A nearly universal belief around the world is that “we” are the Chosen People. This takes on many forms such as nationalism, religion, sports team supporting, and story telling about the Chosen One. The bright side is building enthusiasm and cooperation. The dark side is delusion, irrational discrimination, and justification of betrayal, all of which lead to great waste.
Chosen People is a variant on Us versus Them thinking. Human thinking is adaptable, and Us versus Them thinking is no exception to this. The Us versus Them instinct dates way back. It was a valuable style of thinking in the Neolithic Village environment. It is a kind of thinking that has had to undergo constant adaptation since early in the civilizing process. One of the first adaptations was brought about by the cultural conflict between the hill people and the valley people. As agriculture became more efficient when large groups worked together, the hill versus valley culture-clash emerged. It happened because large scale agriculture was much easier in the valleys, and that encouraged larger groups to cooperate there. The hill people, however, never got on board with the program. That began the push on redefining Us versus Them, and it has been pushed hard and in many ways ever since.
Coming up with Chosen People thinking is part of the adapting. But it was just a beginning. In the Industrial Age and globalized living conditions, even more adapting is needed. These days Chosen People thinking is a powerful tool, but like any powerful tool, it can be abused. It has a bright side and a dark side.
Chosen People thinking is often used to whip up community enthusiasm. Any motivational speaking is going to have a little of this, and memorable versions usually have a whole lot - “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” When Chosen People thinking is working well it helps people cooperate on a bigger scale and with that bigger cooperation the community can overcome bigger obstacles to produce bigger successes. The American Experience (1700 - 2000) of simultaneously conquering a continent and adapting wholeheartedly to all the disruptions of embracing the Industrial Revolution is a spectacular example of the power of Chosen People thinking being used well. North America went from primitive and sparsely inhabited to the home of the world’s most prosperous people and a super power. This took a lot of cooperation, more than the world had ever seen before, and Chosen People thinking helped make it happen.
Using Chosen People thinking well, however, is not easy to do. History is littered with less successful examples. The German and Russian Revolutions which started at the beginning of the 1920's come to mind as examples of more mixed results. Although these began with great promise for the future, that was not to be the final outcome. In the 1920’s and 30’s both were admired for the progress they were bringing to the people of Germany and Russia. In 1938 and ‘39 first Hitler then Stalin became Time magazine’s “Man of the Year”. But by the 1940’s the revolutions got twisted around, resulting in the creation of concentration camps, gulags and a world war. These are results which pretty much define big waste, as in waste of resources and waste of human lives.
When Chosen People thinking is used to support delusion it gets expensive. One current chronic example of this is the Teaching Creation/Evolution Debate in US public schools. Evolution has been considered a threat to Christian-style Chosen People thinking ever since it was first proposed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace in 1859.
The problem here is delusion: evolution matches harsh reality; Noah's Arc does not. The more a community believes in Creationism and makes choices based on it, the more the community is wasting resources because a) things won't work as planned, and b) experiments won't be tried or results exploited because they don't fit the delusion. A deliberately dramatic example of this was the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee. In 1925 John Scopes, a teacher, was arrested and found guilty for teaching evolution in a public school class. The trail caught national attention at the time and became famous enough to write books about and even a movie, Inherit the Wind (1960). The verdict was overturned due to a technicality, but the trail had already been played out by the media as a battle between science and the Word of God. This is a high profile case of science Us versus evangelical Christian Us, and this feud continues to this day.
Exclusion is another part of the problem. It involves drawing a dotted line between groups that could be working together but aren't because one group isn't part of the Chosen People as defined by the other group. One form of this is discrimination. The waste is caused by lack of a bigger cooperation that includes members of both groups. The Middle East is an example of a place where this larger cooperation is difficult. There are a lot of ethnic and religious groups thoroughly mixed throughout the region. The chronic conflicts in the Middle East since World War II are examples of Chosen People thinking that is crippling wider cooperation rather than contributing to it. To get these groups cooperating even a little often requires a heavy-handed strongman running the government. An example of this is Iraq’s brutal President Saddam Hussein who ran the country in the 1980’s and 90’s before the second Gulf War deposed him. The chaos that has followed in Iraq since Hussein’s overthrow is an example of what can happen in that region when a strongman is not in charge. These people have not yet learned how to cooperate but continue to function at an exclusion level.
The waste can get even bigger if the groups start betraying each other - taking cheap shots. This quickly leads to bad feelings, and can grow even worse, into feuding and violence. The Middle East is also a good example of this happening. The Syrian Civil War of 2013 is a current example of Chosen People feelings going way off the deep end and into senseless violence with various religious groups supporting discrimination. This results in soldiers shooting at each other and civilians rather than supporting cooperation.
The colonizing of the Americas and other sparsely inhabited parts of Earth by Europeans and other cultures utilizing Industrial Age technologies has been the world's biggest game changer, bar none. This is a huge change for the better and at the heart of it is immigration - people moved from their home villages and cultures to places far away. In the process they learned new ways, adapted, and then innovated. They came up with millions of new ways of doing things and created our modern day civilized lifestyles. Immigration was, and still is, at the heart of this process.
In spite of the obvious good results, immigration scares a lot of people. This fear is powered by the Chosen People instinct, “These people aren't us, they are strangers, and they are going to do all sorts of bad things.” Ironically, the recently arrived immigrants are often the ones that get scared the most. In US history the English of colonial times (1700’s) were scared by the Germans who immigrated after them. “Dutch Treat” was originally a demeaning remark about the Germans, “I’ll treat you to lunch… you pay for your own. Ha! Ha!” In one of those surprise twists of life it later evolved into describing a useful concept. Fast forward fifty years and the Germans are complaining bitterly about the wave of Irish immigrants that followed them. “Help wanted: No Irish need apply” is a famous sign from that era. The Irish then complained about the Chinese - and so on.
