Laurene Powell Jobs

“There’s been a significant breakdown in Americans’ ability to speak to one another and to hear one another. That’s become much worse in the last three years, where there’s been full license given to the otherization of our neighbor.” -- Laurene Powell Jobs

My wife just alerted me to the NY Times interview with Laurene Powell Jobs. My fabulous new grandson Calvin's fabulous Momma Eileen posted the above video on FB this morning.

"I'm Calvin, and I approved this message."

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I am reminded of another fine book in my stash that I cited a few years back, of some topical relevance to the foregoing:

TRIBALISM 
The most straightforward cause of strife on the new pastures is tribalism, the (often unapologetic) favoring of in-group members over out-group members. This is going to be a very short section, because there’s little doubt that humans have tribalistic tendencies that promote conflict. Insofar as there is a debate about our tribalistic tendencies, it’s not about whether we have them, but about why. In my view, the evidence strongly suggests that we have innate tribalistic tendencies. Once again, anthropological reports indicate that in-group favoritism and ethnocentrism are human universals. Young children identify and favor in-group members based on linguistic cues. Reaction-time tests (IATs) reveal widespread negative associations with out-group members in adults, children, and even monkeys. People readily favor in-group members over out-group members, even when the groups are arbitrarily defined and temporary. People readily replace racial classification schemes with alternative coalitional classification schemes, but they don’t do the same for classification by gender, as predicted by evolutionary accounts of human coalitional psychology. And there is a neurotransmitter, oxytocin, that makes people selectively favor in-group members. Finally, all biological accounts of the evolution of cooperation with non-kin involve favoring one’s cooperation partners (most or all of whom belong to one’s group) over others. Indeed, some mathematical models indicate that altruism within groups could not have evolved without hostility between groups.

In short, we appear to be tribalistic by nature, and, in any case, we are certainly tribalistic. This is bound to cause problems— though by no means insurmountable problems— when human groups attempt to live together. 

COOPERATION, ON WHAT TERMS? 
Tribalism makes it hard for groups to get along, but group-level selfishness is not the only obstacle. Cross-cultural studies reveal that different human groups have strikingly different ideas about the appropriate terms of cooperation, about what people should and should not expect from one another...

Greene, Joshua (2013-10-31). Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (pp. 78-79). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

Also goes to recent topical interests of mine such as "Deliberation Science."

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More to come...