This post has nothing to do with Valentine's Day

[cmdr_zoom]

Sometimes I really do think that the most natural and honest state of humanity is a whole bunch of small tribes or enclaves that absolutely hate each other - because they're the Other, and provide a convenient target to blame for every woe. Actually, I overstate; each community has a few others in its orbit that they tolerate and associate with in a "friendly" way, while secretly (or not so much) believing themselves to be superior. And of course, within each community there is a pack hierarchy, 'cause when you come down to it we are still monkeys and/or wolves at heart.

All the internet has done to this timeless dynamic is to reduce the geographic barriers and allow the like-minded to find each other wherever they may physically live.

Comments

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

"You say everyone in this room has felt aggression. Surely that's right. I'm sure it's right. There may be a few saints in the room... and I very much hope that there are. But at least almost everyone in the room must have felt it. But I also maintain that everyone in the room has felt compassion. Everyone in the room has felt love. Everyone in the room has felt kindness. And so we have two warring principles of the human heart, both of which must have evolved by natural selection, and it's not hard to understand the selective advantage of both of them. And so the issue has to do with which is in the preponderance. And here it is the use of our intellect that is central. Because we're talking about adjudicating between conflicting emotions. And you can't have an adjudication between emotions by an emotion. It must be done by our perceptive intellectual ability."
- Carl Sagan, in a Q&A session during his turn at the Gifford Lectures in Glasgow, 1985 (transcribed in The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God)

[caluche.livejournal.com]

We can't really blame ourselves for it, there must have been selective advantage to development of social structure that way. In a hierarchy that allows an individual to rise to a leadership position is selecting those that are more likely to lead in a competitive way against other societies thus gaining advantage over those other societies.

Even within the like-minded there are hierarchies and outcasts.