This dude was definitely just writing entries to balance the books without cashflow or contracts and every transaction that was revenue was intergroup and no consolidation ever took place

I see it in contemporary times as pretty ordinary as a social phenomenon, intergroup frictions flaring up again, happens all the time. One of the problems with Jews being one foot in/one food out of the world, half Israeli half diasporic, possessing divergent interests and values

<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"> <p>Over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle had some bars about the kids these days: “Young men have strong passions, and tend to gratify them indiscriminately,” the great philosopher wrote in <em>Rhetoric</em>. “They are changeable and fickle in their desires, which are violent while they last, but quickly over… They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Later in the same chapter, he had some words for their elders: “They are small-minded, because they have been humbled by life: their desires are set upon nothing more exalted or unusual than what will help them to keep alive.”</p> <p>He could have been reading my email. </p> <p>A striking number of my readers—older, almost uniformly—skipped past the data entirely and went straight to character: younger generations complain too much. They spend recklessly. They don’t sacrifice. They <em>whine</em>.</p> <p>What was notable wasn’t the anger. It was the precision of the deflection. No one challenged the <a href="federalreserve.gov/releases/…">Federal Reserve data</a> showing that Baby Boomers control roughly 52% of U.S. household wealth while representing about 20% of the population. No one argued that Millennials are, in fact, thriving. The response to a structural argument about wealth and power was, almost invariably, a moral argument about character.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" data-src="fortune.com/img-assets/wp-co…" alt="" class="lazyload wp-image-4505791" src="fortune.com/img-assets/wp-co…" width="1024" height="683" original-width="1200" original-height="800"></figure> <p><a href="statista.com/statistics/1376…" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a>That pattern has a name in psychology. And understanding it—alongside what actually makes Boomers different from every dominant class that preceded them—tells you more about where America is stuck than any balance sheet. Is it whiny to try to understand this psychology, or is it a form of self-knowledge?</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="two-kinds-of-threat--and-why-theyre-not-symmetrica">Two kinds of threats—and why they’re not symmetrical</h2> <p>In 2023, researchers <a href="pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?ter…]">Stéphane Francioli</a>, <a href="pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?ter…]">Felix Danbold</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?ter…]" target="_blank">,</a> and <a href="pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?ter…]" target="_blank">Michael North</a> published a <a href="pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…" target="_blank">peer-reviewed study</a> in </span><em>Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin </em>examining precisely what makes Boomers and Millennials hostile toward each other. The findings map almost perfectly onto the reader mail in this reporter’s inbox.<a href="pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a></p> <p>Both generations express genuine animosity toward the other. But the <em>nature</em> of that animosity is fundamentally different, and the difference is not incidental.</p> <p>Millennials’ hostility toward Boomers is driven primarily by what <a href="http://chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/oscarybarra.lsa.umich.edu/Ma…">intergroup threat theorists</a> call <strong><a href="oar.princeton.edu/rt4ds/file…">realistic threat</a></strong>—specifically, the fear that Boomers’ delayed transmission of power hampers their life prospects. The Federal Reserve data on housing, wealth, and debt give that fear its material texture. Millennials aren’t upset about Boomer values. They’re upset about Boomer advantages, and the structural conditions that have made those advantages self-perpetuating.</p> <p>Boomers’ hostility toward Millennials runs in the opposite direction. Their animosity is driven primarily by <em>symbolic threat</em>—perceived conflict over culture, values, and worldview. Not economics or data. The feeling that a generation coming up behind them is challenging something essential about what America is, what hard work means, what success is supposed to look like.</p> <p>This asymmetry is a predictable feature of dominant-group psychology, older even than Aristotle. When you hold the material advantages, you don’t feel materially threatened — because you aren’t. What you feel threatened by is the <em>narrative</em> that your advantages might not be entirely earned. That is a different kind of threat that produces a different kind of defense.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="the-meritocracy-is-the-message">The meritocracy is the message</h2> <p>One word I used in a previous headline was particularly triggering: “hoarding,” as in, hoarding wealth, hoarding real estate, hoarding political power and opportunity. Seen through the lens of psychology, this verb begs the question of what Boomers are actually being asked to defend.