I was thinking about a character in a TV show. He’s a Christian monk who is captured by Viking raiders and kept as a slave. He’s still quite young though. And while he has no freedom, he isn’t whipped or treated like an animal, he just lives as a very low status person. Eventually, after years, he starts wanting to improve his status with the tribe around him. Maybe he’s tired of being at the bottom. Maybe he’s just starving for some kind of human connection. When they come under threat, he asks to join the Viking fighting force. This seems like pretty clear Stockholm Syndrome to me - fighting for the people who enslaved you.

But is it really that different from waking up as a child in a certain culture and over time, absorbing its ways, and feeling the desire to grow your status in that society? How many people absorb their home culture’s ways because they think about them and deem them best? It’s a process of absorption.

So yes, while there’s always a little sass and irony in showerthoughts, I think there’s a connection here with pondering. You didn’t elaborate on your “yeah no” comment at all. Perhaps now you will?

“But not me!”

—everyone

That's exactly what a person with Stockholm syndrome would say!....... /s

But how do you feel about universal healthcare?

Exactly. We all adapt to what’s around us. Which, for me, explains how prisoners can eventually come to help their kidnappers. People consider Stockholm Syndrome incredibly strange, unexplainable. But it’s the basic thing we are built to do.

Same. I grew up in rural Ohio (USA) going to churches talking about the "synagogues of satan", people at school saying "that's Jewish" for something lame, lots of words I won't repeat here about a number of ethnic and sexual minorities, etc.

It all basically never sat well with me. I moved out when my mom remarried which was a bit before my senior year of high school. Bigger city, bigger school, more diversity, etc. quickly proved what I had long felt: humans are humans and neither their religion nor ethnicity nor gender identity changed that. This would have been in the late '90s.

I now live on the other side of the world from that place (Japan, of course, having its own issues with things like gender and racism, but that's (a) mostly the older generations and (b) a story for another time). Before I quit facebook years ago, I did catch up with a couple of people. Most of them did not change, but many of the bad ones got worse (this would have been around 2016) and emboldened by far-right groups growing in popularity. Living as a minority in another country also taught me a lot of about privilege and accidental racism.

Take the old adage “treat others how you would want to be treated” - is that something you believe because you’ve just been told that for so long? Or is that something you intrinsically believe in regardless of what others have said?

For what it's worth, this is essentially the "tit-for-tat" strategy from game theory, and you can rigorously prove it to be a superior cooperative strategy in many situations. Essentially, cooperation with others enables greater community success than everyone going alone, but trusting others always exposes you to selfish people that will take advantage of you. The optimal strategy is to cooperate by default, but if someone reveals themselves to be untrustworthy, stop cooperating and ideally work with others to punish them.

You actually see this bear out in nature in other animals as well. Vampire bats will share blood with other vampire bats that didn't successfully feed, but they also keep track of individual contributions, and if they identify that a bat is freeloading, they'll stop feeding it. By default, they cooperate to help each other, but if a selfish actor is identified, they stop helping it.

In the abstract, so long as most actors aren't selfish and the cost of being betrayed isn't too high, tit-for-tat is the optimal strategy.

It’s a good sign that it keeps you up. Few people ever think about this stuff.

Guns aren't safe. They aren't supposed to be safe, or at least they aren't supposed to be any safer than any other tool. They are a tool that is very specifically designed to grant their user an increased ability to injure a target with ease from a safe distance. This ability grants the user an increased ability to hunt, to defend themselves, to defend their property and family, and yes to harm or kill other people and predators.

A hammer, a knife, a blunt object, and a car can all provide these same abilities with differing efficiency, but we still have them, too, even though they aren't necessary. You don't need to drive. Walk or take a bus. You don't need a hammer to drive nails. Use a rock instead. Although there is a famous story about a guy named Cain, that makes a strong argument for getting rid of rocks, too. No one needs a baseball bat. Those are only used for recreation, so it should be easy to get rid of those dangerous weapons, right? I'm sure we can get rid of those dangerous knives, too. Our ancestors didn't need them to survive, so I'm sure we can do without them to make the world a safer place.

This is why we have a rule that none of these things can be used for that thing about killing other people under threat of harm or death unless it was done under pretty specific circumstances.

You are statistically safer around a gun than you are around a ladder, but I'm guessing ladders aren't on your list of things to rid the world of for some reason.