This short article, How Evolutionary Psychology Illuminates Everyday Life, by Glenn Geher, highlights a few common idioms which have to do with group relations. These two are particularly interesting:
4. Eye for an eye.
I’ve written extensively that we are giving, altruistic species (see Geher, 2015). But we’re not dumb. The nature of altruism in a species like ours is conditional – we tend to help in a strategic manner. We tend to help people who have helped us in the past. Helping others who don’t help you leads to a scenario of possible exploitation, and evolutionary forces would have selected against such non-reciprocated helping (see Trivers, 1971). Similarly, it’s not good social policy to be a punching bag. If you let someone walk all over you and don’t retaliate, then (a) that person learns that he or she can continue to be a jerk to you and (b) others come to see you as exploitable. The whole “eye for an eye” things helps us understand all of these dynamics.
2. Tail between your legs.
Across many species, dominance hierarchies exist in social contexts (see Geher, 2014 for a summary of this concept). And lots of non-verbal behavior is associated with dominance-related contexts. When two dogs squabble for dominance, the loser takes on a unique and highly observable posture – it walks away with its tail between its legs. This is a signal that it has tried to achieve a higher status position than it really warranted – and is now signaling all this information to the others. When a person makes a bold social move that fails, you can see it in his or her face – as if he or she is a dog walking with its tail between its legs.
It’s easy enough to apply these terms to the anti-White/pro-jew zeitgeist. In the wake of the last big squabble for dominance seven decades ago the non-reciprocating eye-for-an-eye jerks have dominated and exploited the dumb punching bag losers, flaunting “our” altruistic norms not only without retaliation but with Whites instead tucking tail.
This way of describing the psychology seems more illuminating than the “pathological altruism” rhetoric I’ve been criticizing recently.