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To extend this a little bit, though, if we're going to care about proper modeling, I think it's important to understand that there are forces pushing individuals towards tribalism besides idiocy.
I think there's this idea that tribalism is, basically, ancient grug-style lizard-brained thinking, and that in more recent and temperate times we've learned that trade and cooperation is better through the use of our ascended reasoning faculties, but due to the lizard hindbrain, or something, tribalism keeps rearing its ugly head.
However this story is mostly nonsense. About as far back as you can go in the historical record, you find that people were extremely well aware that trade and cooperation were extremely lucrative. Archeologists are continually surprised at the length and depth of ancient trade networks. The ability to model minds that have different values and priorities to search out modes of cooperation isn't a new innovation; it's a very old pattern of human behavior.
Tribalistic thinking exists because sometimes the other tribe actually does want to kill you.
And when this happens, switching over to a simplified model of "those guys are evil and want to kill me" is useful because modeling other minds requires a lot of cognitive bandwidth and your primary cognitive concern right now is to get and not get got.
Furthermore, switching back out from that model to a cooperate-trade-understand mentality as soon as you start winning and the other guys show up and say "we're not that different, you and I, don't all our mothers love us? This is all a misunderstanding, we just want to trade and live peaceably" is a profound failure to model other minds, because that's the oldest trick in the book and if you don't model the possibility that the other guy is actually evil and still wants to kill you and part of his evil murderous intent extends to "lying to you" you're a sucker.
Sometimes, tribalistic idiot types overfit the "evil and wants to kill me" explanation, dismiss the possibility that it was all a big misunderstanding, and perpetuate conflict unnecessarily. Sometimes, ascended galaxy-brained intelligent times underfit the "evil and wants to kill me" explanation, eagerly agree that it was all a big misunderstanding, and are promptly killed by their evil enemies.
The highest path of wisdom is to understand others so thoroughly that you can understand when the enemy actually wants to kill you and when they genuinely want to find the path to peace. But this means that the wise person sometimes sounds no different than the naive cooperators...and that sometimes he sounds no different than the idiotic tribalists.
Finally, I think this model suggests why sometimes really smart people seem to become tribal idiots (or naive cooperators). If you put a ton mental work into understanding the other side, it's easy to just sit on your laurels and turn your mind towards winning the war/seizing the peace. As you point out, "the other side" is almost always comprised of different groups, and it is almost always in flux. This means that an accurate understanding of the other side, or your own, if not updated, can quickly become woefully insufficient. But building and maintaining an accurate model is time-consuming work, and it's no surprise that many smart people do not have the time or inclination to do so.
I agree with most of this, but I think one of the primary failure modes of the "those guys are evil and want to kill me" line of reasoning is that, within a single modern day society, those other guys can't kill you. Nor can you kill them. At least not at any meaningful scale. This is where the lizard brain short circuits.
In prehistoric times (the times our brains are optimized for), once your group had decided another group was dangerous, you tried to kill them. And they tried to kill you. One side succeeded and then moved on. The loser was either dead, enslaved, or driven far away. Even a couple hundred years ago, intra-society tribal feuds could result in things like civil wars and pogroms. But in modern western societies, there is no such mechanism. Look at how bent out of shape society got after 2 people were killed by sectarian violence.
So we have two sides that have gone from grudging cooperation to full on "we need to fight, this is an enemy" mode. But no matter how hard you fight, the enemy is still there. You can pass laws and change policies, but the enemy is just sitting there watching, getting angrier and angrier. I don't know what a modern resolution to this type of schism looks like.
I mean - I agree that people overfit the "those guys are evil and want to kill me" model, but I absolutely don't agree that violence is a thing of the past.
Well, it can look like full-scale socio-cultural domination by one side by measures short of disorganized violence, until the other side is either decisively beaten or practically driven extinct or at least underground by social pressure and/or state action ("legitimate violence.") The Civil Rights Movement achieved this sort of victory (at least for a time - perhaps not for all time, however).
