[ExI] Protest

[Keith Henson]

William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Can we agree that for a long time humans existed as tribes?  Good.  Then
you have tribalism - your tribe is right about everything.  The neighboring
tribe is a bunch of robbers and rapists etc.  A person with different
clothes, face paint etc. was one to fear.

Bill, you have most of it, but you miss the fact that *most of the
time*, your tribe swapped women with the neighboring tribe.

> This gave rise to xenophobia - in the genes I assume.  So humans
discriminate against anyone different,

You are right that it is in the genes (what isn't?) but xenophobia
buildup typically follows a current or pending resource crisis.
Besides an evolved trait to xenophobia, there is a behavioral switch
flipped by the resource crisis, or in more modern terms falling income
per capita.  The sequence in the tribal era was resource crisis ->
xenophobia -> to war.  The war reduced the population which solved the
resource crisis until the population built up and another resource
crisis came along.  Rinse, repeat for a million years.

> Not like us - that's the motto.  It can be skin color or just anything.

Yep. Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia for recent examples.

> And we still do it-  by race, by religion, by nationality and so on.

It is possible to keep the whole sequence turned off.  Steady or
rising income per capita will keep these stone-age traits switched
off.  Birth control is essential.  Not that the population cannot
rise, it just needs to rise slower than economic growth.

That's why the IRA went out of business.

Keith