I think tribalism is one of the primary behaviors hardwired into us, if not the primary one.
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All I said is “This rock is good enough for Jehovah!”
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Why are citations necessary? Do you imagine rape isn’t more common in the animal kingdom than in civilisation?
Do you reckon that all the men who act on the impulse to rape someone have learned that impulse somewhere, or are they merely responding to testosterone’s effects without giving a shit for the rights of others?
Pretty much all men feel an urge, often quite strongly, to initiate sex with anyone they find attractive. How is this controversial?
Race might not be a real thing, but something resembling the concept is, given the differences in facial morphology our facial recognition hardware has a hard time with.
There’s the monkeysphere, and then there’s the difficulty of discerning particular individuals amongst that bunch of folks who all have a different skin colour and appear more generic due to one’s own hardware limitations.
I don’t think pretending this isn’t real helps the cause; it’s a difficulty to overcome.
Sex is not rape. That you seem to be using the words interchangeably is concerning.
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let’s try this again
I see that this is a troll topic, started by a troll to troll us.
Perhaps we should decline to follow his lead and talk about something else instead.
Is that sort of insult necessary?
Isn’t it kind of obtuse of you to miss that it’s the rapists who are the ones conflating sex and rape?
As in, gee, I really want to sex her - hang on, she doesn’t want me to, oh well, bad luck - I’m gonna anyway.
Pretty rank move IMO, to lob me in with rapists as a tactic of argument.
Perhaps racism is the wrong term, but behavioral studies have repeatedly demonstrated a tendency towards human behavior that is very similar. I specifically avoided the concept of tribalism because it does not fit the observed behavior. Racism explicitly posits superiority. I am arguing that humans have an innate trait to identify themselves as superior to other people.
People believe, normally, that they are superior to the average person and that any group that they are arbitrarily affiliated with is superior to other similar types of groups. People with green eyes will generally believe that having green eyes is better. They will think that people with green eyes are more honest, smarter, etc. There are obviously exceptions to this experience(self-loathing), but if sampled most children will quickly argue for the superiority of individuals who share traits with them.
Race may be a construct, but not racism(or whatever we want to call this behavior). In fact, the way in which that racism has historically been overcome is to convince the ‘superior’(superior/inferior referring to the targets of the racism and not any actual trait) group that the ‘inferior’ group is more closely affiliated with them than they previously assumed. It is particularly effective when both groups can join together and be racist towards a third group.
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xenophobia
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So if each person is deciding that they are “superior” (whatever that means), isn’t it clearly delusional?
It sounds like just another version of classic self-serving bias. People could treat cognitive biases as just another health problem to be understood and optimised. But it is different than simply striving to cure influenza or diabetes because the social structures of human society itself have been organized to exploit people’s cognitive biases. So there is literally no place for a cure.
It is a huge undertaking to clue people in to this, such as teaching kids about cognitive biases and logic in elementary school, or earlier. And to push for undoing the traditional power games of politics and economics. It is practically impossible to have much success with this when the structures of society actually require people to favor indirect reputation and symbol manipulation over evidence and communication.
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Yes. It is absolutely delusional
xenophobia is “fear of strangers”. Not a feeling of superiority over those strangers. Racism is a “prejudice that members of one race are intrinsically superior to members of other races”. The definition of “race” might be debatable, but I am not talking about xenophobia.
I agree. I was asking the question because when it comes to social problems, I encounter many people using the excuse of a factor being “innate” to be sound reasoning to not do anything about it. Such as asserting that sexism is natural (when men do it), racism is natural (when whites do it), political power is natural (when I have it), capitalism benefits all (when I succeed), and so on. People have some sharp double standards here about addressing pathology/health when the domain is mental/emotional/behavioral as opposed to physical. Even staunch bigots never insist that they should succumb to a physical ailment because it is “the natural order of things”!
I am confident that cognitive biases can be overcome. But alarmed at how much people fight to keep them. With the delusion that it is making them a better, more effective person somehow.
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If you want to be absolutely strict about a dictionary definition of these terms. I don’t.
What about the racism that comes as a race that is considered inferior to other races? That’s not in your strict definition of racism.
Or what about when fear of strangers turns into loathing and then violence? In this example, when xenophobia turns into aggression is it no longer xenophobia? That seems far-fetched.
What is the difference between violence and feelings of superiority or dominance? Why do we care about how the aggressor feels? If you are the victim of xenophobia, do you really care if the person was afraid of you or feeling like god and you’re a piece of shit? In that case, the strict definition is again, not very useful.
You resisted the word tribalism, but tribalism is somewhat amorphous. It can be a mixture of fear and superiority, similar to xenophobia.
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I am not using it as excuse for behavior, but simply as mitigation against current concern.
I don’t believe that modern Jamaica deserves reparations from the modern UK because of something that occurred 200 years ago. The UK school system also taught that the colonial system was fair and good and that they were “bettering the lives of savages”. I wouldn’t encourage such a viewpoint today, but I am not going to hold dead people accountable for basically succumbing to cognitive bias. Should we also sue the UK for libel?
I was also trying to make the point that Jamaica(as a country) did not suffer under slavery but prospered. The slaves suffered, but some of the slaves descendants no longer live in Jamaica. Some slaves were the victims of racism. Some were the victims of religious discrimination. Jamaica was also a state-sponsor of terrorism(piracy).
Many Jamaicans are the descendants of both slave owners and slaves. So, who exactly is the injured party in this situation?
I argue that we can chalk the entire thing up to long-dead people being typical human jerks. Don’t, by any means, tolerate jerks in the present. However, don’t lose sleep at night over all the ways that humans have been horrible to each other over the past 2 million years. We have done it A LOT.
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The only “justice” is to not play social games and try to fix the underlying cognitive problems. Blame tends to not be useful, and relationships like you are describing are too complex to attribute specifically accountable social causes to. Even the whole question about whether reparation or compensation are actually possible in anything but a symbolic way is more of a philosophical problem, which people aren’t likely to agree upon.
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