7 ms·

Overcoming Us vs. Them (2017)

62 points by yamrzou 6y ago

yamrzou 6y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934183
theFeller00 6y ago
there is no overcoming it with the level it has been allowed to get to. sorry, no handshake at the end of this game
yamrzou 6y ago
I posted this to see more discussion about it. Isn't a strong social identity, something desirable? Doesn't it result in stability and strength? Don't we all seek the belonging sentiment which necessarily implies an Us vs. Them? On the other hand, it seems that tribal thinking can increase social tension and divisiveness, and makes people more "stupid"/less critical towards their group. So what is the right balance here?
- shekharshan 6y ago
  As your sense of "I" diminishes the more compassionate and caring you become. The more emotionally resilient you become and the less harmful your decisions are to yourself and others (including animals). This is the core of Buddhist findings. Having said that, there are religions and ideologies that tend to become a big part of a person's identity. Then their actions become guided by those ideologies.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    > As your sense of "I" diminishes the more compassionate and caring you become. I am not sure that is always the case. I would think that, for example, the women involved in the Charles Manson murders had a diminished sense of I, but they were not compassionate and caring.
    - chillwaves 6y ago
      I don't see the relevance. Joining a cult is not the same as diminishing the ego. You don't just supplant your ego with someone else's. Anyone who loses themselves in a cult of personality is not following the teachings of the Buddhism.
      - loopz 6y ago
        People in organizations routinely fail to acknowledge an ignored ego: The Organizational Ego The whitepapers and salespeople going on and on about their products, services and companies that nobody cares about? Yeah, that one! The ideologies and demagogues are even "worse". Not that ego is a bad thing, just in isolation..
        bingobongo1 6y ago
        This is so true. I've tried to explain why an organization is the way it is before via cause and effect and some people refuse to believe that there is any sort of subtle force that factors into how organizations turn out. Even if you point to things like Conway's law they still won't listen sometimes! The best organizations have compassion for their employees and customers, but it takes right-thinking from the top.
        loopz 6y ago
        It might depend on leadership culture. Most people are unprepared for their first management position, and how can they prepare? You even see natural leaders flounder, when put in the same leadership position and culture. The positions are necessary for the organization, but I believe almost nobody has really cracked the nut generally, just for their little trible. Most impactful thing leaders can do is cooperate and bring teams together, in order to accomplish concrete goals and organization. Project Lead is sort of that, but it needs to be continuous instead of temporary and limited scope.
        bingobongo1 6y ago
  - bingobongo1 6y ago
    Oh good, someone else who is on the right track. Laughing at the manson family reference from the other comment, that's an example of hostile brainwashing by a cult leader, whereas what is being described here is an exploration of self and the true nature of consciousness, which is compassion. Shamatha is calm abiding mind, single-pointed meditation, temporary emotional stability. Vipassana is analytical meditation, wisdom, lasting mental stability through deconstructing the self and other phenomena to repeatedly discover that all is empty at the ultimate level. Going through this you can then approach the conventional world with more mental stability than just reacting naively to every event and occurrence.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- haecceity 6y ago
  I don't know about balance but the person that embodied every human virtue renounced his citizenship and he lived happier than his peers, lacked nothing and stood taller than kings. We can't all be Diogenes but he's something people should strive towards.
  - quacked 6y ago
    He lacked nothing because other people produced everything for him. If you want to live in a barrel, first you need a barrel, meaning you need a safe place to assemble it, and a way to source wood and tools, and then you need it to be protected from other people who want it, and before you know it you've got a whole functioning state with a shared identity and a legal system, and guys with beards are running around plucking chickens and criticizing you for wanting rules.
- loopz 6y ago
  This is very easy to answer. It depends on your context, your environment! In a family, closer connections are part of living together. We see the same proximity effects in people working in teams. When there is a need for improved collaborations between people, teams and organizations, the environment need to kindle and support such initiatives. This is called leadership. For some individuals and roles, it is more natural to make connections across "the chasms", but this is dependent on individuality, position and opportunity. Thus in professional organizations, you want enabling this to be part of leadership and training of an organic organization. Everyone can't connect to everyone all the time, so there needs to be some design and maintenance of such designs. Though personal connections remains an individual experience and skill, the environment must cease to sabotage initiatives, become more mature and professional.
irontinkerer 6y ago
The title is "Why Your Brain Hates Other People" not "Overcoming Us vs. Them".
- neogodless 6y ago
  Right - it does appear the browser title is the latter. The subtitle is "And how to make it think differently." The second paragraph begins to focus on this: "And it can be vastly consequential when people are divided into Us and Them" So they are both important to this article - why it is this way, and how we can improve upon it, or work around it.
bingobongo1 6y ago
