are trying to make here. You talk about danger but danger for whom? One person's danger is another person's gain.
- pygy_ 10y agoDanger of massively killing one another? Unending vendetta? Cultivating cross-cultural resentment makes the world more violent, and less safe, for everyone. Another example of the tragedy of the commons.
- thriftwy 10y agoAs you can see, in Turkey this vendetta was not unending - it ended when all the Armenians were dead or driven away. So I fail to understand what's the long-term downside for Turkey, given they were never punished. Yes, the world became more violent and hateful (Armenian terrorists blew something turkish up in France AFAIR), but that's outside of their borders. Inside borders they were a pretty successful country to date.
- pygy_ 10y agoAs you said, to date. I suppose that resentment among Armenians towards Turks is still high to this day, I'm not saying that there will be more violence, but the threat is still there. Note that I come from Belgium, whose historians are so ashamed of the Congo Free State genocide that they consider it a controversial topic that should not be taught in school. Were it not for Internet conversations, I'd be blissfully unaware of it as most Belgians are. There were more Congolese people killed under Leopold II than there were Belgians living at the time. There's been little to no backlash. So, indeed, sometimes it pays. I sometimes wish I could have a more cynical take on things, but I have a strong fairness drive, spontaneously.
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y agoActually majority of Jewish people in Germany considered themselves as German and didn't want to move to Palestine prior to the holocaust.