Thread by @hughhowey

THREAD on why people are crazy and we all can't just get along:

Social Theory of Division theorizes that TRIBES are designed to replicate the same way cells and individuals replicate. In other words: messy AF

We accept the absurdity of cellular and individual replication because they are everywhere around us, but objectively both are absolutely insane.

Single celled organisms give up HALF their cytoplasm, mitochondria, and everything else just to make a COMPETITOR in their neighboring environment that they will have to wage war with. What the hell? Why not try to live longer instead of making copies?

The answer is that any attempt to simply "live longer" is going to LOSE mightily to an algorithm that solves for "make lots of copies." A live longer strategy ends with a single death. The lots of copies individuals are going to drown out any other strategy.

So nature converged on what SPREADS MORE rather than on what makes the most logical sense. It does this at the expense of the individual (material cost + creating competition). It doesn't care about suffering, just MAKING COPIES.

Replication on the multi-cellular level is just as insane. Grow a copy inside you, have i t burst out, then spend time and resources creating this new competitor while you age and die. Why not just live longer?

It's a similar problem to the single-cellular weakness: a single death wipes out all gains. Immortality would be like nature shoving its entire pot onto red or black hoping to never lose. It doesn't do this. Nature DIVERSIFIES.

Individual replication is dangerous, painful, and costly. Mothers and children alike die during birth all the time. Eggs and newborns are helpless food to other animals. And yet nature loves this solution and we accept the pain as normal.

In addition to safety in numbers, the evolutionary solution of death rather than immortality is that lots of varying copies in the wild can deal with environmental shifts. It can also invade NEIGHBORING AND SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT NICHES.

Everywhere we look, nature prefers this "lots of copies" idea over the "live forever in an unchanging way" idea. However, for the macro "lots of copies" to work, you need each individual to be motivated by "live forever." But it's all a big lie. The macro is conning the micro.

Social Theory of Division is founded on this mismatch between the macro and micro, on the BIG CON. Our brains are saying "Yo, let's try to stick around forever." The group says "make lots of copies then go die so we can make the group stronger and more successful without you."

What does this con look like in action? Three things:
1) It makes us act dumb, not in our own interests.
2) It makes us in-group and out-group to an absurd degree.
3) It makes us unwittingly create copies of our culture rather than grow larger, cohesive, permanent mega-tribes.

These three things work in tandem to do on a tribal level what nature has solved for on a cellular and individual level: make copies rather than look for harmony.

Maximize numbers rather than minimize suffering.

Keep that mantra in mind, and so much of our tribalism begins to make more sense. It explains why protestants and catholics are willing to murder over small dogmatic differences. Same for other religious sects that have more in common than in difference.

In fact, Social Theory of Division predicts that anger between SIMILAR groups should be more ferocious than anger between DISSIMILAR groups.

The purpose of the anger is to bifurcate the tribe and make a copy, then eject that copy into a neighboring niche.

Primates do this all the time. Tribes grow beyond a particular number, the tribe goes to war, half the tribe is ejected, and now you have two tribes instead of one.

It's painful. You give up resources. You create a competitor.

Sound familiar?

Just as absurd (from nature's POV) as a single cell that grows and grows and tries to last forever would be a single tribe that attempts to fill all niches while remaining cohesive. All it takes is a single cancer or accident to wipe out everything.

Immortality is a flaw, not a feature. This is how nature thinks on the macro. But its plans only work because it makes each individual crave immortality on the micro. The whole history of human civilization is an attempt to force our micro on the macro.

And it's working! To a large degree, our collective logic overcomes the tribal urges that want us to make copies rather than be cohesive and grow larger. We are beating nature at her big con when we collect tribes into states, states into nations, nations into pacts.

Rather than rely on nature's algorithm of "make lots of copies and let many die off as the environment changes" we have gone with: let's kill each other less and try to adapt our ideas and philosophies to changes in our environment and shared cultures.

Hence less war. Less murder. Longer lives. More prosperity for more people. Our solution is better than nature's solution, and she would be proud of us for moving to the next stage of development, but ... the con is deep. It's still in us.

Which is why, as absurd as it sounds, sailboaters and power boaters often don't wave at each other. And why sit-up-straight motorcyclists don't wave at lean-slightly-forward motorcyclists.

It's why fans of opposing football teams will get in a fistfight long before a hockey fan and a boxing fan. And why Abrahamic religions have more beef within them than without. We are unwittingly trying to make copies of our similar cultures.

Social Theory of Division (STD) spreads like crazy. It's ugly. But it's a consequence of making lots of copies. When we see it happening, we should recognize that our out-grouping tendencies come from a place of love and a shared, ancient desire to replicate.

But that doesn't mean we should give into it or celebrate it. The con can be overcome. We can more align our micro to the macro. We can create something that lasts, gets bigger, grows, but is robust and able to change with the times.

/END