The Basis Of Nationalism And Natural Selection: Neurological Compatibility

Nationalists speak about genetic compatibility, but it is less commonly noted that genetic compatibility leads to neurological compatibility as the basis of friendship and in turn, of nations:

Dating sites would be well-advised to add “brain activity” as a compatability criterion, according to a study released Tuesday showing that close friends have eerily comparable neural responses to life experiences.

“Our results suggest that friends process the world around them in exceptionally similar ways,” said lead author Carolyn Parkinson, director of the Computational Social Neuroscience Lab at the University of California in Los Angeles.

…The closer the relationship, the more alike the neural patterns in parts of the brain governing emotional response, high-level reasoning, and the capacity to focus one’s attention.

People who are friends are more likely to be genetically similar:

Sociologists have long pointed out that we often favor people who look like us. Now, a new study shows that that bias runs deeper still: we tend to chose friends who are genetically similar to ourselves.

…Compared to strangers, the people the subjects chose to be friends with had significantly more in common genetically. They shared about one percent of their genome – about as related as fourth cousins. Most often, friends shared genes related to sense of smell, the authors found.

Long ago, the researchers think, this tendency to chose genetically similar friends might have provided our ancestors with an evolutionary advantage. Having people around who share some of the same weaknesses, preferences and needs can be useful for building a support network.

There was one exception to this rule, however. Friends significantly differed in their arsenal of immunity genes, the team found. Speculating, the researchers think that this might increase the chances that our friends will be more resistant to the germs that cripple us, and could thus take care of us and help stop the spread of infection.

In other words, the basis of human socializing and cooperation is genetic and neurological similarity. People who think along the same lines, find themselves as natural allies, and able to appreciate each other. These groups also have their own internal diversity in that people are attracted to those whose immune systems work differently than their own, creating a double barrier to disease.

When we apply this to civilization, we see that a group of people who are genetically/neurologically similar are more likely to be friends than people who are attempting to control one another because they are dissimilar. The scourge of the twentieth century, managerial/bureaucratic control, is thus deprecated in favor of similarity and cooperation.

In this way, we see nationalism as an extended friend/family group. Those who have similar ambitions for their civilization group together, and within that group, they achieve diversity at a biological level by choosing people near them who offer what they do not, at least at the immunological level but perhaps on many more.

Diversity cannot compare to the simplicity and clarity of this model. In diversity, people are choosing mates based on fractional similarities, and the resulting instability means a lack of unity and thus constant internal conflict. In the friends/family model of nationalism, people group with those similar to them, and so cooperation is an unspoken mutual goal.