As it has been well-known in the east for thousands of years and well preserved by the Tibetan people, the us vs them mentality arises naturally through the nature of consciousness which grasps at the notion of a non-existent self. Through ignorance we fail to see reality for what it truly is, ultimately empty, but conventionally existent. Thus, we reify our perceptions as real, instead of recognizing that all objects are simply names and labels imputed over aggregates and the introduction of the mental afflictions that cause protectionist and selfish thought arise. First comes the individual, then the small group, then the group of groups, then the nation and so on - all grasping at a sense of self that isn't truly there when thoroughly analyzed. Every human being on this planet is the same. We all would like to avoid suffering and would like the causes of happiness. Ridding yourself of the us vs them mentality involves waking up and developing unwavering compassion for other sentient beings. This requires the realization that all sentient beings want to avoid the causes of suffering. Does this lengthy article mention this ancient and well-developed philosophy? Not a single word on it. I recommend listening to just some of the conversations the Dalai Lama has conducted with western scientists and researchers: Mind & Life Session 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcgcFbPTwys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcgcFbPTwys Mind & Life Session 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoAEEAq8idU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoAEEAq8idU I highly recommend you read Pumla's book (who appears in the second conversation): "A Human Being Died that Night" which is highly illustrative of the power of compassion for others even in the midst of human rights violations.
- zzzeek 6y ago
  hi - I practice mindfulness. Your post is both entirely true and also total BS. Because this: we live in our physical bodies , we are deciding to live in that world. Of course Donald Trump is, like all of us, another infinitesmally small point of energy that is consciousness like all the rest of us. However, within the physical realm that pure dot unfortunately happens to be manifested inside of an orange bucket of authoritarian narcisssm, which is a threat to all the other physical entities. When we practice mindfulness we still live in the physical world. I can feel sorrow and love for the innocent dot that is inside of DT but the physical manifestation should be rotting in jail. put another way, if you truly accept everything about manifested reality without condition, why does it matter that there is conflict? the decision to no longer suffer is to accept whatever one's fate is, not to circumvent that fate.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
I posted this to see more discussion about it. I don't know what you are hoping for here. This is probably not it. I spent a fair amount of time in therapy in my teens and twenties. I'm quite convinced that a lot of our identity is a mental construct. Let's take race. What makes someone "Black" or "White"? It's not their skin color. You can find "Black" Americans and "White" Americans with very similar skin tones. It's not their blood. The US decided somewhere along the way that people who are 7/8 Caucasian/European ancestry and 1/8 African ancestry are "Black." I have read these same people would be classified as "White" in Brazil. It's not their culture. Even if a "Black" person gets a good education, etc, they will still be othered by most "Whites." Anyway, we get taught certain categories and mental models and it winds up being taboo to think too hard about where they come from and what they mean and why they were really created and we live with the legacy of those inherited mental models and then those mental models shape both how we see ourselves and with whom we identify as "Us." In other primates, those associations will tend to be more rooted in "This group takes care of me and I have positive associations with them and I'm one of them" and "This other group is openly hostile to me and they are my enemies and they are a problem, not an asset to me." Human culture is more complex than that and it ends up being super hard to find a way out of those traps. Even if you can find your way out, other people will try to keep pushing you into one of the preexisting categories in their own mind. So the real question is "How do we find a path forward on getting group think to change?" because lots of people do therapy, sort their crap ...and then find that other people are actively affronted at their failure to fit with existing mental models.
- babesh 6y ago
  Black and white was a competitive construct of us and them. It is that simple. Human culture really isn’t more complex than that. It is just strategies and tactics layered atop the same goals animals have.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    No, in this case it was a simple way of saying "This group of people can be slaves and that group of people cannot be slaves" which is why we get weird demarcations about how you are still "Black" even if you are only 1/8 African: So slave owners could rape their slaves, father children upon them and treat those children as slaves for several generations. In the US, our weird definitions surrounding "Black" and "White" are a polite euphemism for "People officially marked as someone you can victimize and people officially marked as someone who can do the victimizing." Which I didn't really want to baldly state because it isn't something Americans really want to hear.
seamyb88 6y ago
This should have 'Robert Sapolsky' in the title. He is a fantastic scientist and science communicator. An advertisement to anything else he does.
082349872349872 6y ago
From Yes, Minister, I learned the Us/Them aikido exercise of filling in social conjugations: I am compassionate. You have a strong heart but a weak head. They start by trying to love everyone and end up loving no one. (I am trying to remember a web-published book I read a while ago on defusing authoritarian tendencies. What I remember most strongly was that equal-treatment laws are more effective than one might intellectually believe, not because they are "legislating morality", but because they allow large numbers of in-group members who actually would treat out-group members normally to do so without being subject to retribution by in-group hardliners.) 人之初，性本善?

