I was catching up with an amazing college buddy recently, and like good friends generally do, we got off the normal conversation path of “so what have you been up to?” and diverged into a wild range of topics, one being equal rights. She was amazed how many minorities didn’t agree with gay marriage, mostly because of the mirrored marriage laws that were applied to minorities in the not-so-distant past. She asked my opinion, and I agreed that it was incredibly disappointing that people would want to impose the same type of oppression on another group- but unlike my friend, I was not shocked.
Simply put, humans suffer from pack mentality.
Religion, tribes, groups, teams, clubs, ethnicity, race, family, clan, friends, fraternities, sororities, etc.
Call it what you will, but it all boils down to one thing: A Pack.
Back in the day when humans were just glorified gorillas out in the bush- the only natural protection we had was our disgusting tasting meat, and our gigantic brains… and like the phrase goes, two brains are better than one. So, it only made sense that humans joined together to create safety in numbers, creating packs. Since humans were built so smart, we quickly learned how to eliminate all natural predators. Just like a bored housewife, humans started to create their own drama to help stimulate these giant brains which were formed as a defense mechanism.
Dude, my pack is hella cooler than your pack.
Which essentially is the center of all human related conflict.
The Olympics? A friendly my pack is cooler than your pack.
Middle East Conflict? A long, bloody, and sad version of my pack is cooler than your pack.
No matter how you slice it, people are constantly trying to belong to one group and push away from another, and it’s usually due to the most inane reasons:
That pack doesn’t look like me. That pack worships something I don’t. That pack has different relationships than I do. That pack didn’t live where I lived. That pack doesn’t eat the food that I do. That pack listens different music than I do. That pack is louder than I am. That pack. That pack. That pack. That pack.
If our brains weren’t developed for defense in our primal years, I think human relationships would be incredibly different.