Tribal competition, status-wireheading and its uses

Sort of a reply to SSC.

When we were kids, we played mostly soccer on the playground, our city being located in Europe. We always kept score and it was actually important which team wins, even though teams were mostly assigned randomly, in the order of showing up. Playing it without counting goals looked so boring, we hardly ever tried it. So we had this spirit of competition in us, and the important thing to understand that is not the economic kind of competition, which is largely about multiple people wanting the same thing. It was empathically not scarcity based. There was nothing to win, other than temporary glory i.e. social status and prestige, but even that was not fully real, as we did not heap much praise on winning teams. We respected good players, individually, and yet we did not turn it into an individual competition, so did not decide to play an individual sport instead. Although we did something like that if not enough boys showed up, but once we were enough in numbers real football started. In short, we mostly played for internalized group status, the sweet, sweet feeling of the power trip when your team defeats the other team. It’s basically self-esteem, but through collective, not individual wins.

This is something that is hard to notice because it sound so irrational. Even buying individual social status – such as with Apple products – is so irrational that a lot of Aspies don’t get it and they think people are just being duped by marketing instead of actually getting their money’s worth: not in technical feature but in status. Getting the kind of collective social status – my team is da champion, we are No. 1 – looks more irrational as it is not even directly about you. And then you realize it is mostly just inside their heads because they are not getting any actual respect and standing out of their team winning. I mean star football players are of course celebrities but Joe Plumber the fan will not get any sort of social standing out of his team winning. It is status wireheading. But the simple truth is that our basic biological instincts are so that we get a lot of good feels out of this “my gang yay, your gang boo” setup and this is why we do it.

And it works very reliably. The FIFA, NFL are huge money-machines, based entirely on group status wireheading. And spectator sports and sport nationalism were more or less explicitly invented in order to replace war.  Videogames that pit team against team like Counter-Striker are hugely popular and they are based on that, too. And teachers know if
they want to make boys to clean up they have to turn it into a game. And a game does not simply means something that allows playing: like some sort of a toy. Oh, no. Game explcitly means teams competing e.g. in who collects more litter, with a clear winner team who gets applause.

I said boys, not kids. I think this sort of thing is closely related to testosterone. Competitive orientation clearly is, that is more or less a scientific fact, but I think even team loyalty, too. In Europe the relationship between machismo and nationalism is pretty clear. MMA fans always seem to have more than the average number of nationalist tattoos. It was always the manliest, highest-T, most aggressive guys I know who really hated traitors and disloyal unpatriots, and never wanted to forget the grievances caused by neighboring nations. Or they go and join PEGIDA and similar ovements. I remember how girls related differently to these sports games in my childhood. Some just wanted to play volleyball for the sake of just playing, not winning. Yes, there were other girls who cared as much about winning as boys did. But while almost all boys cared, only about 30-40% of girls did. These 30-40% of girls were generally annoyed by all the other girls who did not care to win. They often said they rather prefer playing with the boys so that they don’t have to deal with the other girls who don’t play to win, although getting accepted was not easy. I suspect they may have turned into feminists later on.

Most intelligent Aspies people have figured this out more or less actually – such as by looking into spectator sports and asking themselves why exactly do neurotypicals care about whether Arsenal wins or loses – while neurotypicals don’t even need to figure it out because it is more or less their life.

But do people really internalize the lesson? For example, suppose you retire and then get bored and figure out you will breed pigeons as a hobby. But you still feel bored. What to do? The obviously correct solution is to join or form a pigeon breeder club and compete with other pigeon breeder clubs. Individual competition is less fun – you don’t get the same
tribal camaraderie – and having a club that does not compete is aimless and pointless and does not have the same kind of “fire” that one that does. And yet, while this is the correct solution, do many people figure it out?

So this is what is largely missing from Scott’s article is that it is not merely about the benefits of tribal membership. It is that sweet, sweet power trip when we defeat them. But it seems in order to feel that, to crave that, you need to have fairly high testosterone levels and Scott does not seem to be very good at that. So he may easily miss that point.

It is really weird that despite the fact that this is literally everywhere, people are not using this model to actually solve problems. If I lived in a startup-friendly place, I would help solving them obesity problem while getting filthy rich through a web startup that is largely about organizing local, team-based chin-up or pull-up competitions, in various leagues and real money to win (from participation fees). So your other team members who want the team to win would motivate you to lose weight and/or get stronger. You would never have to motivate yourself to work out anymore, they would do it for you, while you would do it for them.  And why is that real corporations who compete in the economic sense never challenge each other to a bet to compete in quarterly profits? Would be a way to motivate people.

