I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup

"And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist." I'm guessing this is just because it's never come up. Maybe it's because I live in the midwest or something but I know…

This SSC piece has influenced a lot of my thinking. Christopher Hitchens wrote about "the narcissism of small differences," concept as well. There was another post on HN recently about a summary of Rene Girard, who extended this idea ("mimetic violence" in his style) with the inevitability of scapegoating neutral parties as an alternative to war. The rationalist community that SSC has represented may be walking right into that scapegoat role because they are viewed as compromised by the extreme…

That's a good article. It starts off with some irrelevant material, but after about three screens it gets down to business. "So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences." Good point. Thought for today: tolerance is an entitlement. Acceptance is a gift. A society has to have its groups tolerate each other to function well. They don't have to like each other. Insisting on acceptance may break tolerance and force division. Politically, this created a situation in Congress where…

Traditional anthropological ingroups and outgroups are defined by "random" characteristics: ethnicity, language, religion, dress, etc. Many previous well-known essays and studies have pointed out that the primary difference between Blue and Red is that they perceive ethics (not just ingroup traditions/taboos/etc. and folkways) differently. In the modern day, if not the past, we can tolerate outgroups that have different taboos (eating shellfish), have different mandatory standards of politeness (bowing, formal…