Since social engineers have come up with the idea of building new, multi-racial, multi-national, multi-religious, multi-cultural societies, they have encountered the natural barrier: xenophobia, which is another name for in-group loyalty and out-group avoidance. Xenophobia is a biological mechanism imprinted at the genetic level that carries a survival advantage. It tells an individual to create bonds with members of the same group and be on his guard against aliens. 2). To put it in plain language: xenophobia is practised at the very basic personal level each time parents warn their offspring to be wary of strangers: not to open the door to them, not to trust them. So modern social engineers have a problem. They need to overcome this deeply rooted biological barrier.
A sign has been given, most probably followed by substantial grants and other financial incentives, and so scientists got down to work to find a cure for xenophobia. One of the research teams included psychologists and psychiatrists from Bonn, Tulsa, and Lübeck scientific institutions. Urged by the increasing globalization and the mass migration of peoples, as they say, the mentioned scientists, who otherwise dutifully recognize the evolutionary advantage of the in-group loyalty/out-group exclusion, nevertheless set themselves a task of demonstrating whether oxytocin can enforce the acceptance of aliens and reduce xenophobic out-group rejection. To this end they devised experiments in which subjects were asked to donate a certain amount of money to people in need, either compatriots or refugees. 3). Before the experiment the subjects were screened for the level of xenophobia. During the experiment the subjects were either allowed to act on their own, or were exposed to peer pressure or were administered oxytocin intranasally. It turned out that (i) refugee-directed donation among the subjects scoring low on xenophobia were significantly increased by oxytocin, whereas (ii) oxytocin alone was not enough in the case of the subjects scoring high on xenophobia: their out-group avoidance (or parochial, as it is patronizingly named, altruism) could only be overcome by the orchestrated operation of oxytocin and peer pressure.
Comment: More on oxytocin and sociability:
- 'Love hormone' Oxytocin could help spread kindness between strangers
- Five ways oxytocin shapes our social interactions
Throughout history, the world has been torn by two opposing factors that face each other with daggers drawn. These are natural biological, and unnatural forces, or reality and dystopia. It is natural for a human being to want to possess things and work as little as possible; to counter it, dystopian socialists, communists or Christian heretics came up with an idea of a society governed by the principle: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. It was supposed to work. And it failed miserably everywhere it was installed and implemented, from Cuba to East Germany, to the Soviet Union, to North Korea.
The human being, an evolutionary extension of the animal world, is endowed with certain indelible features at the genetic level. Group loyalty and fear of aliens are among them. Man cannot survive alone. Mankind is not a biologically monolithic, homogeneous family. Rather, it is made up of human groups (clans, tribes, nations, races) that as a result of their long development are moving apart from each other. Biology is the basis on which human communities create culture and ultimately civilization, not the other way round.
Human groups, which have come into being as a result of living separately from each other for ages and so have developed incompatible cultures and religions, compete for resources i.e. for survival. Since man cannot make it through life on his own, he is a part of a group (clan, tribe, nation). In order for the group to function well and safeguard its (and simultaneously its members' survival success), each group member is equipped with two psychological mechanisms (i) in-group loyalty and (ii) out-group enmity. Group members collaborate, and support each other even to the point of sacrificing themselves for the whole. That's the origin of altruism. Defection to another group means weakening one's own group and strengthening the alien group, which has always been regarded as the gravest mortal sin: treason. (Dante's hell has Judas Iscariot in its centre, which is the severest punishment for it). 4) Altruism towards members of the out-group is something between in-group loyalty and defection. Its exuberant instances are technically referred to as pathological altruism.
The phenomenon can be compared to the rivalry among soccer teams. The team's (survival) objective is to win the cup. The prize will be shared by all team members. In order to achieve it, each one of them has to cooperate with the others: no cooperation with members of any other, opposing, team is thinkable. A team's player may want to sacrifice his personal career for another player from the same team by helping him to score as many goals as possible and thus becoming the team's star, or by fouling the opposite team's player and thus risk being sent out of the playground (death), thus enhancing the chances of his team's win, but the same will not make things easier on the playground for any member of the opposing team. Helping members of the other team means lessening the chances for winning the cup (survival) of one's own team and, ultimately one's own chances.
If my well-being and survival depends on that of the group that I am a member of, and, conversely, if my group's survival is contingent on the cooperation, altruism and self-sacrifice of its members, including me, then in-group loyalty is in high demand whereas out-group (pathological) altruism is detrimental. That's evolutionary mechanism. That's game theory. That's common sense. Everybody knows it. So do social engineers.
The conclusions are obvious. Citizens of host countries must be forced to accept the influx of aliens whether they like it or not. If they do not comply then, in the name of high-flown ideals of universal brotherhood of men, they will be forced either by peer pressure or by oxytocin or by both. Oxytocin suits this purpose very well as this hormone raises the emotional well-being, it so to say oh-so humane. Like Aldous Huxley's soma in his book Brave New World. 5) The human being with his biologically-driven likes and dislikes is not to be tolerated, he must be changed. By ideological interaction or by chemistry. He must not be left alone. He must accept what he does not like not merely passively. He must be made to like what he previously disliked. 6) There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem. The 'Free World' has taken on where the Soviet 'scientists' left off.
References:
1. Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, London: Andrei Deutsch (UK edn). 1978. (in Russian) 1979: I vozvrashchaetsi︠a︡ veter-. New York: Khronika izd-vo. 1979.
2. Bogusław Wolniewicz, Zbigniew Musiał, Ksenofobia i wspólnota, Kraków, Arcana, 2003.
3. Oxytocin-enforced norm compliance reduces xenophobic outgroup rejection, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
4. Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy.
5. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.
6. George Orwell, 1984.
Reader Comments
All people have preferences....
Preferences for particular food
Preferences for a certain fashion
Preferences for different drinks
Preferences for music, film, novels.
Preferences for different religions, cultures, peoples, histories, legal systems, lifestyles.
Preferences........
Edward Bernays comes to mind.
As Williamwallace said, we have called out Mother Nature as a fraud. Humans have become so self centered that we have disassociated ourselves from our true beginnings. However, this whole cultural shift going on know is actually enhancing Xenophobia, and more and more are we looking for other people that resemble ourselves. This causes a tightening of our inclusion zones forcing us to not only look for like minded individuals that reinforce our beliefs, but to add stipulations to that person that go beyond just like mindedness.
Just so, this debate is framed with the negative, devaluing even insulting word "Xenophobia". The key component of fear (phobia) is ignorance. So what the word implies is literally an ignorant scardie cat who is afraid of everything strange to him. It's hard to lift off of the runway with baggage like that!
Greed (and all its ugly and evil by-products) cannot be overcome via the greedy desire to overcome it.
You see?
Science cannot answer or solve or help anything by attempting to 'answer' and 'solve' and 'help' everything.
By attempting (voraciously) to know more, you end up knowing less.
And less.
And less.
And less.
You see?
No, you don't.
ned,
out