10-25-2022, 11:43 AM
(10-25-2022, 09:16 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(10-18-2022, 03:25 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Irrationality, bigotry, and malign intent have never served Humanity well.
Well, they have in their own sideways way. The fittest survived. If two groups hated each other and fought, the looser did not pass on their 'faulty' genes. The race was 'improved' in blood. Of course such perpetual conflict is no longer so cost effective in this era of nukes. It is time to reevaluate things. Major powers do not become more apt to perpetuate themselves or their people by hatred and war. There is a need to end the perpetual violence.
Irrationality, bigotry, and malign intent prove suicidal in a long war. In a short campaign they may succeed if they cause the political and military structures of the losing side to disintegrate swiftly. In a long war the opposing side has cause to become more competent and develop a grand strategy whose basis is to ensure that the Other Side has little to gain. They may conquer, but they will have few settlers. They don't win the peace; they will face partisan resistance and ultimately lose the war of demographics.
Recklessness has never been a survival value. Dishonesty implodes as a basis for a viable economy. Cruelty causes community to lose viability. The Nazis damned themselves to failure.
Genes may reflect ethnic heritage. One in Europe suggests ancient origins in the Indian subcontinent and only that -- the Roma (not to be confused with Rome or Romania; their Romani language is descended from Sanskrit in the sense that Ladin and Romanian are descended from the language of Roman Italy). From what I understand, my ancestor Adam Brouwer, an early settler in New York, has a mysterious origin but a haplogroup connected with one sixth of Europe's pre-Holocaust Jewish population. Did his parents or grandparents come from some marginalized group in a Jewish community in Germany or did they flee the Spanish Inquisition? I fit about every Jewish stereotype except for a big nose, and that cannot solely be the result of one ancestral gene.
Healthy societies seek out the best in human nature and foster that. Morality and competence are compatible. Sick societies enable their vices. Competence and morality have nothing to do with ethnicity unless if immoral and largely-incompetent people are identifiable pariahs whose pariah status continues from the murk of pre-history.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.