Philip Trammell

Philip Trammell RSS Some informal thoughts about economics, philosophy, effective altruism, and other stuff I know less about than I think I do The Narcissism of Small Differences SHARE  ·  24 AUG 2019  ·  #43 Some groups spend a lot of energy fighting over what seem to outsiders like petty differences—even fighting “each other” more passionately than they fight people with whom they more substantively disagree. Freud called this the “narcissism of small differences”. His original illustration of the phenomenon was the intense conflict that sometimes arises between neighboring ethic groups, but he proposed it as a general rule of human psychology, produced by some sort of desire to individuate oneself from one’s crowd. Many psychologists since have tried to explore it more thoroughly. As far as I can tell, it isn’t any sort of general rule. We often see it in religion (recall the joke about Baptists on a bridge), we often don’t (how much animosity is there between reform and reco

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