-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
A war of aggression going hand in hand with "Total Information Awareness" (anyone remember that?), going along with that is crazy and suicidal.
I guess people at Jonestown also talked a lot about the crazy things going on in the world, just not about the crazy they were part of.
So, that's how that works. Just like the instant downvoting without reply works. It's like asking "what is cancer?" and when the reply is "it can come in various forms, for example that lump you have there, that's also cancer", then suddenly we don't really want to know what cancer is anymore, and are no longer accountable for basically shutting people up. As long as the status quo agrees, no justifications are required.
So what do we know? Well for one we know that unsustainable processes end. Modern persuasion and propaganda techniques appear sustainable at present. Of course they only work at all because they exploit biological reality. It's farcical, but only homo sapiens is evolved to be susceptible to modern propaganda.
War is of course sustainable. We know this because it's been going on as long as we have records and shows no sign of stopping.
But war and conquest take many forms. One group doesn't necessarily have to roll in tanks and rape and massacre to conquer another's territory. It can also be done in a more evolutionary way, by taking their ecological niche or destroying their habitat. I don't mean to "dehumanize" by observing that we are animals, because we really are animals and we really are subject to the same scientific laws as every other animal, including the ecological ones.
Throughout history, it is the real world network of interpersonal relationships between people which has been the source of power for the oppressed fighting oppressors. By hijacking this, social media has almost become the perfect tool for the subjugation of the general populace. At present, it's still possible for dissent to spread virally, and in that lies hope, even when such media contains the truly vile. It's the same now as in the 60's. Hope lies in the alternatives, even though there was some vile nonsense mixed up in it. So long as there is speech and dissent, people will eventually sort out the truth. Unfortunately, I think that the near complete squashing of dissent is also within reach of the current technological and political powers that be.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by scale invariant, but there are many ways in which history repeats itself.
Other than that I can recommend talks of Hans Rosling, who gives an entirely different picture of the world backed by data.
this is an exceptionally bad time to make this claim. the internet is in the process of obliterating the consensus machine.
See alt right, MRA, incels, and many other net-savvy extremist groups that only manage to reach critical mass due to the internet.
https://www.gwern.net/The-Melancholy-of-Subculture-Society
> The otaku & hikikomori recognizes this dilemma and he chooses - to reject normal life! He rejects life in the larger culture for his subculture5. It’s a simple matter of comparative advantage; it’s easier to be a big fish in a small pond than in a large one.6
[...]
> As ever more opt out, the larger culture is damaged.7 The culture begins to fragment back into pieces. The disconnect can be profound; an American anime geek has more in common with a Japanese anime geek (who is of a different ethnicity, a different culture, a different religion, a different language…) than he does with an American involved in the evangelical Christian subculture. There is essentially no common ground - our 2 countrymen probably can’t even agree on objective matters like governance or evolution!
> With enough of these gaps, where is "American" or "French" culture? Such cultural identities take centuries to coalesce - France did not speak French until the 1900s (as The Discovery of France recounts), and Han China is still digesting & assimilating its many minorities & outlying regions. America, of course, had it easy in starting with a small founder population which could just exterminate the natives.
Where do decisions and responsibility come in? Is there anything but "war and conquest" that takes many forms? I mean, we evolved from sharing and cooperation as much as any competition. And sociopathy is also as old as history. What makes one thing that's very old more scientific than another that's also very old, why this narrow focus?
As for war being sustainable, that's like saying "I always ate junk food and always will, so nothing bad can happen". Nothing is sustainable, not even peace, but that's not the point. Slavery is also sustainable, does that make it right? Anyone who would say so is free to offer themselves as slave to others, but they could not justify excusing the slavery someone else endures with that.
Just looking at wars of aggressions and the people who push(ed) for them, it's pretty obvious to me that the people involved don't seek power and money because they're so strong, but because they're so weak, as the actual invidual human beings they are. They need more power because to stand still might mean to lose power, and that would mean looking into the mirror and at others, and that would make them implode.
I see naked emperors. Maybe there would still be war or whatever without them, but I see them, and I see what they do. So saying that it's all just human/animal nature that is "subject" to scientific laws that somehow make all of this inevitable, cherry picking "written history" which itself is cherry picked by definition, kinda sounds like "oh yeah, it's a common occurence that sometimes air perturbations make the emperor seem naked to some". They would say that. Maybe you're right, but I won't believe you until we removed the naked emperors from the equation. Fair enough?
Jim Jones was Marxist not religious. That was all a sham.
I find it astonishing that you'd lump the Republicans in with those three. Most (all?) totalitarianism is of the left -- or pretends to be.
Consider the possibility that you may be mistaken.
I find it astonishing that you'd lump the Republicans
I hope (clearly over optimistically :-) that once people can understand the mechanism by which they are manipulated they can become a bit more critical about what they choose to believe and how they come to that belief. Every time I've found myself in what seems like an irreconcilable difference of opinion, when we've been able to break that down into what we believe and why, we can see exactly why we disagree.
I find it helps me to be more empathic to different points of view. Some people find it destabilizing and threatening clearly.
Further, groups can shift between those states based on context. What’s going on when propaganda vilifies a group is context is being assumed.
