Have you ever been in a situation where you only cared about one thing? Perhaps it was finding your keys or watching the end of a game or a movie. Perhaps the only thing you cared about was your brother or your best friend or your mom or dad or child. Perhaps you only cared about paying the rent or finding success with your date or avoiding humiliation at a gathering.
Perhaps you’ve been in a situation so dire that you only cared about your breath, your safety, your family, or perhaps you only cared about your friends or members of your religion or tribe.
These feelings are all human and natural and normal and healthy.
There’s nothing shocking about Jewish nationalists who in certain circumstances only care about the welfare of Jews or of Japanese nationalists who only care about the welfare of Japanese or Australian nationalists who only care about the welfare of Australians or white nationalists who only care about the welfare of whites. These feelings are all human and natural and normal and healthy.
Life has a way of narrowing our attention to what is most pressing in the moment.
Normal people often have good will towards many people, but all people in sufficiently difficult circumstances, only care about a very limited number of things people. These feelings are all human and natural and normal.
It is normal, natural and healthy to most care about those with whom you are most closely genetically linked and to have less care for those who are more genetically distant from you. In a homogeneous society, it is easy to care about your fellow who’s like you, but in a diverse society, you tend to pull back your caring to your narrow circle.
The same people in one circumstance will have good will towards all and in another circumstance, they will only care about members of their group and have hostile feelings towards outsiders.
Caring about others depends upon circumstance. Diffuse caring is usually a product of luxury.
Right now, I think, an increasing number of people in America feel pressed to the wall and they are narrowing their concerns to members of their group and they are increasing their hostility towards out-groups. In some circumstances, this will be adaptive and in other circumstances, maladaptive.
I just watched three very different movies back to back. Deep Horizon was about the world of men in danger on an oil rig. Jackie was about the world of women and emotions. Watching it after Deep Horizon seemed a letdown. It was simply a cascade of contradictory female emotions all familiar to anyone who’s had a wife or long-term girlfriend.
Lion (2016)
Plot summary: “Five-year-old Saroo gets lost on a train which takes him thousands of Kilometers across India, away from home and family. Saroo must learn to survive alone in Kolkata, before ultimately being adopted by an Australian couple. Twenty-five years later, armed with only a handful of memories, his unwavering determination, and a revolutionary technology known as Google Earth, he sets out to find his lost family and finally return to his first home.”
People create a society and genes create people and so different sub-species create different societies.
Near the end of the movie, Saroo tells his adoptive white mother, “I’m sorry you weren’t able to have children of your own.”
And the mom replies, something like, “We could have had children of our own but we thought the world had enough people in it, we wanted to take better care of babies already here who needed it. When I was 12, I had a vision that my purpose was to adopt brown babies.”
Unlike every other people in the world, Anglos don’t have a dual morality. They don’t think there’s one standard for how you treat members of your group and a different standard for how you treat outsiders. That’s why Anglos created the high trust countries of the United States, Canada, England, and Australia.
