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So does psychology determine a person’s philosophy?For example, are nihilistic people more likely to be depressed or are they depressed because of their nihilism?What about there political ideology’s/ religious values?

If I put ten people in a room with only enough food for eight people to survive, and forced them to fight over it, meanwhile I am sitting there with enough food to feed everyone on earth, claiming it as my “private property” which I control, then you would have to be some kind of an asshole to believe that this situation really portrays the same universal “self-interests” of everyone involved.

And there are very certain things the ten people in the room can do to change the outcome of this situation, but they don’t end well for me who is hoarding the wealth.

Wouldn't that make our inability to rise above tribal instincts our 'greatest problem'?

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Agreed. "Tribal Instincts" seems like an obfuscating term at best to refer to global human systems that are not only social but political and economic as well.

If only people, communities, companies, and countries would stop pursuing their own self-interests all at once! If the was fundamentally different than it is, and we all behaved differently, we could achieve a different outcome. Gee, what a concept.

That’s missing the point. I wasn’t just speaking on pre-colonial peoples, but on all human beings. The point is not that pre-colonial peoples lived in some kind of utopia where there was no conflict. The point is that two different groups of close knit communities are, in reality, just as likely to help each other than to engage in conflict. This negative idea of “tribalism” is just another way of phrasing the “human nature” argument which is literally just capitalist colonialist propaganda.

Precolonial societies weren’t exactly peaceful, though. They had ethnic conflicts, wars, and massacres just like everyone else. There were even empires like the Aztecs.

I’m glad you understand what I was trying to say! Not just that it’s offensive language, but that it’s a flawed concept. I can be in one tribe and you can be in another, and there is nothing about this “instinct” of close community that says you or I will not help each other’s tribes when the other is in need, that it must always mean conflict and greed. It’s just as likely, or more likely without capitalism, that one tribe would help to feed another. This idea of a negative kind of “tribalism” being the true human nature is pure propaganda.

There seems to be some hard limit on co-operation.

It’s easy to find a team of 10 that all co-operate. You can even have a team of a couple of hundred co-operate to say… build software. You can even have a team of a couple of thousand get together to build aircraft.

But once you get above that number, it seems that humans cannot agree on an outcome and co-operate.

It breaks down at the lower level with violent crime and antisocial actions, and it breaks down at the top levels with corruption and massive greed.

Yes, we would be more prosperous. Poverty is often a form of violence inflicted on a population, and that violence ripples out and comes back and affects us negatively. Things don't have to be perfectly even, that's a strawman, but by elevating the bottom we also lift the top. Certainly the inequality should be reduced, though, because a top elevated too high causes instability for everyone. It's impractical.

We now live in a world of endless technlogical miracles, and the result is greater amounts of the population retreating into magical conspiratorial thinking and religious delusion. Truly disappointing.

Iirc, you can track a civilization pretty well just by measuring the amount of power available to it. We have the modern world because we've been able to heavily use fossil fuels since the 1830s or so.

Without those, or a replacement, everybody goes back to raising horses and plowing a lot.

When your problem is my solution and vice versa, this discussion is not going to go well.

Chill?

It's paradoxical how people look down on tribalism as some primitive mindset that we should get rid of, but at the same time they value highly democracy and freedom of opinion.

The whole point of democracy is that we can't have a sole political stance that everyone agrees on, it's inevitable that different groups will form each with it's own opinion on which is the optimal path forward for society.

Sounds great for us, then.

But are you suggesting we'd be happier if wealth were evenly divided?

No, I am suggesting that we are "happier" in the wealthy parts of the capitalist economy because others are put into fields in slave-like conditions.

Not my point. Are you suggesting we'd be happier if we were all in the fields?

Our brains are designed to work effectively for 20,000 years ago. It has been unable to keep up with what we've created.

I’d say it refers to our evolutionary instinct

If people were fundamentally different, and agreed on truth construction frameworks, and aligned on core values, then there would be far less disagreement and conflict.

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