". . . [P]eople’s tendency to define themselves against one another. Imagine two people getting into an argument about some minor political disagreement but, after an hour, ending up taking positions so intransigent that they find themselves on completely opposite sides of some ideological divide — even taking extreme positions they would never embrace under ordinary circumstances, just to show how much they completely reject the other’s points. They start out as moderate social democrats of slightly different flavors; before a few heated hours are over, one has somehow become a Leninist, the other an advocate of the ideas of Milton Friedman. We know this kind of thing can happen in arguments. Bateson suggested such processes can become institutionalized on a cultural level as well. How, he asked, do boys and girls in Papua New Guinea come to behave differently, despite the fact that no one ever explicitly instructs them about how boys and girls are supposed to behave? It’s not just by imitating their elders; it’s also because boys and girls each learn to find the behaviour of the opposite sex distasteful and try to be as little like them as possible. What start as minor learned differences become exaggerated until women come to think of themselves as, and then increasingly actually become, everything that men are not. And, of course, men do the same thing towards women.

Bateson was interested in the psychological processes within societies, but there’s every reason to believe something similar happens between societies as well. People come to define themselves against their neighbours. Urbanites thus become urbane, as barbarians become more barbarous. If ‘national character’ can really be said to exist, it can only be as a result of such schismogenic processes: English people trying to become as little as possible like French, French people as little like Germans, and so on. If nothing else, they will all definitely exaggerate their differences in arguing with one another."

#DavidGraeber #DavidWengorw #DawnOfEverything #schismogenisis

#DavidGraeber #DavidWengorw #DemocracyNow #DawnOfEverything
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JDO28CPAPuM