A Thought Experiment in Human Psychology, Power, and the Strange Machinery of Tribal Minds****🧠 “What Would Earth Be Like if We Were All One Colour?”
Here’s the uncomfortable truth psychologists, sociologists, and evolutionary theorists agree on:
Race is not the engine of human conflict.
Power is.
Culture is.
Institutions are.
Economics is.
And behind all of it sits the human brain, addicted to group-making.
If tomorrow every human woke up the exact same shade — copper, warm brown, gold-bronze, whatever — the brain wouldn’t celebrate unity.
It would panic.
It would look for a new line to draw.
Because the human mind is a pattern-hunter and an ingroup-builder.
Give it a blank slate, and it scribbles tribes on it immediately.
🌍 In a One-Colour World, What Actually Happens?
**Conflict doesn’t vanish.
It simply shifts to a new address.**
Same skin tone.
Same phenotype.
Same baseline genetics.
But you still get:
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wealth divides
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political power games
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cultural prestige battles
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empire-building
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exploitation
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social hierarchies
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migration pressure
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religious competition
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ideology wars
Because humans don’t discriminate based on colour.
They discriminate based on meaning.
And they’ll attach meaning to anything:
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language
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region
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caste
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class
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religion
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accents
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clan markers
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ideologies
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even football teams and soft drink brands
We are meaning-making apes before we are rational ones.
📜 History’s Control Experiments (Already Done for Us)
Anthropology actually ran this experiment many times:
Societies that were racially homogeneous by today’s standards still created fierce hierarchies and wars.
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The Mali Empire waged wars and enslaved neighbours.
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Chinese dynasties fought other Han states for millennia.
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The Aztecs dominated surrounding Mesoamerican peoples.
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The Zulu kingdom reshaped Southern Africa through violent consolidation.
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Middle Eastern empires (Ottoman/Safavid/Abbasid) fought nearly nonstop.
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Kings of India fought thousands of intra-continental wars.
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Southeast Asian kingdoms went to war for centuries.
These conflicts weren’t about colour.
They were about power, land, resources, identity, myth, and prestige.
Skin colour is merely the quickest visual label available in multi-continental societies.
Remove it, and the mind finds a new label.
🔮 So What Actually Changes?
🌟 The “Better” Column
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Less colour-coded trauma
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Less race-based discrimination
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Less pseudoscientific nonsense
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No colour-based caste systems
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No “visual othering” on sight
A lot of human suffering really is tied to colour symbolism — and losing it would reduce a real psychological burden.
⚖️ The “Unchanged” Column
Hierarchy doesn’t disappear; it just rebrands.
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political manipulation
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greed
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tribalism
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empire logic
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propaganda
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economic inequality
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group violence
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culture vs culture tension
Humans do not default to “equal.”
They default to structure — and structure bends toward hierarchy unless actively resisted.
🕳️ The “Worse” Column
Ironically…
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Prejudice becomes more invisible, harder to call out
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Discrimination shifts into things with no visual clue:
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religion
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caste
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class
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ideology
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Oppression can now pretend to be “rational” since it’s not about colour
When colour disappears, bigotry often becomes more covert.
💡 Final Answer (Psychology Edition)
If humans were all one colour, racism wouldn’t end.
Colour-based racism would end.
But the mental engine that produces racism —
the one designed to sort, group, dominate, defend, and compete —
would simply redirect its energy.
Humans don’t need colour to discriminate.
They just need a boundary.
And if the boundary doesn’t exist?
The brain will invent one.
GPT/ Compiled & Edited By Olofin
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