If Punching Up is OK, So Is Punching Down

Thinking that our world monoculture seems to be drifting into maladaption, I’ve wondered how to get folks to care more about making their culture adaptive. One big obstacle is that this idea, often called “Social Darwinism”, become associated the Nazis, who tried to promote their culture by directly killing their rivals. (Though Hitler didn’t believe Darwin.)

Yes, there are many possible rivalrous actions short of murder, but even so our society also often seems pretty uncomfortable with group loyalty. We are often more okay with people acting selfishly than with their sacrificing for larger groups. Especially when such groups are religions, nations, ethnicities, or family clans, but maybe also if they are orgs or cities.

We seem to fear that people loyal to such units will make biased choices when acting as agents for other units like firms, schools, or governments. And we fear that such rivalries may eventually deepen into violence and war, as they did in the past.

Which makes some sense. But I hesitate due to the fact that historically natural selection of culture seems to have quite often relied on strong group loyalties as adaptive strategies. Suggesting that this will continue into the future, so that we will need to accept or even encourage such group loyalties if we want to become more adaptive. (The Amish and Haredim, current fertility winners, clearly do this.)

I’ve previously posted on how we categorize some kinds of groups as “up” vs. “down”, and tend to think it is more okay to favor and be loyal to down versions, relative to up. For example, whites, men, bosses, extroverts, and the cisgender, rich, and old are seen as up while alternate categories are seen as down.

While I’m not sure which kinds of group loyalties we should be how wary of, I feel a bit more sure that these norms that discouraging up groups from coordinating to promote themselves, while encouraging such coordination by rival down alternatives, mainly just seem like ways for rivals to coordinate to make up groups less adaptive.

So up groups shouldn’t accept such anti-up norms unless they feel so confident in their relative adaptiveness that their lack of promotion becomes a useful and credible signal of that confidence. Like the way if a toddler kicks and punches the legs of standing adult, that adult shows confidence via an amused grin and not punching back. But if that kid is now a teen attacking with a knife, the adult should fight back. Perhaps just to knock the knife from their hands, but yes, no longer an amused grin.