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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (130941)	5/2/2004 4:23:21 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Bilow. The "general reflex to respond submissively to authority" that you allude to is something that I've been thinking about. I agree that it's an automatic reflexive response for many of us, maybe to some extent all of us, as we tend to mirror the attitudes and beliefs of the "man in charge." It still provides benefits as people in power tend, even today, to choose to promote and hire those that look, think and act like they do. Our ancestors didn't survive famine, wars and diseases in times when their very lives were many times dependent upon the protection and favors of the powerful members of the tribe, without carrying a gene that made them "see" things the way the leader saw things. In addition, the tribe, as an entity, could not survive those edge-of-the-cliff times without the geometric increase in capabilities that occurs through cooperative, group efforts organized under the leadership of the most able. So both the "tribe" and the "leader's pet" each benefited through supporting strong leaders. As with the "teacher's pet," however, I suspect that the benefits that accrued from being the leader's pet carried the costs of being the leader's helper. For that reason I would imagine the "leader's pets" also carry an automatic reflexive response to assert considerable pressure to conform on those who refuse to follow the leader. Or, as I recall the Beatle's song, "I am you, and you are me, together." Of course the "tribes" that followed bad leaders over the cliff didn't spread their gene pools very far. There must be another "general reflex" that kicks in and creates a rebellious "reflexive response" when the leadership is seen as endangering the tribe. I would imagine that the perception of the immediacy and extent of endangerment would determine the level of lower brain response to "bad" leadership. Which brings me to the Bush Administration. The Bush Administration is governing at a time when the "tribe" feels the very real threat of harm from groups that have openly stated they want to "kill Americans." They have, for reasons that are not difficult to perceive, capitalized on this threat by amplifying and exaggerating the level of danger from not only the terrorists, but carefully selected nations who they wish us to consider deadly enemies of the "tribe." If there are gene traits which explain the "man in charge" syndrome and the "rebellion" reaction, the Bush amplification of those "tribal" fears are going to create more, rather than less, divisiveness and anti/pro-Bush passion in this country. Which side will prevail in the love/hate fest will be determined, as it was in the Vietnam era, by the wisdom that results from the emergence of the REAL TRUTHS that spin can only disguise for a short time. But one thing that is surely true is that the LEVEL of passionate support for, or opposion to, Bush will be red-hot and the country will continue to be very divided based on the perception that he is; take your choice, either protecting the tribe or endangering the tribe. On a slightly different tact; there are a lot of interesting aspects if you think about the possible factors that allowed some of our predecessor mankind to survive while others did not. One of the interesting aspects to ponder is that a member of the "tribe" will often UNTHINKINGLY give his life for the safety of the "tribe." Is that because people with that trait created stronger, more cohesive tribes that survived when others could not? Another is the process by which a group of strangers, who may not even particularly like each other and may not have much in common, can become a "tribe" in a short time when they are threatened as a group. This still happens and it occurs very quickly in combat units. I'm convinced, from experience, that the process is almost totally instinctual. We may be, to a greater extent than we realize, products of a natural selection process that resulted in a "hive" mentality. If that's the case then we should have known better than to try to step in and run the Vietnamese or the Iraqi hives. Of course the Russians should have learned that before Afghanistan, and the French should have learned that before their Sudanese adventure, and before their own Vietnam adventure. Maybe there's another gene that allowed those tribes to survive whose leaders were aggressive in conquest and used superior power to "swallow" less powerful tribes? In many ways "we're a mystery to us."