> broad alignment between people is natural

Uh, what? People have been killing each other over values misalignments since there have been people. We invented civilization in part to protect our farms and granaries from people who disagreed with us on whose grain was in said granaries.

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bluefirebrand 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

We would never have even reached "farms and granaries" if alignment between people didn't happen pretty naturally

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JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-]

Fair enough. We are a social species. But those alignments occur in small groups. You don’t need effort by “corporations and governments” for nations of millions of people to schism. If anything, those large institutions drive broad-based alignment.

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uoaei 2 days ago | parent [-]

Methinks you've been sitting in your armchair too long.

Broad-based alignment doesn't come from nothing, but it is surprisingly easy to achieve when a population recognizes a shared stake. A synthesis between selfishness and altruism emerges when you consider who you can call a "neighbor".

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JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-]

> it is surprisingly easy to achieve when a population recognizes a shared stake

Sure. But it takes work for anything larger than a small, close-knit community. I’m pushing back on the notion that this comes naturally and is a default state. It’s not, at least not relative to people naturally forming in and out groups.

The armchair commenters are probably folks who have never organized a group of people before outside a commercial context.

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uoaei 2 days ago | parent [-]

You might be treating "neighbor" too literally. People understand the global nature of the limits on resources and by extension the world economy better every year. The boundary of who shares 'stake' grows likewise.

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JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-]

> boundary of who shares 'stake' grows likewise

But that shared stakeholding doesn’t naturally drive alignment. You need journalists, fiction writers, organizers and delegates. Travel and curiosity. These each take effort, resources and organization. It’s something we do well. But it isn’t spontaneous in the way small-group kinship is—it literally emerges if you put people in proximity.

	▲	uoaei a day ago \| parent [-]
		I'd say it's "typical" that one person witnessing another's plight will identify with them based on the similar conditions of struggle, oppression, etc. As you point out, the trick is to expose them to those scenes in the first place. But this is proximity just the same, in a social and experiential sense if not in a "my bed is within walking distance of yours" sense. So it is spontaneous given those caveats. The question, then, assuming camaraderie and kinship is the goal, is how do we expose people to each other's lives' conditions without the narrative spin machine altering the message to distance people from each other rather than bringing them closer together?

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robot-wrangler 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Couldn't read the next sentence before wading in, huh?

	▲	JumpCrisscross 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Couldn't read the next sentence before wading in, huh? Whatever the difference between naturalness and a state of nature, it has nothing to do with education or middle-class existence.

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dns_snek 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Critical bit:

> i.e. without brain-washing and deliberately working to create out-groups

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JumpCrisscross 2 days ago | parent [-]

And if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bicycle. The process of creating an in group naturally creates out groups. The “brainwashing” OP describes is just as natural as social alignment through an innate drive for conformity.

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cwmoore 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Conformity I think follows the innate drive to coerce the nonconformant into compliance

	▲	JumpCrisscross 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Sure. Push and pull. The point is that needs effort to work at larger scales. We don’t “naturally” organize into nations of three hundred million or a billion. To the extent we do, we also “naturally” go to war.

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pineaux 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There is a pretty interesting study of a large group of chimps. I dont remember where exactly but they have been civil warring the last 15 years or so. Point is, it seems that there is some kind of innate group formation process.