Well, I have a practical desire to maintain power over people who want to maintain power over other people. And to me, hypothetically, if I have to judge someone and make some determination of how to treat that person, there are both selfish and selfless thoughts involved. Selfless is the holistic, society as a whole thinking, which is what you refer to. Selfish refers to your personal experience, memory, imagination, desires and fears - how it directly involves you.

If these two types of thinking are absent, meaning the thoughts are incapable of being able to be divided into clear duals, then I can understand that the culture has brought itself into a state of being where the consciousness of it seems to be completely connected, and there are no disconnects that seem apparent between person to person. But there are, it's just that a significant portion of the society is afraid of acting on them.

So part of the society (or part of the individual himself) engages in this 'this is best for you/me' behavior, and the other part is constantly paralysed by fear. The socio-psychological dynamics of what it takes to maintain a relatively homogeneous culture that perpetuates conflict as part of it enforcing homogeneity in thinking throughout these cultures is interesting, but as I have aged, I can no longer simplify things down to a choice between pure spite or pure will to power.

Those two may be the outward forces that seem apparent, but there is all the other crap that has to fit together, in order for people to rationally perpetuate the kinds of philosophies they enforce, especially when they encounter cultures than can demonstrate their own social and spiritual dissonance.