62 points by yamrzou 6y ago

yamrzou 6y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934183

theFeller00 6y ago

there is no overcoming it with the level it has been allowed to get to. sorry, no handshake at the end of this game

yamrzou 6y ago

I posted this to see more discussion about it. Isn't a strong social identity, something desirable? Doesn't it result in stability and strength? Don't we all seek the belonging sentiment which necessarily implies an Us vs. Them? On the other hand, it seems that tribal thinking can increase social tension and divisiveness, and makes people more "stupid"/less critical towards their group. So what is the right balance here?

shekharshan 6y ago
As your sense of "I" diminishes the more compassionate and caring you become. The more emotionally resilient you become and the less harmful your decisions are to yourself and others (including animals). This is the core of Buddhist findings. Having said that, there are religions and ideologies that tend to become a big part of a person's identity. Then their actions become guided by those ideologies.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > As your sense of "I" diminishes the more compassionate and caring you become. I am not sure that is always the case. I would think that, for example, the women involved in the Charles Manson murders had a diminished sense of I, but they were not compassionate and caring.
  - chillwaves 6y ago
    I don't see the relevance. Joining a cult is not the same as diminishing the ego. You don't just supplant your ego with someone else's. Anyone who loses themselves in a cult of personality is not following the teachings of the Buddhism.
    - loopz 6y ago
      People in organizations routinely fail to acknowledge an ignored ego: The Organizational Ego The whitepapers and salespeople going on and on about their products, services and companies that nobody cares about? Yeah, that one! The ideologies and demagogues are even "worse". Not that ego is a bad thing, just in isolation..
      - bingobongo1 6y ago
        This is so true. I've tried to explain why an organization is the way it is before via cause and effect and some people refuse to believe that there is any sort of subtle force that factors into how organizations turn out. Even if you point to things like Conway's law they still won't listen sometimes! The best organizations have compassion for their employees and customers, but it takes right-thinking from the top.
        loopz 6y ago
        It might depend on leadership culture. Most people are unprepared for their first management position, and how can they prepare? You even see natural leaders flounder, when put in the same leadership position and culture. The positions are necessary for the organization, but I believe almost nobody has really cracked the nut generally, just for their little trible. Most impactful thing leaders can do is cooperate and bring teams together, in order to accomplish concrete goals and organization. Project Lead is sort of that, but it needs to be continuous instead of temporary and limited scope.
        bingobongo1 6y ago
- bingobongo1 6y ago
  Oh good, someone else who is on the right track. Laughing at the manson family reference from the other comment, that's an example of hostile brainwashing by a cult leader, whereas what is being described here is an exploration of self and the true nature of consciousness, which is compassion. Shamatha is calm abiding mind, single-pointed meditation, temporary emotional stability. Vipassana is analytical meditation, wisdom, lasting mental stability through deconstructing the self and other phenomena to repeatedly discover that all is empty at the ultimate level. Going through this you can then approach the conventional world with more mental stability than just reacting naively to every event and occurrence.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
haecceity 6y ago
I don't know about balance but the person that embodied every human virtue renounced his citizenship and he lived happier than his peers, lacked nothing and stood taller than kings. We can't all be Diogenes but he's something people should strive towards.
- quacked 6y ago
  He lacked nothing because other people produced everything for him. If you want to live in a barrel, first you need a barrel, meaning you need a safe place to assemble it, and a way to source wood and tools, and then you need it to be protected from other people who want it, and before you know it you've got a whole functioning state with a shared identity and a legal system, and guys with beards are running around plucking chickens and criticizing you for wanting rules.
loopz 6y ago
This is very easy to answer. It depends on your context, your environment! In a family, closer connections are part of living together. We see the same proximity effects in people working in teams. When there is a need for improved collaborations between people, teams and organizations, the environment need to kindle and support such initiatives. This is called leadership. For some individuals and roles, it is more natural to make connections across "the chasms", but this is dependent on individuality, position and opportunity. Thus in professional organizations, you want enabling this to be part of leadership and training of an organic organization. Everyone can't connect to everyone all the time, so there needs to be some design and maintenance of such designs. Though personal connections remains an individual experience and skill, the environment must cease to sabotage initiatives, become more mature and professional.

irontinkerer 6y ago

The title is "Why Your Brain Hates Other People" not "Overcoming Us vs. Them".

neogodless 6y ago
Right - it does appear the browser title is the latter. The subtitle is "And how to make it think differently." The second paragraph begins to focus on this: "And it can be vastly consequential when people are divided into Us and Them" So they are both important to this article - why it is this way, and how we can improve upon it, or work around it.

