[thechao]

I live in deeply red exurban Texas; and, yes, a lot of my neighbors are like this. I'd guess ... 30–40%? When my wife was working on redistricting & gerrymandering, a Danish group came over. They're the ones who pointed this out, because they had bumped into the phenomenon in Denmark, first, when going door-to-door.

EDIT: I think we can all be like this. It's something I reflect on.

[eszed]

> we can all be like this

Yes. Most definitely. Personal experience has often changed my approach to, or the salience of, or - more rarely, because I genuinely try to be both empathetic and rational - my entire opinion about, oh gosh... An embarrassing (in hindsight) number of things.

This is inevitable, isn't it? Like, we all learn best through experience. No one can perfectly (however empathetic) assimilate another's point of view. And, anyway, exercising empathy is dangerous, because it makes us more vulnerable to manipulation by people who cynically evoke it.

Where I land with this is to self-limit the scope of my own judgment. If I have not experienced something, then as far as possible I defer to those who have. If something matters a lot to someone else, and only a little bit to me, I defer to them. My model of the world will never be perfect, so I'd like to minimize the consequences of my own limitations.

[MrMcCall]

We all have the potential to be like this, but not necessarily the predilection.

That said, we are all, by default, some part selfish from the getgo, for oursself, for our ethnicity, for our religion (or lack thereof), for our family, etc.

It's our actual, physical inheritance from our mammalian body construction. Pack mentality gives us if not outright pack warfare, then at least callous disregard for the happiness of those in which out-groups we conjure up out of thin air. Yes, kinship theory is real and human beings can transcend it, but it must be a conscious effort to do so.

That is the baseline human nature. That's why history is so belligerent and why our "evolution" hasn't really gotten us beyond warfare, destruction of the Earth, and ever-growing unhappiness. It's also why the most brutal and callous of our people are now our leaders.

These are all personal choices, however subconscious, that stack up into the majority -- and we are, across the globe, across cultures, like this, until we choose to embrace compassion as our core precept, but few have, because they're still in their default state, raised by callously unconcerned, yet confident, "traditional" cultures.