But I think modern western societies are fully capable of flipping to violence to resolve the problem instead. Ireland's independence was a successful use of this; less successful attempts, such as by Puerto Rican or Quebecois separatists, didn't manage to garner enough support and critical mass and are thus not really remembered as anything besides some low level terrorist violence.
Even in the case of Ireland, the violence just swayed opinion. It didn't actually kill off or pacify enough of the losing demographic to affect the outcome; that requires the "old" prehistoric type of violence. Iran's crackdown has been more in that vein than anything we do. Newer violence is mostly just a PR move.
The civil rights movement is interesting in that it was the starting point for this whole conflict. But I don't know if it tells us too much about how it ends. At the risk of dramatizing it a bit, the historical arc as I see it looks like this:
You start with a system that is pretty blatantly unfair (encoded in law, rigidly enforced etc) to the various groups that make up the current woke pantheon. You also have a rich, quickly advancing society (US circa 1960s) that has every reason to be optimistic about the future. In an environment like that, it's easy to convince the majority of people that it's only fair to make life better for those on the bottom rungs. People are generous when their bellies are full.
Then the organizations and institutions that were built around helping those groups end up winning. They achieve their goals. But careers have been built around this. Huge fund raising networks exist. Do you just set everything down and walk away when you're done? Of course not. You find new problems. Maybe not as big, but problems none the less.
Go through a few dozen iterations of that, and you end up where we are now. We aren't nearly as prosperous and optimistic anymore. These movements have taken on the characteristics of religions, complete with crazed zealots running around attacking non believers. In a situation like that, you suddenly get backlash. Small and isolated at first, and then suddenly huge. The wokes/SJWs try to fight back, expecting the same up-swell of support they got back in the 60s, but it's not there. Nobody under the age of 70 even remembers segregation. But we all remember not being able to get some perk because we don't tick the right intersectional boxes.
Religious zealots don't usually put down their scourges willingly. And religious beliefs are pretty hard to change if they've become the bedrock of one's morality. But the bulk of society is no longer willing to play along with the SJW fantasies about living in the 60s. Normally, the birth of a new religion has gone hand in hand with a violent struggle against whatever existing institutions it encountered. But if that's not able to happen....then what will?
While there absolutely were cases in the past that involved wholesale slaughter, my understanding is that a lot of "old" prehistoric type violence was also "a PR move," - often very ritualized and fairly safe, with focus on glory and not necessarily lethality. For instance, the point of "counting coup" was specifically not to kill the enemy. I don't really think it's correct to suggest that the "old" way of doing things was "high lethality" and we've slumped into a newer "low lethality" culture; rather I think the type of violence that occurs depends a lot on the specifics of a culture, situation, technology level, etc.
This I think is absolutely correct (and insightful).
See, I'm just not sure this hasn't happened. (I'm also not sure that's really correct of new religions but that's a different question.) The violence might involve more ritual, more PR, less violent, but I don't think it's correct to say that either the BLM-era protests or the recent anti-ICE protests were entirely nonviolent. And you can trace the violent strain in contemporary American left-wing thinking back further, at least to the extremely violent 1970s "Days of Rage" if not before.
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Quebecois separatists managed to get some major concessions from Canada to placate them, so I'd consider them at least partially successful. Not really aware of any major concessions to Puerto Rico though.
Thank you! I will admit to not being very familiar with all of that.
What I do find interesting about Ireland was how relatively little violence separatists had to engage in to succeed. There were relatively few deaths - it's been a while, but I seem to recall looking up the per capita homicide rate and finding that it was lower than in a major US metro area at the same time (although the IRA favored bombs, which tend to maim many more than they kill, so one could argue that looking at deaths is understating the violence.) If the Quebecois were able to get something meaningful that seems like another data point in that direction.
It's the reason why French is required to be used everywhere, even in Vancouver, a continent away from Quebec: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Languages_Act_(Canada)
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