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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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The human brain is hardwired for an "Us vs. Them" viewpoint. As Bush once said, "You're either with us, or you're against us."
Advertisers, politicians, and those that seek to influence, they know this. They don't project any shades of grey or balance into their arguments. They attempt to "match groups" with you, and then point out that other group, over there, aren't they terrible, we should do something about that.
So you get videos going, "Look at those shoplifters, doing wrong things! We're glad that they're getting their just desserts, aren't we?"
They don't show anything that might evoke some empathy in their target audience. You don't want people to identify with your enemy, you want them to identify with you.
I kinda wonder, is it? Asked in a non-antagonistic way. One often sees kids before they are taught to hate be generous and caring towards others. I wonder if it's less hardwired and more ingrained in societal upbringings. Especially in the USA where binary thinking is quite profitable.
I can also see it being hardwired, however, as it would likely live adjacent to the base survival instinct.
Soft-wired , perhaps.
The brain is a lazy thing. It falls into patterns easily, it takes mental shortcuts whereever it can. All that comes from our evolutionary history, where energy (literal energy for thinking) was limited.
Your subconscious mind handles all the everyday trivia to maintain your existence in a low energy way, and your mind is very quick to shunt things down that low energy path. That path is all our "instincts" (fight or flight, nurturing instincts, forming into groups etc etc ) and is based upon nomadic living in the savannah plains of Africa three million years ago.
If someone presents something in a way that can easily fall into one of our evolutionary shortcuts then your subconscious will run with it without you even realising.
I think it's part of the way we are socialized into a society based on economic competition. So it seems normal to us, but it's just another way of saying "it's not perfect, but it's the best/only system we have!" as conservatives are so fond of saying. I don't think it's hardwired at all, but we're intentionally taught that it is.
I took an anthropology class once and learned that there's archeological evidence of early tribes taking care of disabled elderly (for the time) people. It would have taken a lot more energy to take care of a disabled person in a hunter gatherer society than it would now. I feel like a capitalist would have just left them to die in a cave because that's what Ayn Rand would have done.