Degrees of allegiance

Great Debates
1

I find myself thinking a lot about this.

It starts pretty simple and straightforward. Would you fight to protect yourself?

Why?

Probably because you are you, and being alive usually reflects a determination to stay that way.

Those you love are a part of you. Your children, siblings, family, mate. For the same basic reason you will fight for them

Looking around, you might find that there are other groups of people just like you, though unrelated, who also love and protect each other. Becuase of their similarity and circumstances, you can identify and sympathize with them. Primitive man inevitably found that he and his were much safer and stronger with mutually beneficial allegiances of similar groups.

The same basic concept is what makes insurance works.
Look at two family groups of 6 people each living in close proximity to each other, and picture the patterns of degrees of allegiance between the members of these societies to each other.

As a male in group A how do you respond to the dominant female in Group B?
At what times do these groups compete and at what time do they help each other.

If you think about the dynamics of groups like this, it is truly incredibly complicated. But, it seems that we do it very easily as humans. Think of how easily we network together to perform tasks, and think of all the different networks we belong to. Family, friends, work, etc.

Think about all the complex interractions we engage in with others. I think that the protocols going into even a pretty isolated human’s behaviors towards others is far more complex than even the largest of computer networks.

Yet we don’t go walking around with huge pages of protocol and code and notes telling us how to deal with the wife’s sister’s friend who slept with your brother but doesn’t like you, yet you have to spend the day with her helping her move into a new apartment.

You just instinctively knew that you had to help her, and she knew you had to to and never became an issue. The rules are complex, yet we all seem to understand them. We are exceedingly good at forming into complex cooperative/competitive groups and fulfilling our rolls within those groups.

In fact, if you think about it, it is pretty much all we do. That’s what it means to be human, and a part of humanity.

Our lives are based on functioning with degrees of allegiance, and those degrees of allegiance are based on identity. The closer something is to our identity the greater the allegiance we owe it.

Think about it and try to write down the rules that govern your most basic family and work relationships. You’ll have to give up. It’s too complex.

Yet we handle it easily. In fact (and here’s the big word,) we handle it instinctually It’s hardwired into us.

The same thing that makes us love our wife, willing to gladly die to protect our children is the same governing principle that makes prisons break up into hostile groups based on race, that makes nations wage war.

The fact is that I am most comfortable when I’m with people I identify with. I intend to identify with people that are most like me.

Even, perhaps especially on these boards, where we are nothing but the words we type to each other we still self-organize into like groups.

An attack on a gay poster will tend to garner support from other gay posters.
Conservatives and liberals band together against each other. Say something against the particular intersts of a group and the members of that group will band together.

The degrees of allegiance work out interestingly. In one thread I may be allied with a person who has identified themselves as a hefty liberal black woman against a person who dislikes SUVs. We both have SUVs and show a degree of allegiance and support each others arguments and help each other and identify with each other and our differences are meaningless because of our common allegiance.

Later on we may argue about capital punishment and become enemies, and all our differences may become highlighted because of the conflict.

I identify with my colleagues, and those I conflict with become “other.” They are different. They are unlike me. They are bad.

There is no good reason why we do this, but it seems to me that we work very hard to. We have all the “ask the ____ guy” threads so that we can determine degrees of similarity and allegiance. We state that it is to promote understanding, but I’m not sure I completely by it. It’s to know our friends and to know our enemies and to know which is which and what is what when… to figure out degrees of allegiance.

Nowhere does this become more obvious and ridiculous than in political threads. Politics is basically degrees of allegiance with very little underlying substance.

In numerous threads we have tried to discover what conservative or liberal means, and there are certainly tendencies, but few hard and fast rules. basically it depends on who you choose to identify with.

I believe that there is very little substance behind these degrees of allegiance.

2

Ya. In flowbark’s mind, humanity is shaped by its ancestral environment. Back then, it made sense to offer a large degree of protection towards your family and a substantial degree of protections towards your band of (um) 25-80 members.

Nationalism, musical tribes, and ideology are partly an extension of this form of tribalism.

That said, I have another explanation for political viewpoints.

Some observations

  1. Political involvement is more intense among those in their twenties.

  2. Often, the intensity of political viewpoints are largely independent (or negatively related) to the extent to which the speaker is informed. People get hot under the collar about politics, and less so about physics, though they may be equally knowledgeable about both.

My contention is that youthful conservative and liberal males engage in a form of signaling. Conservative views imply tough guy/good provider. Liberal views imply a nurturing nature and extra commitment to potential partners. (Again, we trace this back to the ancestral environment.)

OTOH, female POVs are left out of this framework.

Here’s another one

American conservatives allow their gut (specifically their liver) to over-ride their head and their empathy.

American liberals make a point of showing their compassion, sometimes at the expense of infantilizing the subject of their concerns.

This is posturing, not analysis. My evolutionary mumbo-jumbo reveals the incentive for such posturing. Maybe.

Oh, btw, the evolutionary psychology idea was written up in the Economist, some years back.

Of course, there are also economic underpinnings for one’s POV.

3

In buddhist jargon, these are part of maya. Six of one, a rose by any other, etc.

It’s interesting stuff. Stop and look into it with the most precious gift of being human, mindful clarity, and it’s ephemeral, it’s wisps of smoke and mirrors and narratives.

For all that lack of solidity, it makes and breaks people, groups, cultures, and nations against each other.

I’m not sure there’s much to debate, but then again the OP’s content resonates pretty strongly for me, so.

4

Scylla, this is essentially Peter Singer’s point when he argues that, if we take seriously the idea that all people are of equal worth and distance or “otherness” is irrelevant, then we are inconsistent to morally condemn a man for walking past a drowning child he could easily save, but fail to condemn a starving child he could easily feed simply because it lives farther away from him. It’s a pretty radical result from some very reasonable premises. Yet, even those people who agree with the premises seem to instinctually fail to recognize this. I recognize the premises, recognize the validity of the argument, and yet I STILL find it hard to really appreciate. In Singer’s case, this is one of many results that leads him to reject instinct and intuition as reliable guides to morality. Other people might have different responses to it.

—People get hot under the collar about politics, and less so about physics, though they may be equally knowledgeable about both.—

I dunno: physics can get people just as hot under a collar: it’s just that you need a much better grasp of the controversial issues before you can understand the “sides” and the potential implications.

5

[Hm. Doubts noted Apos. Perhaps point 2 needs to be rethought.]

Emotional affiliations are defined by shared adversaries.

They are also defined by other elements, I must admit: mutual gain and comradery can sustain cooperation, for example. Still, American conservatives seem to devote a fair amount of attention to attacking liberals. Lefties seem to enjoy attacking corporations. Musical tastes are defined as much by what people hate as what they like. Shared adversaries form and bind coalitions.

Voluntary organizations such as the Red Cross or Habitat for Humanity rely on a different dynamic, AFAIK.

6

How about allegiance to a deity? That’s kinda big for some of us.