Goat sacrificing takes place as a result of this general fear of immigrants and supports the formation of cumbersome immigration procedures that serve as barriers. These barriers both sacrifice and limit the further good that immigration can be doing today. We are far from finished gaining the benefits of figuring out how to do things better, and the immigrant experience is one of the most fruitful ways of getting people in the frame of mind to put innovation into action.
Social Darwinism is the mixing of “survival of the fittest” thinking from evolution theory into social context. The problem with this thinking style is that in reality evolution supports cooperation just as enthusiastically as it supports competition. For example, think of lichens which are algae and fungus cooperating, flowering plants and pollinating insects, and the gut bacteria that aid the digestion of cellulose in termites and cows. These are cooperative relationships that evolution enthusiastically supports. Evolution also supports diversity - most species support many variations from the “norm”. The diversity of the human race is one example, and dogs are an example of just how much variation is possible.
In other words, Social Darwinism, the idea that the strong will get stronger and the weak will disappear, is a straw man. It’s not real. It is Chosen People thinking and can be used to justify betrayal of other groups. An example: A guy proudly telling his friends at the bar, “I just pick-pocketed some tourist.” They look at him a little strangely. “Survival of the fittest,” he says. “I’ll buy the next round!” And they all go back to drinking. The irony is this logic can be used by people on any side of a social divide.
Social Darwinism, a variant on Chosen People thinking, is expensive when people use it as justification for betrayal.
Unionism is founded and sustained by Chosen People thinking. It is closely related to Social Darwinism, because those supporting unions often say the workers are under constant threat from managers who are claiming that Social Darwinism justifies exploiting workers. When a union is getting started in a company or an industry, all the workers are called the Chosen People. But soon after it is established union members become The Chosen, and non-union types can be seen as just as evil as the bosses. To counter this non-union worker form of evil, the unions demand “union shops” - workplaces where only union members can work. (Union shop is a technical term. It’s also called a “closed shop” and the opposite is an “open shop”. ) An example: Utah’s public schools where teachers must become members of the Utah Education Association (UEA).
The big cost here is betrayal in the form of work rules that game the system rather than help it work better. Featherbedding is the name given to one such abuse. It is the practice of hiring more workers than are needed to perform a given job. As the system gaming (defined in the Gaming the System section) becomes more successful and widespread, the union types become more suspicious that any changes in how things are done will stop the gaming, because that would be a defeat.
Goat sacrificing slows down changes in the work place that could otherwise bring new efficiencies and technologies so things could be done faster, better, cheaper, and safer, and if the company grows, more workers could be hired. In addition to slowing changes, a second cost is coercion - “Join the union, or else…”
Abortion is an issue that just won't settle in the US. This becomes a Chosen People issue when the Pro-Life people take the stand that killing a fetus is murder. The Pro-Lifers are invoking Chosen People to protect the fetus: “The fetus is human, just like we are.” This leads to legal oddities such as a person who is accused of killing a pregnant women getting accused of two murders.
A major form of goat sacrificing, aside from who should get abortions and who should pay for them, is the spillover into medical research. “Stem cells? What's the difference between a stem cell and a fetus? ...There isn't any!” Medical research is now cursed by this extension of Chosen People thinking. It's an extension that sounds irrational if you’re not part of the Pro-Life Chosen People group that is looking for ways to stop abortions. An example of this extension shows up in this 23 Oct 12 LifeSiteNews.com article, “Pro-Life World Debating Nobel Prize for Adult Stem Cell breakthrough”, by Hilary White. From the article, “At the news of the announcement from the Swedish Nobel Prize committee, on October 8th, American Life League (ALL) were quick off the mark with a press release condemning the award. The pro-life organization touted the virtues of adult stem cells, while raising concerns about the source of the genes that are being used to re-program the cells. Some pro-life critics have observed that Yamanaka’s team used the now infamous HEK 293 cell line, which was cultured from the kidney cells of a child aborted in 1971, in their research. ‘With such complex subject matter, we call for vigilance,’ said ALL. ‘Technical language and prestigious prizes will not hide the truth. To encourage the murder of preborn human beings in order to facilitate scientific research is unethical and criminal.’”
Heart-feelings that surround the core abortion issue create goat sacrificing that extends to and stymies medical research. And that research is going to make all our lives much better.
Hobbiton is my term for the current practices in residential designing that isolate neighborhoods and people from each other. (I've described it in a preceding section.) Glaring examples are cul de sacs and gated communities. The odd part about Hobbiton designs is that residents are mostly oblivious to stranger unfriendliness. Odd, until you realize that this is Chosen People sneaking into thinking again. People not in the neighborhood become, “Those barbarians outside the gate.” And the emotional extension is that these are not people who can be trusted.
The cost is: if you can't trust someone, you can't cooperate with them. It doesn't feel like it to those who aspire to live in one of these communities, but the growing Hobbiton instinct is the exact opposite of what is needed for more globalizing and better modern living.
Chosen People thinking has been around a long time. It has served mankind well and can continue to do so. It does so when it helps a community build cooperation for getting big things done. But it is a tool; it can be used for good or bad. Since it involves from-the-heart thinking, it can easily become the foundation for goat sacrificing. Consequently, care needs to be taken so it isn’t used to justify wasteful activities such as discrimination and betrayal.