virus: The other

Marie Foster (mfos@ieway.com)
Tue, 11 Nov 1997 08:37:28 -0800


List...

During the time I was home and too ill to really work on anything I
spent some time with TV. I have cable so I surfed around and ended up
spending some time watching shows about nature and the animal world as
these seem to be prevalent for some reason during the day.

Much work has been done to dispel some of our ideas about animal
interaction by observational scientists. Much has been observed about
how animal groups deal with autonomy and outsiders. Solitary species
also have some of the same rituals upon running into another of their
kind but less work has been done with these species because they are
rather more difficult to study.

I wonder how much of our contemporary behavior has as its root some
ancient antecedent of this kind of behavior? Suspicion, testing,
acceptance or rejection seems to be a generalization of what happens in
nature.

Having recently joined this list I found the same thing here. Since
this group has less cohesion than a 'real' society I am pretty sure that
I still remain in each of the categories mentioned above with the other
people on the list.

I raise this issue to stimulate some thinking on where to approach the
meme. Perhaps we need to look at the core value that this meme has to
survival (the meme of the 'other').

Is there some way that we could correct the negative aspects of the meme
at this level rather than trying a top down approach?

What do you think?

Marie