Monday 17 January 2011

The binary nature of human evalutions

*

An anonymous commenter made an excellent point recently (such that I broke my rule of not publishing anonymous comments):

"There are many, many examples in history of bitter factional conflicts in which one side (or both) invite foreigners into the country in order to destroy their domestic enemies. The foreigners inevitably destroy one faction, then the other, and never leave. This has happened so often that one can only conclude that it is human nature to develop such a blinding hatred of your domestic foes that you would do anything, including hand over the country to foreigners, rather than see your domestic foes win"

*

Politics is simple and binary at the level humans can understand it

(i.e. politics is either simple or incomprehensible);

and any social group gets cohesion primarily by exclusion.

We define ourselves and our allies primarily in terms of who we are not.

*

Therefore, as domestic politics becomes more conflicted, and the perceived gulf between who we are and who we are not becomes (apparently) wider; a point is reached at which anything seems justified in order to defeat the enemy (not least because the situation has become so polarized that we are rightly terrified of what the enemy will do to us if we are defeated).

*

At that point people make a grab for the One Ring using the-end-justifies-the-means arguments

(i.e. that 'nothing could be worse' than being defeated by the domestic enemy).

And that is when a group invites the alien powers, the mercenaries, the irresistable machinery to help them win the war they cannot contemplate losing.

*

So - here's are some questions to consider:

Which side is ramping-up the conflict?

Which side is most terrified of losing?

Which side has invited the alien powers to help them win?

*

To ask these questions is to know the answers.

We have - in other words - already passed that point in which one side cannot contemplate losing the domestic battle and would therefore sacrifice anything and everything to win it.

*

 

4 comments:

dearieme said...

That's approximately how the Anglo-Saxons arrived. But after about 1300-1400 years, Roman standards were restored i.e. you could get a warm bath again.

S. F. Griffin said...

"There are many, many examples in history"

I would appreciate a list.

@dearieme
Which groups were battling and which brought in the Anglo-Saxons?

Brandon said...

The answer of course is obvious...

Unknown said...

I am not the anonymous writer of the original comment, but I agree with it. Examples are found in the history of the Roman Empire, aren't they. When the Germanic tribes were noticed to be at the borders, they were often even made members of the Roman military. Perhaps the realization of the Romans was that they could in no way stop the onslaught of these tribes so they had to accommodate. Thus the Empire lumbered on longer than any other known regime (albeit with major adjustments). Maybe the lesson here is that, as was pointed out, regimes like the Nazis in which no immigrants are allowed and all judged to be the "the other" are simply exterminated are unsustainable at any level while more sustainable regimes are such because they accommodate to the inevitable, at least in terms of the reality that huge population growths in any part of the world will lead to immigrations in all directions.

But to the issue of US immigration, the question was who benefits financially from it. And the answer would have to be the "powers that be". So we have immigration because 1. It can't be stopped. 2. It is financially benefiting the "power structure".