Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Those who relate ethnic supremacism (is that a word??) to animal behavior are, I think, not too far off. Hunting animals who travel in packs like wolves and lions have an overwhelming instinct to protect the survival of their own pack. That means that unless food is overly abundant because of a good year, they have to guard their territory against other packs of the same species.
We, being descended from hunter-gatherers that lived in packs, have inherited that instinct. Our definition of a "pack" has increased over the millennia to the point that human communities as large as 20,000 often function well without much formal government. But we tend to regard people who look quite a bit different from us as belonging to another pack.
Some of us regard the strangers with interest and want to know more about the place they came from, their customs, their culture, their art and science. Others regard them as competitors for scarce resources. Easy to tell which ones are the wave of the future.
We, being descended from hunter-gatherers that lived in packs, have inherited that instinct. Our definition of a "pack" has increased over the millennia to the point that human communities as large as 20,000 often function well without much formal government. But we tend to regard people who look quite a bit different from us as belonging to another pack.
Some of us regard the strangers with interest and want to know more about the place they came from, their customs, their culture, their art and science. Others regard them as competitors for scarce resources. Easy to tell which ones are the wave of the future.