
Overcoming Us vs. Them (2017) - yamrzou
http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/why-your-brain-hates-other-people-rp
======
bingobongo1
As it has been well-known in the east for thousands of years and well
preserved by the Tibetan people, the us vs them mentality arises naturally
through the nature of consciousness which grasps at the notion of a non-
existent self.

Through ignorance we fail to see reality for what it truly is, ultimately
empty, but conventionally existent.

Thus, we reify our perceptions as real, instead of recognizing that all
objects are simply names and labels imputed over aggregates and the
introduction of the mental afflictions that cause protectionist and selfish
thought arise.

First comes the individual, then the small group, then the group of groups,
then the nation and so on - all grasping at a sense of self that isn't truly
there when thoroughly analyzed.

Every human being on this planet is the same. We all would like to avoid
suffering and would like the causes of happiness.

Ridding yourself of the us vs them mentality involves waking up and developing
unwavering compassion for other sentient beings. This requires the realization
that all sentient beings want to avoid the causes of suffering.

Does this lengthy article mention this ancient and well-developed philosophy?
Not a single word on it.

I recommend listening to just some of the conversations the Dalai Lama has
conducted with western scientists and researchers:

Mind & Life Session 1:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcgcFbPTwys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcgcFbPTwys)

Mind & Life Session 2:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoAEEAq8idU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoAEEAq8idU)

I highly recommend you read Pumla's book (who appears in the second
conversation): "A Human Being Died that Night" which is highly illustrative of
the power of compassion for others even in the midst of human rights
violations.

~~~
Tade0
_Thus, we reify our perceptions as real, instead of recognizing that all
objects are simply names and labels imputed over aggregates and the
introduction of the mental afflictions that cause protectionist and selfish
thought arise._

You're falling for something which I call the falling physicist problem.

A physicist was thrown out of a plane. He is aware of the forces that
currently affect him and can even estimate his terminal velocity. Hell, he
even knows that the atoms he's made of will be fine, since it would take
energies orders of magnitude higher than his kinetic energy to affect them.

Nevertheless he'll go splat just like anyone else put in such a position.

This is why this philosophy isn't really that successful - it doesn't create
any incentive to survive and perpetuate it.

Sure, you may have achieved ultimate compassion for your fellow man. Where's
the benefit in that?

~~~
bingobongo1
I respect your assessment.

You may think I'm falling into an idealist's dilemma, however, that single
statement is speaking on the nature of emptiness of phenomena and how certain
thoughts and emotions arise. Objects do not exist inherently and
independently. Everything arises from an interdependent network of causality.

The scientist will go splat, but why does he fear death?

I have to lightly refute your point about it not being a successful
philosophy, it was very successful for thousands of years in India where it
originated and very successful in Tibet and other eastern societies. Western
materialism tends to be in direct conflict with Buddhist wisdom.

All beings suffer, compassion is the way out of suffering for the individual
and for others. Ask the Tibetan Yogis who were imprisoned and tortured by the
Chinese who harbor no resentment toward their captors after release and who
say that the greatest danger they felt during their imprisonment was losing
compassion toward their captors.

No one ever said it was easy to develop, as can clearly be seen by such
stringent resistance to the notion of having compassion for others, even
enemies.

~~~
babesh
Buddhism is a religion (along with many other religions) that allows a
minority to brainwash a majority in order to exploit them. Those Buddhist
temples don’t build themselves. You offer them afterlife or an end of
suffering and in return they offer their independence of thought and action.

The concept of self is evolutionarily effective. For better or worse, so is
the concept of us and them.

~~~
bingobongo1
It's not based on faith and has a rich history of academic development and
logistical analysis by trained Nalanda scholars of 4th, 5th, and 6th century
India.

Also there is a rich history of independent development and contemplative
examination of the nature of reality, consciousness, and mind.

The western mindfulness genre is almost entirely made up of bits and pieces of
Buddhist contemplative practice.

I don't expect to convince you that you don't know exactly what you're talking
about.

Don't think for a second I'm surprised that most commenters here are pure
material realists, part of the fun I guess.

------
yamrzou
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934183](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934183)

------
yamrzou
I posted this to see more discussion about it.

Isn't a strong social identity, something desirable? Doesn't it result in
stability and strength? Don't we all seek the belonging sentiment which
necessarily implies an Us vs. Them?

On the other hand, it seems that tribal thinking can increase social tension
and divisiveness, and makes people more "stupid"/less critical towards their
group.

So what is the right balance here?

~~~
shekharshan
As your sense of "I" diminishes the more compassionate and caring you become.
The more emotionally resilient you become and the less harmful your decisions
are to yourself and others (including animals). This is the core of Buddhist
findings.

Having said that, there are religions and ideologies that tend to become a big
part of a person's identity. Then their actions become guided by those
ideologies.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
> As your sense of "I" diminishes the more compassionate and caring you
> become.

I am not sure that is always the case. I would think that, for example, the
women involved in the Charles Manson murders had a diminished sense of I, but
they were not compassionate and caring.

