Research (Sapolsky etc) says being at the bottom of a hierarchy is stressful, and this is true, but only within an impedance matched band. In a bank office party, a teller making 50k will experience stress talking to the investment banker making 500k. 1-point band on a log scale.
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Think of society as a matrix of class and culture. Some notion of functional harmony is both possible and effective within a sing,e cell. Across 2 adjacent cells you get theater or superior/subordinate dynamics. With 3 cells band you basically get confusion.
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You can do ceremonies across 3 or more bands but no real problem solving is possible beyond a theatrical pass-me-the-salt level. Again note that we’re talking fundamental breaks, not cosmetic ones like using the wrong fork or missing a cultural reference.
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Cosmetic breaks are irrelevant. They make for social awkwardness and cringe, but don’t really get in the way. One side can learn the other’s culture of manners. You can fake knowledge of references. But deep protocol breaks can’t be smoothed away that way.
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“Split check evenly” is a handshake that only works when people have matched standards of what amount of money is in the indifference band (modulo individual differences like a Scroogey millionaire who pinches pennies). You can’t fix it with a finishing school teaching fork use.
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A huge proportion of culture war problems today are due to pretending deep protocol problems are either cosmetic or a matter of morals/ethics. Hence misdirected efforts at civil debate etc.
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I’m not sure what the solution is. But it’s clear what happens when the problem is mischaracterized. You have the human social equivalents of electric arcing, short circuits, fires, etc. The *best* case outcome is a blown fuse and a blackout.
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A useful starting point might be to distinguish 2 kinds of social mobility: life situation mobility (relocating across classes and/or cultures) versus “tourist” mobility (being able to visit/problem solve across “harmony cells” so to speak).
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I included an unnecessary Myers-Briggs poison pill specifically to ward off a particular subculture of harmony seekers
The opposite of my temperament, Introverted Feeling (Fi) btw, has what they think is a solution: causing what I think of as “values scenes”https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1322674148984844288 …
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MBTI language is convenient but not necessary to think this through. It has a positive side-effect of turning off statistics-rationalists If Fe is futile harmony theater, Fi is an irregular verb: “I’m behaving with integrity, you’re moral posturing, he’s causing a useless scene”
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A “values scene” is somebody breaking a harmony theater (often accising others of hypocrisy) and strutting around causing a scene, while sermonizing about how they’re not going to compromise their integrity. It’s as futile as the harmony theater.https://youtu.be/Uwapf5DnUrs?t=170 …
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End of conversation
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