Memetic Horizon

What is it that allows us to equate hard work, mutual agreements and a clockwork of peaceful interactions to be foul and heinous, while mass murder in the name of an abstraction is praised?  Let us brake it down.  In the first situation someone else is prospering and in the second someone else, the designated enemy, suffers.  Jealousy is plainly at work in the first instance, watching those we feel disconnected from succeeding in replacing competition.  In some kind of primitive, reflexive act of group defense we immediately side with this imagined victim.  Certainly the competition couldn't have been replaced or removed in an acceptable manner and who could feel the situation resolved without a physical conflict.  It is as if the high minded process of equitable exchange is not processable by the hunter-gatherer structure of our neural network and must instead be resolved in the same way the pecking order for mating is to be determined, per the areas of the nervous system handed down to us from pre-human ancestors.

War and mass violence also appear to satisfy our primitive aspects.  Though here the ability to stave off the outmoded falters do to two factors.  One the enemy is faceless, or given an unhuman face, not part of the same tribe.  Second the state condones it, and unfortunately all to many would act barbaric if they didn't know there were consequences.  The most effective propaganda uses all the tools of rhetoric, leaving the audience without even the thought the enemy may have a rational point of view.  The brainwashed, being told only of the differences never thinks of the similarities.  What, though, does it say about us that we can be brainwashed to not think of similarities.  How is it that we can be made to stop thinking in relation to human communication and interaction when that is what makes us able to leverage our skills for more then survival, but to thrive.

The memes of identity and group survival continue to fail at including the whole race even in this age of global communication and travel.  The struggles between our peoples is not for resources, they are plentiful, everyone can live and reproduce.  The only goal of modern war that would result in something different then before is extermination.  The citizens of the United States believe that, because of their pluralistic nation that is run from the bottom, they could not perform a war more aggressive then their most recent.  One must truly wonder though, if a nation such as the U.S. couldn't be blinded into genocide.  In no definitive way will this be proven, it is hoped.