Saturday, December 2, 2023

Tribalism and Trust

A repost from December 2020.

The title of this piece was "Is Tribalism a Natural Malfunction?" but that seems an incorrect characterization.

It's all about trust, which is one of the reasons globalists have a problem convincing ordinary people to share their grand dreams and visions. Many of the things globalists have promised turned out not to be true so people go to the population size they feel they can trust.

Can't trust the U.N. after the Oil-for-Food frauds and the Rwandan genocides? Let's try nation-state.

Can't trust nation-states because one part of the populace cheats or shows themselves to be hypocrites? 
(And it is this very point, Orwell's “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” where globalists lose the masses)

Let's try states.

And then city-states and if you can't trust your fellow metropolitans we'll go with blood relations, first tribes and if there are schisms there, to immediate family. Consanguinity and all that.

Tribalism isn't a "mal" anything, it's a survival mechanism for when you really, really have to increase the odds that you will be able to trust another person.

From Nautil.us, August 22, 2019:

What computers teach us about getting along.

Yet when we looked at the output of our simulations, where the strategies were free to evolve in arbitrary directions, we saw something very different. After an early, chaotic period, a single machine would rise rapidly to dominance, taking over its imaginary world for hundreds of generations until, just as suddenly, it collapsed, sending the world into a chaos of conflict out of which the next cycle arose. An archaeologist of such a world would have encountered thick layers of prosperity alternating with eras of ash and bone.

Instead of an orderly playground ruled by cautious, prideful cooperators, the population produced bizarre configurations that made no sense to us. That is, until one evening, in the office and after filling up pads of graph paper, we stumbled onto the truth. The dominant machines had taken players’ actions to be a code by which they could recognize when they were faced with copies of themselves.

In the opening moves of the game, they would tap out a distinct pattern: cooperate, cheat, cheat, cooperate, cheat, cooperate (for example). If their opponent responded in exactly the same fashion, cheating when they cheated, cooperating when they cooperated, they would eventually switch to a phase of permanent cooperation, rewarding the opponent with the benefits of action to mutual advantage.

As long as the codes lasted we called them Shibboleths, after the tribal genocide recounted in the Old Testament Book of Judges:

And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; / Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. 

Shibboleths are a common feature of human culture and conflict. Finns who could not pronounce yksi (meaning “one”) were identified as Russians during the Finnish Civil War. Tourists in downtown Manhattan quickly out themselves if they pronounce Houston Street like the city in Texas.

Here our machines had used them to dominate a population so effectively that no others could survive. Even after the era was over, it was their descendants that inherited the ashes. The blind hand of evolution had found a simple, if vicious, solution....
....MUCH MORE