Please do not take HN threads further into ideological flamewar or nationalistic flamewar or whatever this is. It's off topic, nasty, and evokes worse. We unbanned you because you'd stopped posting comments that break the site guidelines, which is great—could you please stick to them?
> Please do not take HN threads further into ideological flamewar or nationalistic flamewar or whatever this is.
I appreciate your patience, dang. I genuinely never intended for this to become flamebait. I have no idea why people are so nasty to eachother. I'm not promoting any form of "nationalism" here (especially not living in South Africa or having business there), I just meant to counter the idea that poverty deterministically makes people immoral, with a point that sometimes immorality will make your society poor. Whatever everyone else is talking about is their business, but I honestly don't see how I can participate at the same level of conversation as the parent comment, and not have some risk of people reading way more into it than is necessary. You say "it's nasty", but from my perspective, it's pretty nasty to say that all poor people will just steal your stuff and can't be helped; sounds like supremecism to me, even if it can come from a good place.
"The society has no standards" and "the state is organized around cultural jingoism" are inflammatory statements, not a thoughtful exploration of the root causes of poverty in South Africa. It's important, when talking about painful and divisive topics, not to sling cheap rhetoric like that.
If you're saying that your intention was to defend poor people, I believe you; but this is not the way to express it. You'd need to provide a much more patient explanation than that, and then go over it again to take out any provocations.
Very interesting comment, not because I agree with it, but I think it exposes a classic left vs right wing problem, and that the attitude is applied universally instead of selectively. IMO, the optimal attitude for society would be if everyone was "left-wing" (generous, forgiving,...) toward others/out-groups and "right-wing" (demanding, requesting responsibility,...) toward yourself/in-group.
> IMO, the optimal attitude for society would be if everyone was "left-wing" (generous, forgiving,...) toward others/out-groups and "right-wing" (demanding, requesting responsibility,...) toward yourself/in-group.
That's rather odd, because if anything I'd say the opposite is best - you can trust your ingroup to have similar values to you, and thus can afford to forgive them/be generous without being taken advantage of. On the other hand, outgroups WON'T share your values, and being more generous to them than to the ingroup is just self destructive.
And I would have thought both of those were common sense, too.
It's interesting, looking at chimps and bonobos it appears that both of those general strategies is employable, with bonobos being stranger friendly and chimps being stranger averse: https://www.sapiens.org/evolution/bonobos-meal-sharing/. Not exactly the same as what is being talked about here, but doesn't seem far off - note the mention even of bonobos preferentially sharing with strangers over friends and family.
Well, I think my optimum is just a hypothetical high-trust society in which everyone strives to be self-sufficient but gets supported in case of failure by others. Of course, this is not how the world works, which is more what you are describing. I don't think that is best though, from the perspective of humanity.
> high-trust society in which everyone strives to be self-sufficient but gets supported in case of failure by others.
But that IS how the world works! Or at least how parts of it have worked and still work. Puritan settlements in the Americas, Mormon communities today, arguably the Nordic countries, other closely knit peoples and communities throughout history... It's just that that comes from favoring the ingroup, not the outgroup.
I think when you remove ingroup and outgroup and just keep the argument for the attitude toward yourself/others it becomes more obvious what I mean. Otherwise it really depends on where you draw the boundary for the ingroup (e.g. your close family)/outgroup (e.g. your neighbors) which leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
I guess my view is that it's easier (and has fewer negative side effects) to get people to care about others by expanding their ingroup than by making them care about their outgroup.
