[ExI] Fwd: Conflict, was Tea party hypocrisy

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Tue Jan 11 18:05:00 UTC 2011


Forward from another list.

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 11:07 AM, Florin Popescu
<florin.popescu at first.fraunhofer.de> wrote:

snip

> What is relevant about political extremism, in the US and elsewhere, is the risk of global conflict spurred by an ever growing class of people with some means (time, transportation, external funding) but ever declining self-esteem and social mobility angst. That’s a discussion I’d be glad to follow, if we can stay ‘professional’ about it.

1. Humans are top predators.

2. The ultimate control on the number of top predators is other
members of the same species.  Talk to lions about this.

3. Human numbers that stress the ability of the ecosystem (and now the
economy) to sustain them result from reproduction in excess of the
death rate.  (Obviously)

4. Humans are social, i.e., they normally do just about everything
including killing each other in groups.  Spreading memes about the
nastiness of some other group is the way they are synchronized to act
in concert.  (I.e., go to war or related social disruptions.)  This
amounts to a high gain group behavioral switch.

5. Humans are sensitive to *relative* changes.  So poor people who
have historically been poor are much less likely to get into wars or
revolts than people who have been doing well and the future prospects
start looking bad.

6. Fighting other humans is a dangerous business.  Unless the
ecosystem/economy is stressed or projected to be stressed and the
alternative to war is worse, humans are strongly inhibited against
war.  However, being attacked causes the attacked group to instantly
switch into war mode.  (Pearl Harbor, 9/11, countless stone age
attacks.)

6. While this model applies best to hunter gatherers, the effects of
long term selection in the stone age applies to current humans.

So (using this model) why the rise of the Tea Party?

While the US GDP has been rising, the income has been concentrating in
a small fraction of the population.  One of the results has been
stagnant or declining wages for the bulk of what used to be the middle
class.  A large fraction has been sliding into the lower class and the
prospects for them and their children do not look good.  So it is
understandable (in terms of this model) that this sub group of the US
population with "ever declining self-esteem and social mobility angst"
gets infested with radical memes and tends to support external wars as
well.  (Shades of what happened in Germany about the time the Nazies
rose to power.)

What to do to repair this problem is obvious, put the bulk of the US
population into an economic growth mode where the future looks bright.

*How* to do this is another question entirely.

Keith Henson




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list