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Monday, December 23, 2013

Still Tribal After All These Years

I think that you're right about primitive people sharing their stuff with other members of their tribe, but they weren't too keen on sharing with other tribes, especially when the other tribes attacked them and took their stuff by force. Before they had tribes, there must have been family groups or clans that had the same problems. They say that man is a social animal, but that doesn't mean that he believes in the universal brotherhood of all his fellow humans. I think that was an idea that was developed fairly recently, within the last couple thousand years. Even then, it was slow to catch on, and is not universally accepted even unto this day. A lot of people say they believe in it but, in practice, they are still clannish or tribal at heart. This may be expressed as racism in places where they have more than one race living near each other but, even in places like Cheboygan where everybody is pretty much White, people tend to divide themselves into social groups based on family name, income level, or just plain personal preference. There must be something in human nature that causes people to band together and exclude other people like that. That doesn't mean it can't be changed, but the change must be deliberate, it won't happen by itself. Tribalism is the default position.

I don't know where you got the idea that Europe doesn't have issues like that, or Asia or Africa either. Those people were massacring and enslaving each other for thousands of years before the U.S. of A. was even invented. Western Europe may have settled down a bit since World War II, but they've just found more subtle ways to express their tribal tendencies. There is a big worry in Britain right now that, if present trends continue, Englishmen will soon become a minority in their own country. This shouldn't surprise anybody because the same thing happened to the Celts, the Saxons, and the Normans in turn a long time ago. There may have even been somebody for the Celts to overthrow when they first arrived there, but their history was never recorded, so the only hints we have about these "Dawn People" come from myths and legends. France has also been in an uproar for some time over the influx of colored people from Third World countries. A few years ago they had a series of riots about it, and many Frenchmen were demanding that they all be sent back where they came from. I haven't heard anything about that lately, but that doesn't mean it's not still going on, maybe the news cycle has just moved on to other issues like it typically does.

Since the big economic crisis, which has been going on so long that it's beginning to feel like the new normal, there has been a lot of tension between the "have" and "have not" countries of the European Union. A lot of Europeans were never thrilled about the Union in the first place, and now they are taking every opportunity to say "I told you so!" English, French, and German people are pissed about having to bail out countries like Italy, Spain, and Greece, and the Italians, Spaniards, and Greeks are pissed because they are expected to get their finances in order as a condition of being bailed out. Truth be known, none of these people ever really liked each other in the first place and, if they didn't have this issue to be pissed about, they would probably find another. We haven't heard anything about the Balkans in years, but I understand that we still have troops stationed there to keep those people from lapsing into the ethnic warfare that has been going on there since forever, except for the relatively brief period when the Commies knocked everybody's heads together and forced them to play nice.

You're probably right that the forced integration of rich and poor in this country would never work. I'm sure that there is a racial component to it but, even if the rich and poor were all the same color, they still wouldn't like living next door to each other, which is probably why they live in separate neighborhoods in the first place. Racial discrimination in housing was abolished a long time ago, but the birds of a feather are still flocking together. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

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