take it you meant "'we' vs 'them"
I mixed pronouns. Probably 'us vs them' would be the right terms. My fault, anyway.
I'm not entirely sure it's a necessary condition for opposing groups to share some common values in order for them to act-out a tribalistic conflict
You're right here. Two groups having different values doesn't mean that each and every conflict is necessarily caused by that. You have hooligans vs tifosi, there's a difference in values (English vs Italian) but values in this case are irrelevant: the conflict is the usual tribal conflict between sport teams.
The more you get rid of "evil", the more you need to identify another "evil" to fight against and justify your existence (because you are, by definition, the non-'them': when 'them' cease to exist, so do you.)
That's quite a complicated topic. Sometimes the 'us vs them' is just a matter of gradation.
For example: China has become extremely hostile to western influence, mostly because they're afraid that woke influence will screw the country as they've done with western ones. I think that's reasonable. Last week I was reading a debate where one guy asked why China doesn't get some standard phonetic writing as hangul Korean or katakana Japanese or western ones (much more efficient), instead of the traditional writing system where each word has a different symbol. Most of the answers were something like "
we don't need some shitty phonetic writing like western countries, you want that writing, learn some western language instead of Chinese". What I mean is that even though China was hostile to western influence because of a reasonable cause (wokes), at the same time that can translate into simultaneous irrational tribal 'us vs them' behaviours.
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kukuxu (5409)
4 years ago
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And you can add even more layers of complexity to the topic. I remember listening to an interview with Erin Pizzey, and how she was talking about the change in 70s/80s feminism. She talked about how during the 60s/70s every request that feminism had was quickly conceded. That caused that most people who just wanted those requests to be conceded abandonned the movement. "We have reached our goals, I'm moving on". The unforeseen consequence is that people who remained in feminist organizations were the ones that needed psychologically to be part of a conflict. This is how feminism became what it has become. What was originally a conflict with reasonable claims became an 'us vs them' conflict once the requests were conceded and reasonable and sane people moved on, leaving the crazy ones in charge of the movement.
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