Overcoming Us vs. Them

I think this is going to be the next big challenge in social tech:

Contact: The consequences of growing up amid diversity just discussed bring us to the effects of prolonged contact on Us/Theming. In the 1950s the psychologist Gordon Allport proposed “contact theory.” Inaccurate version: bring Us-es and Thems together (say, teenagers from two hostile nations in a summer camp), animosities disappear, similarities start to outweigh differences, everyone becomes an Us. More accurate version: put Us and Thems together under narrow circumstances and something sort of resembling that happens, but you can also blow it and worsen things.

Some of the effective narrower circumstances: each side has roughly equal numbers; everyone’s treated equally and unambiguously; contact is lengthy and on neutral territory; there are “superordinate” goals where everyone works together on a meaningful task (say, summer campers turning a meadow into a soccer field).

How do we bring people who disagree back together? Technology is really good at getting people to do things which are individually gratifying so how do we encourage individuals to do something which is individually difficult but will have a strong positive effect on society?

It kind of assumes good faith actors too doesn't it? One person participating in bad faith just to jerk around the "Thems" would worsen things.

>“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.”

"Only a sith deals in absolutes"

I love phrases like these. Not sure what to call them but they're fun. Recursive contradictions?

This is where countries with some sort of mandatory service may have us beat. And maybe it explains why American policy was so focused after the big national wars. I don't think there's a better way to force camaraderie. But then it becomes Us vs Them on the other side of the border.

Its just a False Dilemma.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

More an artifact of our language and people wanting to condense/compress ideas down too far.