Individual status drives matter, but when it is combined with tribal loyalty, when group competes against another group for status, including this merely internalized feeling of the win even if it brings no actual standing, is one of the strongest motivators of the world. Use it to solve basically any social problem you want to, I am not saying it is magic but it can improve anything from fitness motivation to learning at schools. As long as you can really, truly make people identify with the team. This is probably the trickiest part – maybe you need to base that chin-up or math competition on real tribal splits, like people of different races or religions showing each other who is da Boss.

Intertribal competition can take many forms. Sometimes it is literally about massacring each other, sometimes it is about fighting for real prizes like wealth, sometimes it is just like in sports, a short-term glory and a heady power-trip feeling, and sometimes it is just that funny kind of not-even-competition when you sit safe and comfortable with your in-group and crack jokes at that idiot outgroup. Either that, or you praise yours, like, erecting statues to national heroes. Yes, people do it all the time, like how Reddit likes to make fun of religious conservatives. It is all about feeling better than the other group without having to even do a thing like actually winning a match. This the least realistic but easiest kind of status-wireheading and probably deserves a name on its own, I will now use Direstraiting after the  Money for Nothing song.

There is of course the opposite kind of problem, like how to stop tribal violence and friction. The obviously correct solution is the often-raised Patchwork/Archipelago for multiple reasons. One is that violence often comes from feeling the other group is actually winning the status game, so you lash out in frustration. Isolating our group from them, so that within our circles we are still respected is one of the solutions. If in a country an ethnic minority can form an autonomous territory, then they can teach in the schools, put it on stage plays how cool they are and can largely ignore the painful reality that the majority nation may think they suck. This is one handy way of collective status-wireheading. Another reason is that any shared territory will be fought over. Drawing a border and saying this side of the river is ours does not completely stop all raids – it never fully stopped warfare as such – but it reduces them. War is usually less terrible than civil war. I don’t just mean physical territory, but often things like schools or tax spending – any prize that can be fought over.

I mean, for example, how to stop atheists and Christians from hating each other? Look at what they fight about. Education? Then split schools into atheist and Christian schools. Make them as independent from each other as possible. So far it is possible, have atheist and Christian cities, states or countries. If tribes can live in an autonomous way, not struggling with other tribes over dominance over the same territory, it reduces friction. They still crave that power trip, but often find it safer to just sit on their asses and engage in Direstraiting.

What follows from this? Some of the things that follow are less controversial, some are more. The less controversial ones include:

– Support every ethnic secession or local autonomy movement.
– Two-state solution for Palestine.

More controversial ones include:

– Unless your state is very monotribal, like Denmark used to be a few decades ago, privatize everything, keep taxes low or else tribes will keep struggling over who gets what from the public purse.
– In countries like the US where ethnic-racial-religious secession is difficult, a good policy would to allow constituent states a lot of room in designing policies and they should be explicitly designed so that different states should attract different races or religions/irreligions. Eventually these states should be nearly autonomous from each other and the FedGov, effectively isolating major races and other main tribes from each other and reducing the friction of their competition.

– Split South Africa between whites and blacks. Literally separate countries. Two-state solution, remember?
– Stop calling whites racist shit when they want to segregate themselves / secede like that. They just want to do what literally every other ethnic tribe, such as Palestinians: want to have their own place where they can feel they are the best, other groups are worse, and generally run things their own way.
– Stop third-world immigration to Europe. Why the fsck should we need to import more tribalism? Letting these refugees in islike the worst idea ever, because the most likely outcome is that tribalism increases on both lines, theirs against us, and ours against theirs and the other option is that theirs increases but ours gets suppressed by the antiracist crowd, which is just plainly unjust and unfair.

Here is another thing. It can also be done the other way around. We already have independent, sovereign entities called nations (although e.g. European nations are far, far from being sovereign). Anyway, one thing we can do is to try to channel  tribal sentiment towards nationalism, because it is already true that nations, through being independent, are fairly isolated from each other. War is bad, but less bad than civil war, and often it is replaced by Direstrating and other kinds of status-wireheading instead of direct conflict. This idea is actually far simpler than it sounds. It is just the concept that in the average European country everything from street statues to historic stage plays and national poems taught at schools give you the “we are cool” message. So if you identify with your nation, you get status-wireheading for free, and the isolation, sovereignty means you don’t have to face competing viewpoints too much.

