[donw]

> One of the great myths of nature is that predators have some sort of instinct to screw over their social group at every opportunity.

Speaking of humans: Their social group, no. Other social groups, absolutely.

We know this as "ingroup bias".

Pre-internet, your ingroups and outgroups were largely restricted by geography. Moreover, you got this sort of "ingroup boosting" effect by being part of a town, county, state, and country, so you had a lot of overlaps with other people.

Interestingly enough, each of those geographic entities actually occupies a "slot" in your social graph -- unconsciously, you think of them as people.

Without a forcing function providing behavioral moderation through discordant groupings, ingroups and outgroups become increasingly monocultural, tribalistic, and behaviorally extreme.