Duty, Democracy and the Threat of Tribalism (opens in new tab)

Perhaps what we're finding out is that humans have had all sorts of natural obstacles to communication: geography, the ability of sound to travel, and so forth. As time progressed, trade and travel have presented unique challenges. When I meet a strange person, they might not be friend or foe but something in-between. We can still converse and exchange, but I don't trust you. Not like my people.

We've socially evolved as tribal creatures, but odd ones. We're tribal creatures with the ability to freely mingle between various tribes (for the most part). This actually gives us tremendous evolutionary advantages. We evolve first as individuals, then as small groups, then as groups-of-groups, and so on. At any one time there could be millions of various adaptations in the works. As conditions change, various individuals and group succeed and others fall by the wayside. This person-family-clan-tribe-region evolutionary promotion model works for biology, science, social mores, and so forth.

What we tech folks have done, and we had no way of knowing, is flatten all of that out. So now what we see is winner-take-all for all of those things that used to be widely diverse and somewhat chaotic. It would seem to folks who didn't know better that this would be a good thing. After all, isn't standardization good? But in fact it's turning what used to extremely robust and anti-fragile systems into quite brittle and unpredictable ones.

I don't think most people understand the problem, even the ones who complain about it. That doesn't make me optimistic that there's a solution forthcoming.

> It is not difficult to connect the dots between rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media to the burning of Amazon forests.

Would you please elaborate on how "rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media" leads to the burning of Amazon forests?

I would also like to add these two related paragraphs:

> According to various reports on the subject (Greenpeace, FAO), livestock farming, including soya production, is responsible for about 70 to 80% of deforestation in the Amazon region. The development of intensive livestock production, combined with the increasing consumption of meat in developed countries, is thus the main cause of Amazonian deforestation.

> According to the WWF, It’s estimated that deforestation caused by livestock is responsible for the discharge of 3.4% of current global emissions of carbon to the atmosphere every year. That’s why the late 2018 IPCC report stood out that reducing meat consumption by 90% is the single biggest way to reduce global warming. Some studies also show that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by over 75%. In this way, reducing your meat consumption is also a big step to stop not only deforestation but also global warming on a larger scale.

Source: https://e-csr.net/definitions/what-is-definition-deforestati...

> I see tribalism as one of the most destructive forces of the last decade, responsible for almost all big changes (and lack of change) in the world.

Go further back. The Civil War could be viewed as large-scale tribalism. After that, there were regional and ethnic tribalisms. The World Wars pushed us into a bigger tribalism - the US became one giant tribe. (It still had the smaller tribalisms, but they became less important.) That kind of held through the 50s. In the late 60s, the hippie movement could be regarded as a new tribalism (and a rejection of the old one). The US "big tribalism" has been progressively fragmenting into a number of "small tribalisms" since then.

> The USA was the largest economy in the world by 1890, despite pursing a policy of isolationism for the entire century before that.

The US was never isolationist unless you ignore the existence of Native American Nations; it was brutally expansionist from day one. From the time of the Monroe Doctrine, US imperialism expanded even further, leaving the US “isolationist” in most of the 19th Century mainly only in regard to what happened outside the Western Hemisphere, and not even always there.

I'd be interested in seeing this data. I couldn't find anything with a cursory search, can you point me in the right direction?

That was also the last expansionist era in world history. The US was able to expand into new, fertile land and exploit new mining resources. The land wasn't completely empty, of course, but it was not being intensely farmed with the new large-scale agricultural techniques.

The expansion wasn't all of it; it was also an era of technological innovation in which the Americans were leaders (though Europe also produced a fair amount of innovation). But the expansionism had another advantage: while Europe was busy fighting a series of wars for control over the same territory, the US had a lot more freedom to devote to increasing production rather than destruction.

So the 19th century may not be an accurate model for the 21st. Isolationism was more feasible then because it was a large, self-sufficient nation. Today, capitalism has broken production down into finer and finer pieces and it's much harder for even a very large nation to compete against the combined strength of the rest of the world. If we don't collaborate, and others do, they'll gain a relative advantage that will slowly eat into our dominance. We can't simply conquer new territory because there isn't any, and even if we did, ownership of land isn't as important in a technological era.

"isolationism"

The problem is sometimes someone has to choose the least bad option. Sometimes there aren't any solutions that more than half a constituency are happy with, but not choosing is an even worse option. You can see this happening right now with Brexit IMO.

I like this idea, it seems difficult to implement, my first thought is to have the UN involved in some way, maybe if 75% of countries have the power to veto something. UN has always had a problem with enforcement, especially with G-7 type countries. It would be hard to see UN voting down Brexit and the USA and allies enforcing this somehow. We would have to generate higher respect for the UN and the world seems to be going down a different path right now.

That is effectively fixed by amending the statement

> Nations with ardent and sincere allies

And, clearly though certainly teetering toward "no true scotsman," an ally who is only superficially allied (Germany and the USSR during the first half of WWII, or the Allies and USSR after the war) should not be considered an "ally," for all intents and purposes.

And I think it's clear in that specific example you gave how well selling out their allies worked for U.K. and France. If "greed" is your only motivation, eventually your greedy allies will sell you out as well. See, Prisoner's Dilemma or pretty much the entire field of ethics.

> I didn't see any general call against tribalism.

"We are dividing into hostile tribes cheering against each other, fueled by emotion and a mutual disdain that jeopardizes our future, instead of rediscovering our common ground and finding solutions."

The phrase "defending our way of life" isn't in the article.

More likely "We need a larger budget so we can spent more on cyber threats"

HN is turning into reddit