I swear I am not trolling. I mean, it looks like I am basically just inverting standard liberal ideas, like mixing with different people and keeping an open mind to different viewpoints are good ideas. I am not actually inverting them, I arrived to these conclusions independently. The issue is that liberals think that bigotry, hatred and so on is mostly just about ignorance. In truth it is about the need to feel your group is better than the other group. The more open you are to the outgroup, the more you know how they think your group sucks, the more you mingle with them, the more pissed you will be. So the open mind does not make you hate them less, but more. This is highly ironic. Ignorance actually protects you from the knowledge that other groups think yours is shit and makes you less hateful, non-ignorance makes you angry  because you know how much everybody else is dissing your gang. If you can sit in a safe bubble where all you hear is your group is great and the other sucks and nobody challenges it, you will at least not be angry. And that is nationalism in the older sense.

I know it sounds weird for liberals, but the trick is that they define their groups differently. They are not actually ingroup with the standard, run-of-the-mill nationalist, ethnicist, racist, religionist Joe Plumber. They define their own ingroup precisely as the “enlightened” people who are opposed to that. One reason there is so much grief about politics is that liberals are disloyal, they do not ally with their natural allies, their own race, religion, ethnicity or nation, but define themselves precisely as different and superior to the average peasant of their nation, ethnicity, race or religion. So for them, the open mind stuff and the mixing with other folks works, as long as he does not get mugged, because this reinforces the belief in his own tolerance and thus superiority.

Anyhow, my point is that nations largely being sovereign bubbles – at least they are supposed to be, these days are hard to be independent from the US State Dept – if people primarily identify with their nation, they can more or less isolate themselves from other tribes that way and that may reduce friction.  So instead of your tribe seceding, you take “that which is already seceded” and make it your tribe.

Of course the complicated interaction between citizenship-nationalism and ethnic nationalism does not make it easy.

To sum it up, tribalism isn’t just about various advantages but the very basic collective power trip of defeating another group or simply feeling superior to another group. It is just about the easiest way to motivate people or put meaning and purpose in their lives, but it largely depends on testosterone.  It can used to tackle social problems cleverly – you want more X, form teams amongst pre-existing  tribal lines and make them compete in X – at least so far as genetics allows them to be solved. They can be pretty dangerous but a good solution is local autonomy or secession, basically isolating tribes from each other, as this at least reduces friction, or the opposite solution, to base tribal identity on that which is already seceded, and that is called nationalism. The only issue there that every people are allowed to think along those lines, but whites quia whites not, for example nobody is suggesting or has been suggesting a two-state solution for South Africa. Whites must always endure unwanted interference from other groups, other tribes are respected to some extent when they say they want to be autonomous. The main reason for this that whites are split, white liberals are treating other whites as an outgroup.

Oh! I almost forgot something. When I first started reading Alt-Right blogs, the Anti-Semitism of some (very few) authors and (still few, but more) commenters displayed was often very WTF worthy, I really did not understand how they came to those conclusions.  These days I think the main reason is that generally every ethnicity tends to form one ingroup, unless there is a religious split. That fact that in case of whites it is not so is very unusual and one way to  solve this dilemma is to assume liberals aren’t really whites. And thus they call them Jews. It’s just a pattern. When and if people essentially say whites suck, you assume they aren’t white. Then you look at them and you see a pale face. WTF. What then. And basically these guys just think well, then they are no true whites.  That is how I think they think.  As they assume every tribalism is ethnic, they assume white-hating whites are of a different ethnicity. In reality it is true that Jews tend to be highly liberal but largely because assimilating to white liberal elites. Most Jews are liberals but most liberals aren’t Jews. The ethno-racial disloyalty of white liberals is simply explained by the historic winning of the white people. Winners tend to feel safe and thus tempted to infight. Group, tribal identity is depending on external competition, whenever people feel like there is no external competition worthy of the name they will turn on each other i.e. split their tribe into infighting subtribes. We always knew external threats increase cohesion. This is just the flip side of it: defeating external threats leads to less internal cohesion and a formation of subtribes that are at each others throat.