Humans, for the most part, are pack animals. From Fred Reed on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:
We’re all crazy. This explains everything. I will elaborate in hopes of joining Plato, Burke, and Hunter Thompson as a lighthouses of the intellects
The human mind cannot think of more than a very few things at once. We cannot for example think of a billion citizens of China as individuals, so we say “China,“ or “the Chinese” did something or other when most of them hadn’t heard of it, didn’t want to do it, or wanted to do something else. The billion become one sentient being, a sort of sprawling person.
Thus, for example, people speak of Cuba as “Castro,” or say that “Cuba” must be punished for doing something that Washington doesn’t like, and thus the embargo on trade. In fact, there are 11,000,000 million Cubans, of whom only one is Castro. Most Cubans do not like Castro, as evidenced by their attempts to paddle ninety miles to Miami on inner tubes. The embargo doesn’t punish “Cuba.” It makes life miserable for 11,000,000-1 people almost none of whom have any influence on Cuba’s policies. The embargo certainly doesn’t discomfit Castro, who can have all the prime rib and good bourbon he wants, embargo or no embargo.
This inability to handle complexity runs through and almost defines politics. For example, Donald Trump wants to punish Mexico by making it pay for his wall, this being greeted with acclaim by people for whom Mexico is one thing, a malevolent being in a sombrero and crossed bandoliers that is “shipping its criminals to the United States.” (The precise part played by a third-grader in Mérida in shipping criminals to the US is not clear.) It is easier to think of “Mexico” than of several thousand criminals or hundreds of thousands of the moderately impoverished, who of their own volition decide to go where the money is.
Extracting billions to pay for his wall will punish…whom? Or what? The money would come out of funds for construction of roads, or education, or medical services, and such. That is, it would punish those who did not go illegally to the US instead of those who did. It certainly would not punish anyone in the Mexican government.
The consequences of this psychic compaction are often horrible. The UN estimates that some 600,000 Iraqi children died of waterborne diseases like dysentery because America put an embargo on chlorine for treating water (they might make poison gs with it). “Iraq” was one evil thing, or it was Saddam Hussein. It, or he, had to be punished. (The people who run the US wanted oil, empire, and Israel. The part about punishing Saddam and imposing goodness and democracy was to sucker the rubes into an excited pack.)
Actually watching a child crying as it dies of diarrhea decreases the granularity to the individual level at which people can understand it. This is why governments do not like such things to become public.
To continue reading: Compaction, Pack Instinct, and Territoriality: Some Aspects of Irrationality
