NP? Herero echo

[Doug Millison]

....mentioned in passing, this Herero echo:

"The largest known "suicide" example is the 1856-1857
Cattle-Killing in South Africa in which perhaps 60,000
of the Xhosa people died of self-induced starvation.
(They destroyed their food supplies.)"


 The Human Nature Review  2002 Volume 2: 343-355 ( 23
August )

http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/cults.html 


Sex, Drugs, and Cults. An evolutionary psychology
perspective on why and how cult memes get a drug-like
hold on people, and what might be done to mitigate the
effects

By H. Keith Henson

Abstract

In the aggregate, memes constitute human culture. Most
are useful. But a whole class of memes (cults,
ideologies, etc.) have no obvious replication drivers.
Why are some humans highly susceptible to such memes?
Evolutionary psychology is required to answer this
question. Two major evolved psychological mechanisms
emerge from the past to make us susceptible to cults.
Capture-bonding exemplified by Patty Hearst and the
Stockholm Syndrome is one. Attention-reward is the
other. Attention is the way social primates measure
status. Attention indicates status and is highly
rewarding because it causes the release of brain
chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins. Actions
lead to Attention that releases Rewarding brain
chemicals. Drugs shortcut attention in the
Action-Attention-Reward (AAR) brain system and lead to
the repeated behaviour we call addiction. Gambling
also causes misfiring of the AAR pathway. Memes that
manifest as cults hijack this brain reward system by
inducing high levels of attention behaviour between
cult members. People may become irresponsible on
either cults or drugs sometimes resulting in severe
damage to reproductive potential. Evolutionary
psychology thus answers the question of why humans are
susceptible to memes that do them and/or their
potential for reproductive success damage. We evolved
the psychological traits of capture-bonding and
attention-reward that make us vulnerable for other
maladaptive functions. We should be concerned about
predator and pathogen memes and the mechanisms that
make us vulnerable. The possibility of modeling
important social factors contributing to the spread of
dangerous cult memes is discussed. The history of the
author’s experiences that led to understanding the
connection between drugs and cults is related. 

[...] But a whole class of memes have no obvious
replication drivers. Memes of this class, which
includes religions, cults and social movements such as
Nazism and communism, have induced humans to some of
the most spectacular events in history, including mass
suicides, wars, migrations, crusades, and other forms
of large-scale social unrest. These memes often induce
humans to activities that seriously damage or destroy
their hosts’ potential for reproductive success. The
classic example is the nearly extinct Shakers--whose
meme set completely forbids sex. A more recent example
is the gonad-clipping Heaven's Gate cult.

While inducing such behaviour makes sense from the
meme's viewpoint (diverting host time and energy
toward propagating the meme and away from bearing and
caring for children) it makes no sense when considered
from the gene's viewpoint for a susceptibility to this
class of sometimes-fatal memes to have evolved."


=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>
<http://www.dougday.blogspot.com/>
<http://www.online-journalist.com/index.html>

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