[ExI] [Extropolis] Religion

[efc at disroot.org]

On Sun, 11 Aug 2024, BillK via extropy-chat wrote:

> On Sun, 11 Aug 2024 at 20:34, Keith Henson via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> If you think about it, accepting the memes of your tribe was most of
>> the time good for your genes.  You want to eat those berries and not
>> these.  And in cooperative hunting or war, you needed to follow the
>> commands of the leader.  It's not hard to see how such psychological
>> traits would evolve in social primates.
>>
>> That too.  Memes are elements of culture.  The information in culture
>> exceeded the information in our genes some time ago.
>>
>> Lots of luck.  Humans seem to be biased against having too much insight.
>>
>> Keith
>> _______________________________________________
>
>
> As you say, in humans, your life depended on being a member of your tribe.
> Lone wolves had a hard time surviving. Though this is less significant
> in modern society.
>
> The current problems in the US and Europe seem to be because these
> countries have split into two major tribes with very different
> cultural beliefs. (Plus several minor groups as well). This can't be
> due to genetics, as they all have inherited similar tribal genetics.
> It must be due to different culture or memes that have taken root in
> the different groups.

Looking at my small corner of europe, the two tribes are split along 
income, where lower income vote socialist, and higher income vote 
centrist/conservative/nationalist.

But... there is also another fairly clear split. The left voting crowd 
tend to work in the public sector and the right voting crowd tend to work 
in the private sector.

A third "cut" which kind of aligns with the income one, so not as clear 
cut (pun intended) as the first two are immigrants who tend to vote left 
over right.

Those are three splits I see. It also seems as if interaction between the 
groups is fairly small and most (but definitely not all) tend to socialize 
within their own group.

Apart from the last, I would not be surprised if the first two hold in the 
US as well.

> I don't see how these different cultures can be resolved.
> Perhaps by gradual changes over generations.

In sweden, one thing would be to reduce the size of the public sector, 
since it has become a club with its own culture, norms and traditions, and 
since the public sector makes up around 30% of the voters, it's a big 
sub-group.

Another would be to educate people to see that extreme polarization, in 
the long term is negative for society, and thus for themselves.

In my experience, there is nothing as good as working together towards a 
common, freely choosen goal, to break down social barriers.

But, as you can see, there probably are no easy and quick fixes. Education 
is slow. Reducing the size of the government is difficult, and in terms of 
good leaders in companies, which yields a good work environment, is very 
rare.

> BillK
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