</p> <p>It isn’t just wealth. It’s the story they’ve told about wealth—that it arrived through discipline, sacrifice and superior decision-making. And many vivid stories I’ve been told show that story isn’t entirely wrong. Many Boomers did work hard. Many did save diligently. But the story has a significant omission: they also came of age during the single most favorable economic environment in American history. Postwar manufacturing at its apex. Housing that cost 2x or 3x annual income, not 10x. Defined-benefit pensions, subsidized public universities, and a tax structure that rewarded wages as much as assets are all features of history, not current economic life.</p> <p>Researchers who study <em><a href="http://chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-a…">system justification theory</a></em>—the psychological tendency to defend existing social arrangements as fair and legitimate, even when they aren’t—have found that this impulse is strongest among people who have benefited most from the system. The more you’ve gained from an arrangement, the more motivated you are to believe the arrangement is just. Not because you’re dishonest, but because the alternative — accepting that luck and timing played a decisive role in your success — is genuinely destabilizing to the self.</p> <p>A fair objection deserves airing here: a framework in which both agreement and angry disagreement confirm the thesis risks explaining everything and therefore nothing. If every defensive email is just “system justification in action,” the argument becomes unfalsifiable. That’s why the asymmetry documented by Francioli and his colleagues matters. The claim isn’t that Boomers got angry—anyone might. It’s that the anger ran almost exclusively through one channel (character and values) while leaving the other (the data) untouched, exactly as intergroup threat theory predicts for a materially dominant group. Had readers attacked the numbers and ignored the character question, the theory would have been wrong. But they didn’t do that.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="not-just-any-privileged-class">Not just any privileged class</h2> <p>Here is where the Boomer defensiveness becomes harder to dismiss—and, strangely, easier to understand.</p> <p>Every dominant group in history has reached for the same psychological toolkit. Roman senators, English landowners and mid-century American corporate aristocracies — all told versions of the same story: <em>we have what we have because we earned it</em>. System justification is ancient. Generational condescension goes back to the Greeks.</p> <p>But Boomers are not simply the latest iteration of a recurring historical pattern. The specific configuration of advantages they accumulated — and the mechanisms by which they accumulated them—has no real precedent. This matters, because it means the defensiveness isn’t just psychologically understandable. It’s also, in a structural sense, more consequential than prior versions of the same reflex.</p> <p>Start with the scale. Boomers hold an estimated $85 trillion in wealth—not merely more than prior American generations at the same life stage, but more than any cohort in recorded economic history by a vast multiple. Many of them would seemingly like to think they earned this simply by working harder than anyone who came before, but they entered the housing and equity markets just before both began 40-year appreciation cycles, and they were the largest generation in American history to do so. They didn’t just accumulate wealth—they sat on top of two of the most powerful asset-appreciation engines in modern economic history during their prime earning years. <a href="smartasset.com/financial-adv…" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a></p> <p>Then there’s the democratic dimension, which gets almost no attention. Previous dominant classes held power through class, race or institutional control—not raw democratic headcount. Boomers were the largest voting bloc [by eligibility or participation?] in American history for nearly four consecutive decades, from roughly 1978 until the mid-2010s. That means the policies that shaped housing markets, the tax treatment of capital gains, the defunding of public universities and the dismantling of defined-benefit pensions were debated and passed during a period when Boomers were the decisive electoral constituency. They didn’t just benefit from the system. They voted for it repeatedly at the precise moment when their demographic weight and financial self-interest were in perfect alignment. No prior privileged class had that combination of democratic legitimacy <em>and</em> self-interested policymaking available simultaneously at this scale.</p> <p>Finally, consider what the gap actually looks like on the other side. In most prior periods of wealth concentration, the non-wealthy simply had less. What’s structurally novel now is that younger generations don’t just have less wealth—they carry the majority of the debt. Federal Reserve data shows Millennial and Gen <a href="fortune.com/company/twitter/" target="_blank">X</a> mortgage debt is nearly double that of Boomers in absolute terms. More than a third of all student loan borrowers are Millennials, and the <a href="stlouisfed.org/on-the-econom…">St. Louis Fed explicitly documents</a> a generational “clear increase in debt holdings” for younger generations. “Specifically, both Gen Xers and millennials held more debt than Baby Boomers.” Student debt—which exploded during the very decades of Boomer political dominance—has no real historical parallel in prior generational transitions. The floor has been actively lowered, not just the ceiling raised.