New Reality Seeds

[AlexanderHowl]

I agree. Bigotry is just a method that societal elites use to control the masses by giving them an enemy different than the people oppressing them.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

I disagree. Seeking to be part of a comunity is innate.

Regarding those not part of the community with distrust or disdain is equally innate.

[AlexanderHowl]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Regarding those not part of the community with distrust or disdain is equally innate.

Distrust is different from disdain. Distrust means that you are willing to drive uninvited strangers from your family and you territory. Disdain means that you are willing to invade the territory of another to enslave their family and to take their territory. Distrust is natural, disdain is artificial.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Distrust is different from disdain. Distrust means that you are willing to drive uninvited strangers from your family and you territory. Disdain means that you are willing to invade the territory of another to enslave their family and to take their territory. Distrust is natural, disdain is artificial.

...I'm going to call shenanigans. The distinction between "natural" and "artificial" is meaningless when it comes to human behaviour. The benefits of beating people up and taking their stuff when you can do it without too much risk are so obvious that virtually every culture will engage in it given the opportunity, and "disdain" doesn't necessarily mean that you will think people are worth attacking.

[AlexanderHowl]

Not at all. If you read the anthropological and sociological literature, you will see that there is a difference between internally driven behaviors (natural or reactive behaviors) and external driven behaviors (artificial or manipulated behaviors). It is the difference between spontaneous memes like eating customs and folklore and constructed memes like government and religion.

[sir_pudding]

Can you provide an acceptable peer reviewed source that uses the memetic model of cultural evolution (more recent than the 1980s anyway)?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Not at all. If you read the anthropological and sociological literature, you will see that there is a difference between internally driven behaviors (natural or reactive behaviors) and external driven behaviors (artificial or manipulated behaviors). It is the difference between spontaneous memes like eating customs and folklore and constructed memes like government and religion.

The essential problem with that is that the ones doing the "manipulating" are also humans.

[AlexanderHowl]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Can you provide an acceptable peer reviewed source that uses the memetic model of cultural evolution (more recent than the 1980s anyway)?

How much do you know about complexity science or memetic algorithms? If you are unfamiliar with the basic concepts, the citations will not do you much good, but I will give you a couple of recent ones. A recent primer on memetic evolution is Heylighen & Chielens (2009) Cultural Evolution and Memetics (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Memetics-Springer.pdf). Another article of interest from the memetic algorithm side of things is Ong, Lim, and Chen (2010) Memetic Computation-Past, Present, & Future (https://www.researchgate.net/profile...a340000000.pdf). I hope that it helps.

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Bigotry is innate in humanity. There is no way on earth to eliminate it without radically changing us into a different species. Us vs. them is an evolved necessity that before large populations were viable assisted in survival.

Individuals may learn and work to minimize prejudice, but we all suffer from some measure of it. Remove racism, sexism, etc. and we get fat-phobia, homophobia, etc.

I generally agree with your sentiment, but I think Astromancer has the point in both the specific and the general. First off, it's his worldline, so his interpretation of standard humanity goes.

Second, I think that it's reasonable to assume that, if you had a child raised in a plentiful community that had no notable bigotry -- that is to say, if all existing prejudices from ableism to racism to political cohortoism were reduced in magnitude to the level of bigotry experienced by left-handed people in highly-educated western society -- then, even over multiple generations, no notable new prejudices would arise.

Not that they wouldn't exist, but they would be small to the point of triviality. Of course, we don't live in that society, and it may take many centuries to reach it. (Not that we shouldn't try!) But of course, Astromancer's Americans do. At least initially.

The course of the war may create the sort of strife that creates new predjudices. If Astromancer wants to tell a curiously circular story, he can even make this USA extremely xenophobic (since the rest of the world keeps saying these new Americans are insane and dangerous, and is filled with hateful wars). Such a transformation would likely take a long time. Even a century later, I suspect the cultural inertia would still be going strong.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by PTTG

I generally agree with your sentiment, but I think Astromancer has the point in both the specific and the general. First off, it's his worldline, so his interpretation of standard humanity goes.

Second, I think that it's reasonable to assume that, if you had a child raised in a plentiful community that had no notable bigotry -- that is to say, if all existing prejudices from ableism to racism to political cohortoism were reduced in magnitude to the level of bigotry experienced by left-handed people in highly-educated western society -- then, even over multiple generations, no notable new prejudices would arise.

Not that they wouldn't exist, but they would be small to the point of triviality. Of course, we don't live in that society, and it may take many centuries to reach it. (Not that we shouldn't try!) But of course, Astromancer's Americans do. At least initially.

The course of the war may create the sort of strife that creates new predjudices. If Astromancer wants to tell a curiously circular story, he can even make this USA extremely xenophobic (since the rest of the world keeps saying these new Americans are insane and dangerous, and is filled with hateful wars). Such a transformation would likely take a long time. Even a century later, I suspect the cultural inertia would still be going strong.

Thank-you for your kind support. And as to were I'm taking the story, I tossed this world out because I thought others could spin fun stories of their own off it.