727. How Instincts Reinforce Each Other Thus Aggravating Harm And Suffering
The biological spoils of war
Study finds those who take part in violent conflict have more wives, children
The study, ...... found that, among members of an East African herding tribe, those who engaged in conflict - in the form of violent raids carried out on neighboring groups - had more wives, and thus more opportunities to increase their reproductive success through having more children
In an analysis of 120 men, Glowacki said, the data was clear - those who participate in more raids had more wives and more children over the course of their lives.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-12/hu-tbs122914.php
In a scientific study, observed and observable data are presented. From a very different point of view, I am looking at the suffering caused to individuals.
- Raids cause deprivation and often the subsequent risk of perishing
- Raids often cause deaths, serious injuries and mutilations
- More children mean women suffering more often the agony of giving birth.
- There is often the additional suffering of those women, who are forced to share a husband in a polygamous situation in spite of wishing monogamy and/or to procreate more than they wish to.
This is a clear example, how two instincts reinforce and enable each other leading to aggravated suffering.
- The raids are an expression of the ingroup-outgroup-instinct. The more the distinction between the groups is accentuated by this instinct, the less inhibitions there are against the ruthlessness and cruelty, upon which depends the success of raids. Thus the success of raids both depends upon and rewards the ingroup-outgroup-instinct.
- Procreation depends upon the combined strength of the procreation instincts and the means and occasion to act upon this instinct. The more men are driven by the procreation instinct, the more they consider the acquisition of more wives and children as a desirable goal and a reward for embarking on a raid. Thus a strong procreation instinct serves as a motivation for raids, such men's additional procreational behavior is enabled in the case of the raids being successful.
Would one instinct be absent, individuals would suffer less:
- Without the procreation instinct, there were less or no reasons for raids, depending on the own resources.
- Without the ingroup-outgroup-instinct, raids were not possible, less procreation were possible due to less resources.
One should not shrug this off as if it were merely a remote problem in Africa. The simple and therefore obvious mechanisms described in the study can be generalized and recognized in the sad every day occurrence, that people force disadvantages upon outgroup members in favor of advantages for their own progeny.
- The raid can be replaced by the wider concept of exploitation in situations of asymmetrical power. The same mechanism, that has been shown in the study above, is also at the bottom of all the outrageous injustice and cruelty of the world wide globalized system of exploitation.
- Having more wives and more children can be replaced by the greedy accumulating of control over resources. A person, who dies without offspring has no reason to amass more wealth than what he needs for the preferred standard of life during his own lifetime. But someone leaving behind wealth as an inheritance bestows advantages to further generations of bearers of his own genes. His offspring have a better chance of healthy survival, in turn they may have more offspring than without the inheritance.
Whenever someone in the situation of direct or economic power exploits other humans, expecially slaves, illegal immigrant workers or inmates of labor camps, he has first defined them as an outgroup. Only by this he is able to apply very different standards to them than to those people, whom he considers as his ingroup, while nevertheless not feeling cognitive dissonance with his idea of behaving morally.
In the complex globalized system of exploitation, there are layers of ingroups and outgroups, as the example of this documentary shows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gktid0YO9s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gktid0YO9s
- To the privileged social class of plantation owners, the slaves are the outgroup. These landlords are the most directly and knowingly cruel persons.
- To those Ivorians, who abduct people from Mali, these are perceived as outgroup by being citizens of another country. This is a form of raids, which are not a part of remote tribal life.
- To the companies importing the cocoa beans and to the consumers of chocolate, all Africans are outgroup. The majority of the uninformed customer are in denial or even truly ignorant of the sufferings caused by chocolate as an apparently inland product. But those managers, who dictate the prices, are aware of the unavoidably dire situation of workers not being paid sufficiently.
The worst cause of human suffering are the instincts, which humans share with animals. There cannot be a better world, until people recognize the damage done by instincts and until the control of the instincts is eliminated and replaced by the rational concept of global equality and global equal rights.