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="the-cloaking-mechanism">The lattés and avocado toast</h2> <p>There’s another concept in social psychology called <em>motivated invisibility</em> — the tendency of dominant groups to render their advantages structurally invisible, not through explicit denial but through reframing.<a href="journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.…" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a></p> <p>The most durable reframe in Boomer wealth discourse is the pivot to younger-generation spending behavior: avocado toast, streaming subscriptions, the failure to delay gratification. One reader deployed this argument almost reflexively—a near-word-for-word echo of criticisms that have circulated for a decade. “Wealth is NOT a fixed amount,” they wrote to me. “Want some wealth? Go earn it and save it and accumulate it, rather than always upgrading to the latest iPhone and swilling lattés and avocado toast.” The kicker on the email brought it back to that other epithet: “you’re a whiny turd who figured out who to string some sentences together and vie for cliques.”</p> <p>But the spending-habits argument is durable precisely because it accomplishes what the data cannot: it relocates the problem from structure to individual. If the gap is about <em>choices</em>, then no one needs to feel uncomfortable about <em>conditions</em>. The system is fine. The kids just need to cut back on lattés.</p> <p>This is system justification in action, and it is not unique to Boomers, or to this moment. Research consistently shows that members of dominant groups across race, class, and—now, generation—reach for the same mechanism when their advantages are named. <a href="pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"></a></p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading" id="the-honest-caveat">The honest caveat</h2> <p>Serious coverage of this topic requires the acknowledgment </p> <p>Serious coverage of this topic requires the acknowledgment that Boomers are not monolithic. Per a <a href="pewresearch.org/short-reads/…">Pew Research Center analysis</a>, Boomer households collectively held $77 trillion in 2022—and the top 10% of those households held 71% of it. A white-collar Boomer who bought a San Francisco home in 1985 and maxed a 401(k) is in a categorically different position from a working-class Boomer who rented their whole life and watched their pension disappear.</p> <p>The structural argument is real—but the villain of this story, to the extent there is one, is not a generation. It is a cohort within a generation: college-educated, propertied, politically engaged, and concentrated in expensive coastal metros. They shaped the policy environment in their own interest during the decades when their demographic weight gave them the power to do so. And they are, not coincidentally, the people most likely to be reading <em>Fortune</em>—and writing back.</p> <p>The scolding reflex, it turns out, doesn’t even stop at the generational boundary. It operates within the generation, too. One Boomer reader described protesting the Vietnam War at 18 and feeling “angst about selling out”—”then I grew up,” he wrote. He told me he isn’t rich, but he “worked my way up to making enough to make sure my kids weren’t hungry.” His verdict on his peers was harsher than anything Millennials sent me: “I am not rich, but I am not complaining. And I can’t believe that so many in my generation of Flower Children are such losers.” The character argument, in other words, is not really about age. It is a portable script, and it gets deployed downward—at whoever has less—regardless of birth year.</p> <p>Another reader put it more cleanly than most: “The bigger issue is not old versus young. It is a broken American system that has made housing unaffordable, healthcare unaffordable, retirement insecure, and work feel unstable for nearly everyone.” That framing is neither wrong nor incompatible with the structural argument about how we ended up in a place where everyone feels stuck, and like everyone else is whining about it.</p> <p>That is a harder emotional position than defensiveness. It requires disaggregating two things that Boomer identity has long held together: the real effort and the real tailwind. It requires acknowledging that you can deserve what you earned and still have been given conditions that made earning easier — conditions that were then, through the very political power that prosperity enabled, systematically withdrawn from the people who came after.</p> <p>Jon from the Channel Islands sees an even larger force gathering behind the generational one. The Boomer/Millennial wealth debate, he argued, is being overtaken by a capitalism-and-AI-driven concentration that will make the current gap look modest—wealth flowing not from young to old but from nearly everyone to the owners of the machines. The combatants in the generational war, in his telling, are arguing over a shoreline that is about to be redrawn entirely: “It is like they are scratching their heads wondering why the water has suddenly drained out of the bay,” he wrote, “oblivious to the tsunami that is coming in shortly, to swallow them up.”</p> <p>Only a few readers asked the question that none of the angry emails even approached. My favorite: “How do we build a country where younger people can rise without older people being discarded?” That is a political question, not a generational one. The answer isn’t unknowable, but the people with the most power to shape it have spent the better part of a decade arguing about whether the question is fair.</p> <p>This story was originally featured on <a href="fortune.com/2026/06/14/why-a…" target="_blank">Fortune.com</a></p> fortune.com/2026/06/14/why-a…

