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It is my 1000th post. I discovered DU when wanting to read more about Barack Obama. I have been delighted to follow his ascent, and am very hopeful that it will continue. But the way this primary season has developed reminds me of something that appears to be human nature, and that is the tendency to form groups, to heap blessings on those from within our group, and scorn on those from other groups..."us versus them".
I am reminded of an economics experiment where a group of college students are shown a slide with 100 randomly placed dots, and asked to guess how many there were. The students were placed into two completely arbitrary groups, one was told they guessed that there were more dots than there were, the other was told they guessed fewer.
The two groups were then engaged to perform a series of economic games, and it was found that people treated members of their own group fairly, but would cheat members of the opposite group. This despite the fact that the students did not know each other and the groups were defined arbitrarily.
The interpretation is that there is a very base human instinct, or early learned behavior, to adopt an "us or them" mentality that is both blindly loyal to your friends, and blindly unthinking (even horribly cruel) to your enemies. This is instantiated in our culture, so even so called biblical virtues are generally only applied to members of your own group, and the most horrible vengeances exacted on others. The old testament is full of this conditional morality. This within an among group behavior forms much of the biological basis of understanding conflict and cooperation in human social systems.
The sad part of all this is the arbitrary hate that crops up when people follow different sports teams, are members of the opposite party, or support different candidates in an important primary election. These are the instincts that need to be risen above if indeed, the distinctions between the people that belong to these different groups are subtle when compared to the similarities that would otherwise, in another context, bind them together.
I am a little sad that somebody that I recognize as breaking down so many "us and thems", Barack Obama, is seen by some people to be perpetuating them. I am as optimistic as I have ever been about the political process, and hope that we can rise above our natural tendency to draw some line in the sand and fight till the death. I am tired of it though.
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