~~~
chillwaves
I don't see the relevance.

Joining a cult is not the same as diminishing the ego. You don't just supplant
your ego with someone else's.

Anyone who loses themselves in a cult of personality is not following the
teachings of the Buddhism.

~~~
loopz
People in organizations routinely fail to acknowledge an ignored ego: The
Organizational Ego

The whitepapers and salespeople going on and on about their products, services
and companies that nobody cares about?

Yeah, that one! The ideologies and demagogues are even "worse". Not that ego
is a bad thing, just in isolation..

~~~
bingobongo1
This is so true. I've tried to explain why an organization is the way it is
before via cause and effect and some people refuse to believe that there is
any sort of subtle force that factors into how organizations turn out.

Even if you point to things like Conway's law they still won't listen
sometimes!

The best organizations have compassion for their employees and customers, but
it takes right-thinking from the top.

~~~
loopz
It might depend on leadership culture. Most people are unprepared for their
first management position, and how can they prepare? You even see natural
leaders flounder, when put in the same leadership position and culture. The
positions are necessary for the organization, but I believe almost nobody has
really cracked the nut generally, just for their little trible. Most impactful
thing leaders can do is cooperate and bring teams together, in order to
accomplish concrete goals and organization. Project Lead is sort of that, but
it needs to be continuous instead of temporary and limited scope.

~~~
bingobongo1
Very true.

------
082349872349872
From _Yes, Minister_ , I learned the Us/Them aikido exercise of filling in
social conjugations:

    
    
        I am compassionate.
        You have a strong heart but a weak head.
        They start by trying to love everyone and end up loving no one.
    

(I am trying to remember a web-published book I read a while ago on defusing
authoritarian tendencies. What I remember most strongly was that equal-
treatment laws are more effective than one might intellectually believe, not
because they are "legislating morality", but because they allow large numbers
of in-group members who actually would treat out-group members normally to do
so _without_ being subject to retribution by in-group hardliners.)

人之初，性本善?

------
DoreenMichele
_I posted this to see more discussion about it._

I don't know what you are hoping for here. This is probably not it.

I spent a fair amount of time in therapy in my teens and twenties. I'm quite
convinced that a lot of our identity is a mental construct.

Let's take race. What makes someone "Black" or "White"?

It's not their skin color. You can find "Black" Americans and "White"
Americans with very similar skin tones.

It's not their blood. The US decided somewhere along the way that people who
are 7/8 Caucasian/European ancestry and 1/8 African ancestry are "Black." I
have read these same people would be classified as "White" in Brazil.

It's not their culture. Even if a "Black" person gets a good education, etc,
they will still be othered by most "Whites."

Anyway, we get taught certain categories and mental models and it winds up
being taboo to think too hard about where they come from and what they mean
and why they were really created and we live with the legacy of those
inherited mental models and then those mental models shape both how we see
ourselves and with whom we identify as "Us."

In other primates, those associations will tend to be more rooted in "This
group takes care of me and I have positive associations with them and I'm one
of them" and "This other group is openly hostile to me and they are my enemies
and they are a problem, not an asset to me."

Human culture is more complex than that and it ends up being super hard to
find a way out of those traps.

Even if you can find your way out, other people will try to keep pushing you
into one of the preexisting categories in their own mind.

So the real question is "How do we find a path forward on getting group think
to change?" because lots of people do therapy, sort their crap ...and then
find that _other people_ are actively affronted at their failure to fit with
existing mental models.

~~~
babesh
Black and white was a competitive construct of us and them. It is that simple.
Human culture really isn’t more complex than that. It is just strategies and
tactics layered atop the same goals animals have.

~~~
DoreenMichele
No, in this case it was a simple way of saying "This group of people can be
slaves and that group of people cannot be slaves" which is why we get weird
demarcations about how you are still "Black" even if you are only 1/8 African:
So slave owners could rape their slaves, father children upon them and treat
those children as slaves for several generations.

In the US, our weird definitions surrounding "Black" and "White" are a polite
euphemism for "People officially marked as someone you can victimize and
people officially marked as someone who can do the victimizing."

Which I didn't really want to baldly state because it isn't something
Americans really want to hear.

~~~
doboyy
I liked your first post, but this one is in line with the article.

------
irontinkerer
The title is "Why Your Brain Hates Other People" not "Overcoming Us vs. Them".

~~~
neogodless
Right - it does appear the browser title is the latter. The subtitle is "And
how to make it think differently."

The second paragraph begins to focus on this: "And it can be vastly
consequential when people are divided into Us and Them"

So they are both important to this article - why it is this way, and how we
can improve upon it, or work around it.