I don’t think you understand how IQ works my guy. It’s a intergroup comparative analysis. These numbers don’t make any sense. And that’s before you look into how they came by them.

People mistake Dunbar's Number as a Group size and not a Personal Relationship Capacity. Even in the Stone Age, there were Trade Networks and intergroup Dynamics. Two people aren't going to know the same 150 people. It'll be more like a Venn Diagram of people between them.

A CONFERENCE AT THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT A significant conference will be held at the European Parliament on Wednesday, June 17, 2026, from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM CEST. This event, taking place in Room WEISS S4.3, aims to bring attention to the "Silent Suffering of the Amhara." The conference will delve into the harsh realities of war, ethnic violence, and the ongoing persecution faced by Christians in Ethiopia. This gathering offers a crucial platform for dialogue and understanding concerning these critical humanitarian issues. The distinguished keynote address will be delivered by Prince Asfa-Wossen Asserate, a notable member of Ethiopia's Imperial Family. Prince Asserate is recognized as a respected scholar and political analyst, bringing a wealth of knowledge and insight to the conference. The event is proudly hosted by Bert-Jan Ruissen and Tomislav Sokol, both Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). They serve as Co-Chair and Vice-Chair of the Intergroup on Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB), underscoring the importance of this discussion. This conference, hosted with the support of the European Centre for Law and Justice, provides an essential opportunity to learn about the challenges faced by the Amhara people and Christians in Ethiopia. Attendees will have the chance to witness the discussions live, enabling a broader audience to engage with the critical issues being addressed. The gathering at the European Parliament signifies a formal commitment to shedding light on these important matters and encouraging constructive solutions.

Lasko et al., 2022, Social Neuroscience. Neural mechanisms of intergroup exclusion and retaliatory aggression. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…

Zhang et al., 2019, eLife. Oxytocin promotes coordinated out-group attack during intergroup conflict in humans. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…

Sources. Wood et al., 2025, PNAS. Female fertility and infant survivorship increase following lethal intergroup aggression and territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.25…

A third useful source is a 2022 Social Neuroscience paper on intergroup exclusion and retaliatory aggression. The paper links aggression toward out-group members with activity in the ventral striatum, a reward-related brain region. That adds another piece.

In an intergroup attacker-defender game, oxytocin helped attacker groups coordinate more effective attacks against out-groups. That matters in our context because propaganda is often not only about persuasion. It is also about synchronization.

Another useful source is a 2019 eLife paper on oxytocin and intergroup conflict. Oxytocin is often described as a “love hormone,” but the paper shows a more complicated picture. It did not simply make people peaceful.

One source worth looking at is a 2025 PNAS paper on Ngogo chimpanzees. The authors studied lethal intergroup aggression, territorial expansion, female fertility, and infant survivorship in wild chimpanzees. We should be careful here. Chimpanzees are not humans.

i hate nostalgia-posts but intergroup performances used to be not Slop….

