I'm not trying to make light of what you said; but, you can use the same assessment with spyderlovers.
I agree, you can. That's why the program was so interesting. It is very, very, easy to fall into an "us against them" mindset. Eagleman talked to a couple of guys who were in elementary school when MLK was assassinated. A day or two after MLK was killed the teacher conducted an experiment. She told all the kids that brown eyed kids were not as good as blue eyed kids, and she separated them between the front and back of the room. I think she fed them some more lines, i.e., propaganda. The result was the blue eyed kids became downright nasty toward the brown eyed ones. The next day she told them she made a mistake. The blue eyed ones were not as good as the brown eyed ones. Immediately the roles reversed. The third day she told the kids it was all a lie, that she just wanted them to understand how prejudice, regardless of the basis, made people act toward each other. One of the guys, who has blue eyes, told Eagleman the day he was part of the "better" group he was the perfect blond haired blue eyed Nazi. It was for no other reason than the color of eyes, but it was reinforced by the societal connection with the other blue eyed kids.
Eagleman was making the point that our brains require social connections to function properly, and those social connections will cause us to act as part of the group that makes us feel good. Earlier in the program he showed how, when we observe someone whom we identify as "good", is being subjected to pain our brain has all kinds of neurological response. If we see someone whom we think of as "bad" being subjected to pain, our brain has very little reaction. Interestingly we saw that right here just a few days ago when cuznjohn linked to the video of the Islamist radical getting blown away.
http://www.spyderlovers.com/forums/showthread.php?87826-should-we-feel-bad-for-this-person None of us who commented expressed any hurt or pain at all. That is because we regard the Islamist terrorist as bad, which they are to us because they want to kill us.
It's been that way for millennia. English against the Scots. Romans against the Christians. Nazis against the Jews. Russians against the Ukrainians. Japanese against the Americans. And now, the radical Muslims against the West. What we are seeing in the Middle East is a banding together of radicals who feel they are treated as "lesser" people, but within their own group they are made to feel important, to feel good. That has developed into an extremely intense "us against them" feeling. I don't know if there is a solution other than annihilation of enough of them that the remaining ones will finally be open to receiving vibes from the West that they are valued as human beings. It's worked that way with virtually every conflict of one group with another, with the Japanese in World War II and after, and more recently with Americans and North Vietnamese.
Interestingly, there is another cultural complication lending to the conflicts caused by attitude. At least I think it may be the case. A few weeks ago a gentleman spoke to our Lions club about English language based schools he organized in foreign countries, mostly for the benefit of American and European children in those countries. He started in Yemen, and had very good relationships there for a long time. But after the past few years of conflicts the school has been closed. He related an experience of traveling across the desert with an Arab guide and driver. They stopped at the tent home of a Bedouin I believe it was. He asked why this man's family was having a battle with another Arab family. Why didn't they just show a little love to each other and make amends. The response, "To show love is to show weakness." That phrase strikes me as being one of the fundamental causes of the Middle East conflict. All they seem to understand is force. To not show force is to show weakness. Apparently, to me anyway, there is no understanding of the Western or Christian concept that to show restraint is to demonstrate strength, that it takes a stronger person to walk away from a fight than it does to fight. It's no wonder then, that there is conflict over there between our values, and their values.