/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

I often hear that humans are hard-wired to care more about ingroups than outgroups. This is often used by reactionaries to justify capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, racially homogenous ethnocentric societies, etc, but I found that this entire way of thinking falls apart very quickly for many reasons.

1. It's spatial but not temporal. Due to physical proximity and consanguinity, A man might care more about his children than about his neighbors. A man might care more about his grandchildren than his neighbors. He might even live long enough to see the birth of his great-grandchildren. But can it really be said that he cares more about his 10x-great-grandchildren, totally potential people who haven't been born yet, in the far future, more than his own neighbors, merely because of consanguinity?

2. The spatial nature of it is already dissolved by capitalism. We live in a world where anyone can potentially migrate anywhere at any time. Sure there are legal barriers, but there is also a way around those legal barriers, and even in countries with strict immigration restrictions, there is a constant exposure to foreigners through tourism, international media, trade, etc. If the people aren't arriving, their commodities and media are.

3. The ethnocentricism and homogeneity is already absurd on its face. For example we see people who are clearly not white engaging in white supremacy, partly because they have been brainwashed to dehumanize themselves, but also because the definition of what constitutes "whiteness" has been stretched to such goatse'd proportions as to be unable to return to its original narrow definition, causing the concept itself to dissolve and diffuse, that is, to self-sublate, into absurdity.

4. There is no putting the genie of technological development back in the bottle. Even if resource scarcity and climate change cause us to take many steps backwards, we will develop alternate "tech-trees" with whatever resources we have left, or go extinct branching into new potentials even as the situation becomes increasingly unfavorable for our present unsustainable way of life.

5. Interdependence of nations and peoples is now so obvious and so powerful that there is a strong case to make, viz. the imperial boomerang, that not caring about non-proximates (i.e. foreigners, people of different faiths, people of different ethnicities, people of different ideologies etc.) constitutes not caring about oneself. Anything "bad" your government does to foreigners in your name with your tax dollars will come back to bite either you or your children. Think of how many orphans grow up hating the United States because of US foreign policy. There is a huge incentive to be anti-imperialist not just out of pure empathy for The Other, but out of self preservation for the Future Self.

I'm sure there's other places I could have gone with this, but that's just off the top of my head.