Intergroup comparisons of oral lesions in HIV-positive South Africans popline.org/node/278593?v=13…

Suicidal Empathy as an Adaptation to Conquest: Assimilation, Survival, and the Civilizational Management of Outsiders Abstract This essay examines the provocative idea that “suicidal empathy” may be an ancient human adaptation to conquest, invasion, and intergroup competition. The phrase is imprecise and politically charged, but it points toward a real historical problem: societies must decide whether to exclude outsiders, destroy them, be destroyed by them, or assimilate them. Across human history, successful civilizations often survived not by maintaining absolute tribal closure but by selectively incorporating former enemies, migrants, soldiers, captives, and frontier peoples. This adaptive openness can look self-destructive in the short run, especially when outsiders are violent or culturally alien. Yet in many cases, integration turned enemies into subjects, subjects into citizens, and barbarians into defenders of the very civilization they once threatened. The argument developed here is not that empathy toward invaders is always good, nor that conquered peoples consciously evolved a morality of self-abnegation. Rather, the thesis is narrower: humans possess an unusual capacity to reclassify outsiders as insiders, and this trait likely survived because it improved individual and group survival under conditions of conquest. The negative modern form of this trait appears when empathy becomes indiscriminate, detached from reciprocal obligation, and hostile to the survival of the host society itself. I. The Problem: Why Would a Civilization Invite Outsiders In? At first glance, the idea seems insane. If a settled civilization is threatened by nearby “barbarians,” why would any faction inside the civilization invite them in? Why not exclude them completely? The answer is that complete exclusion is often impossible. Frontier peoples trade, migrate, raid, intermarry, serve as mercenaries, seek asylum, and exploit political divisions within settled states. The border is rarely a wall; it is usually a membrane. Once this is recognized, incorporation becomes a strategic option rather than a sentimental one. A civilization facing a dangerous neighboring population generally has four choices: annihilate them, repel them indefinitely, submit to them later under worse conditions, or admit some of them under rules that make assimilation possible. The fourth strategy is risky, but it has often been attractive because it converts external threat into internal manpower. A hostile people outside the wall may become a military colony, a tax base, a buffer population, or a class of frontier soldiers inside the imperial order. This is the key reframing: what looks like “suicidal empathy” may originally have been a form of preemptive assimilation. The host society accepts some outsiders not because it has forgotten self-preservation, but because it hopes to domesticate danger. Roman history is the central example. Rome did not become great by preserving an ethnically pure citizen body. It expanded citizenship, incorporated Italian allies, enfranchised provincial elites, recruited non-Romans into the army, and eventually extended citizenship to nearly all free inhabitants of the empire under Caracalla’s Antonine Constitution in 212 CE. Roman identity was not simply blood descent. It was law, service, language, hierarchy, military loyalty, and participation in imperial institutions. The Roman state repeatedly turned outsiders into Romans, or at least into people with a stake in Rome’s continuation. (Illinois Experts) Yet this strategy had a dark edge. Late Rome also depended increasingly on federated barbarian groups, or foederati, who could be allies, soldiers, semi-autonomous settlers, and eventually power brokers. The system did not simply “fail because Rome was too empathetic.” That is too crude. But it illustrates the structural danger: when incorporation outruns institutional absorption, the outsider is no longer assimilated by the civilization; the civilization becomes dependent on armed outsiders who retain separate leadership and bargaining power. (Wikipedia) Thus the problem is not empathy versus hardness. The problem is whether empathy is coupled to assimilation, discipline, reciprocity, and institutional confidence. II. The Evolutionary Substrate: Male Lineage Collapse and the Violence of Group Competition The user’s intuition about a prehistoric male genetic bottleneck points toward a real finding, though the timing needs correction. The commonly discussed Y-chromosome bottleneck is not usually dated to 20,000 years ago; major studies place the relevant collapse in male lineage diversity in the post-Neolithic period, roughly several thousand years ago. Karmin et al. identified a striking reduction in Y-chromosome diversity that coincided with major cultural changes, and later work by Zeng, Aw, and Feldman modeled how competition between patrilineal kin groups could sharply reduce Y-chromosomal diversity without requiring a comparable collapse in total population. (PMC) The significance is brutal. Y-chromosomes track paternal lineages. If Y diversity collapses while mitochondrial diversity does not collapse in the same way, the implication is that many male lines vanished while female lines continued. This does not prove a simple story of “invaders killed the men and took the women,” but it is consistent with a world in which male-male group competition, patrilineal clan warfare, elite polygyny, and conquest produced enormous reproductive inequality among men. Zeng et al.’s model specifically argues that patrilineal kin-group competition can produce a dramatic loss of Y-chromosome diversity through “cultural hitchhiking,” where successful male lineages expand with successful social groups. (PMC) This matters for the psychology of survival. In repeated episodes of conquest, the individuals most likely to survive were not always the bravest resisters. They were often those able to read the new hierarchy, submit when necessary, intermarry, translate, bargain, switch allegiance, and protect children under changed power conditions. This does not mean women “evolved empathy for invaders” in a simplistic genetic sense. That would be overclaiming. But it is plausible that human beings, especially those exposed to violent group replacement, benefited from