Consider the case of Edgar Welch, father of two[1]. On one fateful day in 2016, Edgar drove to Washington DC to save children who were being exploited at the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria. Who wouldn't try to save innocent children from an abusive situation when authorities refuse to act? Anyone who is a parent with a sense of duty, that is who. And yet for Edgar, his actions which made perfect sense, given what he believed to be true, turned out to be not only unwarranted but dangerous to patrons at the restaurant.
The only difference about Edgar, who up until then was just an average community member in an average community, was that he believed something that wasn't actually true. Even Edgar realized that his beliefs were misplaced, once it was clear there was no way the restaurant could have been participating in the activity he believed was going on there.
Your comment talks about groups, but I was talking about individuals. And the original comment was how could individuals at Jonestown kill their own children?
My assertion, and Edgar is but one example, all of Jim Jones' congregation is another, is that if you can make an individual believe something, you can cause them to act against their own self interest, even to the point of murder. This is true even when that person is otherwise free of mental illness or emotional disorders.
I don't see the over simplification aspect. Manipulating people through there beliefs is something hypnotists do every day, whether it is to quit smoking or to cluck like a chicken at a Las Vegas show it is a well understood part of human nature.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/business/media/comet-ping...
Because it’s really not about people it’s about aspects of people.
Let’s say Sam is a Packers fan. Now Bob is a member of the Packers football team so on Sunday their part of the same in group.
But, on Election Day Sam is a Dem and Bob a Republican so the must fight.
But their both Americans who are part of the army reserve, so they are brothers in arms willing to risk their lives for each other.
But, they are part of different faiths, and ...
So, this vilification is about context. The football team you need to beat today, may need to beat some other team next week to get you into the playoffs etc etc.
In your example with Sam and Bob, I see two people who are in different groups and can have identical (or highly coherent) belief systems.
If you want to split Sam and Bob up so that they won't be friends any more and they will hate each other, you do that by twisting their beliefs.
First one might suggest that members of Sam's faith, while in the military, were kept from the riskest parts of combat because the military. Then you convince Bob that anyone who plays football is just asking for CTE and that any friend you have is going to turn into a raging monster one of these days, and then you convince Sam, that Bob and others in his religous sect are perverting American politics to keep people like Sam from achieving similar level of success. And you convince Bob that it is Sam "and people like him" who are responsible for the cost of getting a new car or the reason jobs have left the area.
The next thing you know, Sam and Bob hate each other.
My point is that this can be done by carefully setting up what Sam and Bob believe, regardless of what groups they belong to. There are examples all around us today of families that have gone from groups of like minded people to separate camps, lifelong friends that one can no longer talk to.
This is Propaganda, this is Brain Washing, this is the corruption of a group through alternative belief systems.
And its the topic at hand, "Surviving Jonestown".
What you are describing is common to groups but not universal.
The key is that humans act on their beliefs. Which is to say if you believe X, then the action required for situation Y is Q. Rather than be abstract about it though lets put wrap some reality around it.
If you believe your house will be destroyed in the event of a hurricane, then the action required when it is threatened is to evacuate.
Conversely, if you believe your house will survive a hurricane, then the action required when it is threatened is the shelter in place.
Two people, each holding an opposite belief about the threat to the house, will come to two very different conclusions.
Now if you layer in a belief about evacuation, where one believes that people are killed when they try to evacuate with everyone else, and one who believes that people who evacuate survive these disasters. You can set up a perfect conflict between these two people.
Person A, thinks both their their home will survive and that evacuation will kill you.
Person B, thinks that the house will be destroyed and that evacuation will save you.
Here is the kicker, if you can put the right sets of beliefs into a person you can make them do anything you want, even when it is against their own self interest. We call it things like brain washing or propaganda or "fake news" but it is all the same stuff.
It is possible to define a set of beliefs for you where you think that killing yourself and your children is the correct (or even only) choice available to you.
What is worse, deprogramming people is super hard. They have these beliefs, they have been reinforced by some mechanism, and part of that reinforcement are a layer of beliefs that prevent alternate ideas from seeping in.
Immigration is a canonical example. Characterize immigrants as murderers, thieves, and rapists, show an imminent threat of "invaders", and convince people that the other side wants to just let these people waltz into the country without restriction.
The beliefs are all carefully constructed to interlock such that people who have adopted those beliefs will take action to insure the current ruling party is kept in power in order to keep them safe.
The Nazis used this, Stalin did too, the Chinese, and now the Republican Party have all adopted this technique of constructing a belief system around immigration and "the other" that incentivizes people to act against their self interest (or perhaps more accurately to convince them their self interest is served by acting in the way the party wants them to act.)
Jim Jones did this by convincing people that he was a prophet and in touch with God. That he had a clearer view of what was happening in the spiritual world, and could advise people how to act in order to maximize their success in the afterlife. They believed that so strongly that when he told them they needed to die to move on, they considered that a reasonable next step.
Edit: One of the more interesting aspects of Jim Jones' ministry for me was how people responded when faced with the reality that they were in a cult. There is an interview of some members from one of the documentaries where the members get angry at the interviewer who is pointing out inconsistencies and risks. Rather than challenge the beliefs with the source, they lashed out at some poor reporter who was pointing things out to them. No one thought to ask these folks if they would rather feel foolish at having believed something that wasn't true, or be dead. Of course at the time they didn't realize their beliefs would get them killed exactly. In my mind that is a real tragedy, one warped leader leading all of these people to a place where their energy, and contribution served only a twisted need for loyalty and power.