bingobongo1 6y ago

As it has been well-known in the east for thousands of years and well preserved by the Tibetan people, the us vs them mentality arises naturally through the nature of consciousness which grasps at the notion of a non-existent self. Through ignorance we fail to see reality for what it truly is, ultimately empty, but conventionally existent. Thus, we reify our perceptions as real, instead of recognizing that all objects are simply names and labels imputed over aggregates and the introduction of the mental afflictions that cause protectionist and selfish thought arise. First comes the individual, then the small group, then the group of groups, then the nation and so on - all grasping at a sense of self that isn't truly there when thoroughly analyzed. Every human being on this planet is the same. We all would like to avoid suffering and would like the causes of happiness. Ridding yourself of the us vs them mentality involves waking up and developing unwavering compassion for other sentient beings. This requires the realization that all sentient beings want to avoid the causes of suffering. Does this lengthy article mention this ancient and well-developed philosophy? Not a single word on it. I recommend listening to just some of the conversations the Dalai Lama has conducted with western scientists and researchers: Mind & Life Session 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcgcFbPTwys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcgcFbPTwys Mind & Life Session 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoAEEAq8idU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoAEEAq8idU I highly recommend you read Pumla's book (who appears in the second conversation): "A Human Being Died that Night" which is highly illustrative of the power of compassion for others even in the midst of human rights violations.

zzzeek 6y ago
hi - I practice mindfulness. Your post is both entirely true and also total BS. Because this: we live in our physical bodies , we are deciding to live in that world. Of course Donald Trump is, like all of us, another infinitesmally small point of energy that is consciousness like all the rest of us. However, within the physical realm that pure dot unfortunately happens to be manifested inside of an orange bucket of authoritarian narcisssm, which is a threat to all the other physical entities. When we practice mindfulness we still live in the physical world. I can feel sorrow and love for the innocent dot that is inside of DT but the physical manifestation should be rotting in jail. put another way, if you truly accept everything about manifested reality without condition, why does it matter that there is conflict? the decision to no longer suffer is to accept whatever one's fate is, not to circumvent that fate.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

I posted this to see more discussion about it. I don't know what you are hoping for here. This is probably not it. I spent a fair amount of time in therapy in my teens and twenties. I'm quite convinced that a lot of our identity is a mental construct. Let's take race. What makes someone "Black" or "White"? It's not their skin color. You can find "Black" Americans and "White" Americans with very similar skin tones. It's not their blood. The US decided somewhere along the way that people who are 7/8 Caucasian/European ancestry and 1/8 African ancestry are "Black." I have read these same people would be classified as "White" in Brazil. It's not their culture. Even if a "Black" person gets a good education, etc, they will still be othered by most "Whites." Anyway, we get taught certain categories and mental models and it winds up being taboo to think too hard about where they come from and what they mean and why they were really created and we live with the legacy of those inherited mental models and then those mental models shape both how we see ourselves and with whom we identify as "Us." In other primates, those associations will tend to be more rooted in "This group takes care of me and I have positive associations with them and I'm one of them" and "This other group is openly hostile to me and they are my enemies and they are a problem, not an asset to me." Human culture is more complex than that and it ends up being super hard to find a way out of those traps. Even if you can find your way out, other people will try to keep pushing you into one of the preexisting categories in their own mind. So the real question is "How do we find a path forward on getting group think to change?" because lots of people do therapy, sort their crap ...and then find that other people are actively affronted at their failure to fit with existing mental models.

babesh 6y ago
Black and white was a competitive construct of us and them. It is that simple. Human culture really isn’t more complex than that. It is just strategies and tactics layered atop the same goals animals have.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  No, in this case it was a simple way of saying "This group of people can be slaves and that group of people cannot be slaves" which is why we get weird demarcations about how you are still "Black" even if you are only 1/8 African: So slave owners could rape their slaves, father children upon them and treat those children as slaves for several generations. In the US, our weird definitions surrounding "Black" and "White" are a polite euphemism for "People officially marked as someone you can victimize and people officially marked as someone who can do the victimizing." Which I didn't really want to baldly state because it isn't something Americans really want to hear.

seamyb88 6y ago

This should have 'Robert Sapolsky' in the title. He is a fantastic scientist and science communicator. An advertisement to anything else he does.

082349872349872 6y ago

From Yes, Minister, I learned the Us/Them aikido exercise of filling in social conjugations: I am compassionate. You have a strong heart but a weak head. They start by trying to love everyone and end up loving no one. (I am trying to remember a web-published book I read a while ago on defusing authoritarian tendencies. What I remember most strongly was that equal-treatment laws are more effective than one might intellectually believe, not because they are "legislating morality", but because they allow large numbers of in-group members who actually would treat out-group members normally to do so without being subject to retribution by in-group hardliners.) 人之初，性本善?