psychological flexibility: the ability to attach, appease, imitate, and eventually identify with a dominant outside group. Such flexibility would have had individual survival value. At scale, it also created the raw material for multiethnic civilization. III. Empathy as Reclassification: From Stranger to Insider The central human capacity is not generic kindness. It is social reclassification. Humans can decide that yesterday’s enemy is today’s husband, patron, commander, client, godfather, king, emperor, or co-religionist. This is extraordinary. Most animals have relatively fixed in-group recognition systems. Humans, by contrast, can expand or contract the moral circle through symbols, rituals, law, religion, language, dress, oath, and shared danger. This capacity helps explain how small kin groups became large-scale societies. Cultural group selection theories argue that human cooperation expanded because groups developed norms, institutions, punishment systems, and shared beliefs that enabled cooperation among non-kin. Richerson and colleagues argue that culturally transmitted institutions can organize cooperation at scales that ordinary kinship and reciprocity alone cannot explain. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment) Henrich and related cultural-evolutionary work similarly emphasizes that human cooperation is not simply hardwired altruism. It is mediated by institutions, norms, markets, religions, prestige systems, and punishment. Fairness toward strangers varies across societies and correlates with market integration and world religions, suggesting that large-scale prosociality is heavily culturally shaped rather than merely genetic. (WIRED) This is where the “suicidal empathy” thesis becomes more sophisticated. The relevant trait is not a death wish. It is the ability to override narrow tribal hostility in order to enter a larger cooperative order. That trait may look suicidal from the perspective of the old tribe. But from the perspective of the individual, the lineage, or the emerging civilization, it may be adaptive. A Gaul who becomes Roman may be betraying an older identity. But his descendants may inherit roads, law, trade, military careers, citizenship, urban life, and imperial protection. A steppe warrior absorbed into a Chinese dynasty may cease to be purely steppe, but his family may gain office, literacy, and status. A conquered provincial elite who adopts the conqueror’s language may preserve local influence better than one who dies in futile revolt. Civilization depends on this alchemy: turning defeated outsiders into participants. IV. War, Civilizational Scale, and the Efficiency of Ideological Competition Once assimilation becomes possible, competition shifts from tribe-versus-tribe to system-versus-system. A purely tribal order competes through descent groups. A civilizational order competes through institutions. Anyone can become Roman, at least eventually. Anyone can become Muslim. Anyone can become Christian. Anyone can serve a dynasty. Anyone can adopt an imperial language. This does not mean such systems are egalitarian; they often remain hierarchical, coercive, and violent. But they are more expandable than blood-only tribal systems. Peter Turchin’s work on the evolution of complex societies argues that warfare and intersocietal competition played a major role in the emergence of large-scale institutions. In a 2013 PNAS study, Turchin and colleagues modeled the rise of Old World complex societies and found that models incorporating warfare predicted the historical spread of large-scale societies far better than models based only on agriculture, ecology, and geography. (Peter Turchin) This supports a hard thesis: large civilizations were not built merely by peace, trade, or moral enlightenment. They were forged by competition. War selected for societies capable of taxation, logistics, bureaucracy, ideology, discipline, and mass cooperation. But war also selected for societies that could absorb manpower. A state that can turn enemies into soldiers has a major advantage over a tribe that can only kill or be killed. Rome again illustrates the principle. The Roman machine was not merely a conquering army; it was an assimilation engine. It created graded pathways into Roman identity: allies, auxiliaries, veterans, municipal elites, provincial aristocrats, citizens. Over time, the distinction between conqueror and conquered blurred. This was not sentimental multiculturalism. It was imperial technology. The same logic appears elsewhere. Empires that define membership ideologically or institutionally can scale. Empires that define membership only by descent hit a ceiling. Universalizing civilizations are dangerous because they are expandable. They can recruit from defeated peoples. They can make the conquered complicit in further conquest. This is why “anyone can become Roman” is not merely a humane slogan. It is a weapon. V. The Barbarian at the Gate: Incorporation as Risk Management The user’s second point is historically important: sometimes admitting nearby barbarians can reduce the chance that they exterminate or overthrow you. If a fraction of the host population advocates admission, trade, intermarriage, or military settlement, this may look treasonous to hardliners. But in some contexts, it is a rational hedge. A hostile frontier group outside the polity has little to lose. A partially assimilated frontier group inside the polity may gain land, status, pay, marriage ties, and legal recognition. These benefits create hostages to civilization. The outsider now has something to preserve. This is the logic of federates, auxiliary troops, buffer tribes, imperial client kings, military colonies, hostage princes, and elite education of conquered youths. A ruler takes the sons of barbarians, teaches them the imperial language, gives them rank, and sends them back as intermediaries. The empire is not merely being nice. It is manufacturing loyalty. But the strategy only works under specific conditions: First, the host civilization must be confident enough to assimilate outsiders faster than outsiders can form a rival internal bloc. Second, incorporation must be conditional. Outsiders are admitted into a structure of obligation, not merely granted benefits without loyalty. Third, the host elite must retain control over military command, taxation, law, and symbolic legitimacy. Fourth, the civilization must preserve a strong core identity into which outsiders are absorbed. When those conditions fail, assimilation reverses direction. The empire does not Romanize the barbarians; the barbarians barbarize the army. The state does not absorb the frontier; the frontier captures the state. This is the structural source of the modern anxiety called “suicidal empathy.” It is not empathy itself that is suicidal. It is empathy without boundary maintenance. VI. Women, Captivity, and the Survival Logic of Identification The most disturbing part of the thesis concerns conquered women. History contains countless episodes in which men were killed, displaced, enslaved, or politically neutralized, while women and children were absorbed into the victorious population. Genetic data cannot narrate these events directly, but sex-biased admixture has been observed in many historical and prehistoric contexts. The broader pattern is plausible: conquest often destroys male coalitions more completely than female reproductive continuity. Under such conditions, psychological resistance may not always be survivable. Captives, wives, concubines, slaves, and hostages often had to learn the language, customs, and emotional expectations of the victorious group. They had to protect children in the world that actually existed, not the world that had been lost. This is where “empathy” becomes morally ambiguous. From the standpoint of the defeated group, identification with the conqueror may look like betrayal. From the standpoint of the woman protecting children, it may be adaptive realism. The capacity to understand the conqueror’s mind may be the difference between death and survival. But we should not romanticize this. Much of this “empathy” was produced under coercion. It was not always free moral expansion. Sometimes it was trauma adaptation. Sometimes it was survival bonding. Sometimes it was forced acculturation. A serious theory must distinguish voluntary cosmopolitanism from coerced identification. Still, the evolutionary implication remains: lineages that could survive conquest by psychological adaptation were more likely to persist than lineages that could only resist to extinction. VII. The Civilizational Version: Universalism as Expansion Technology At the level of civilization, the same mechanism becomes ideological universalism. A tribe says: you are not us. A civilization says: you may become us. A universal empire says: you are already potentially us, provided you submit to our law, god, emperor, language, or ideology. This is a profound shift. Once membership becomes ideological rather than strictly genealogical, conquest becomes more efficient. The conqueror does not need to exterminate every outsider. He can recruit them. The conquered do not need to disappear biologically. They can survive by changing identity. This produces enormous scale advantages. Universalist systems can absorb talent, labor, soldiers, administrators, merchants, and local elites. They can turn diversity into capacity, provided they maintain institutional dominance. This helps explain why civilizations organized around law, religion, or imperial service often outcompeted smaller tribal formations. But universalism has a built-in failure mode. The ideology that allows expansion may also delegitimize self-defense. If the civilization comes to believe that all outsiders are morally equivalent to insiders regardless of loyalty, reciprocity, or assimilation, then universalism mutates into self-dissolution. The adaptive form says: “You may become one of us if you accept the obligations of membership.” The suicidal form says: “We have no right to require you to become one of us, yet we must still grant you the benefits of membership.” The first builds empires. The second dissolves them. VIII. Modern Negative Externalities Modern liberal societies inherit the civilizational universalism of empire, Christianity, Enlightenment law, market society, and human rights ideology. Their moral scope is vast. They extend concern not merely to kin, tribe, city, or nation, but to humanity as such. This has produced real achievements: abolitionism, humanitarian law, refugee protection, religious toleration, civil equality, scientific cosmopolitanism, and global commerce. These are not trivial. They are among the highest achievements of civilization. But the negative externalities are also real. A society may become unable to distinguish between peaceful migrants and hostile entrants, between assimilation and parallel society, between compassion and elite status signaling, between moral universalism and civilizational self-erasure. The danger is especially acute when elites gain prestige from empathy while lower-status citizens bear the costs of disorder, labor competition, crime, cultural fragmentation, or institutional overload. In this sense, “suicidal empathy” is best understood as maladaptive overgeneralization of an otherwise adaptive trait. Empathy evolved and culturally developed to manage social incorporation. It becomes suicidal when it refuses to ask whether incorporation is actually occurring. IX. Conclusion: We Exist Because of This Trait, but It Must Be Governed The core insight is powerful: human beings exist not only because our ancestors fought, but because many of them knew when not to fight. They submitted, negotiated, married, translated, converted, imitated, defected, and assimilated. Some invited outsiders in because exclusion was impossible and incorporation was preferable to annihilation. Others became outsiders and were absorbed by civilizations stronger than their birth tribe. This is not weakness. It is one of humanity’s great survival technologies. Yet the trait is dangerous because it is morally intoxicating. Empathy feels virtuous even when it is strategically stupid. Boundary maintenance feels cruel even when it is necessary. A mature civilization needs both: the capacity to absorb outsiders and the confidence to demand assimilation; the ability to sympathize with enemies and the discipline to defeat those who remain enemies; the openness to expand the moral circle and the judgment to preserve the institutions that make moral universalism possible. The deepest lesson is not that empathy is suicidal. It is that empathy without selection, reciprocity, and assimilation can become suicidal. But empathy disciplined by institutions is one of the reasons civilization exists at all.

The problem here is that IQ is a intergroup metric. The system is based on the average being 100.

Thomas Sowell on Affirmative Action and Intergroup Resentment.

There absolutely is. Acquired prejudice from sustained intergroup hostility is textbook social psychology, look up intergroup threat theory. And this wasn't a few trolls. An ex congresswoman invented a 300-pound Austin and called the jury racist, many leading African American political and celebrity figures jumped in to defend the killer, the NAACP weighed in, a professor published a letter blaming the grieving father for his own son's death, and an activist organization spent a year framing the prosecution as white supremacy, while the Metcalf family got doxxed, death threats, and six swattings. When that volume of racialized abuse comes at a man for a year from people claiming to act on behalf of a group, bitterness toward that group can form where none existed. That's an injury, not a revelation. He spent the year telling white nationalists to get lost and saying it was never about race. And he announced the watermelon line as sarcasm in the same breath: "Let me make something racist up so y'all can go viral." Knowing a stereotype exists isn't holding it. By your logic every scholar who writes about racist tropes has deep-seated hate.

PrissyMissy also believes that Canada, US, Australia, and NZ were countries that existed prior to Europeans settling there. They also don't realize that intergroup competition has been a constant every where throughout history by multiple groups. youtube.com/watch?v=Kwmm6y9L…