1.1 Our fatal flaw
Let’s go behind the scenes of this ancient tribal game we’re in, and dig deep, so we can understand…
The kind of trouble it is for us.
Because then we can be smarter in how we fight for ourselves.
Once upon a time…
We humans lived in might-makes-right troops.
An alpha male ran the show. He dominated everyone else, he was the enforcer, he had his way.
This is much like how chimps still live today.
But our species diverged from chimps long ago. We humans were rebels. We didn’t like being under the thumb of one top guy. So we did something absolutely remarkably amazing…
We invented a new kind of togetherness.
In our new groups, or tribes, there weren’t any alphas or betas. There weren’t any rich people or poor people. Nobody lorded it over anybody else…
We were all equals.
And that’s why anthropologists call these groups…
Egalitarian.
And more than that, this new way of life we created was…
Fiercely egalitarian.
Because we were fiercely dedicated to it, because…
It was the best survival strategy ever.
We were no longer a collection of self–interested individuals jockeying for position in a hierarchical troop.
We now lived in small bands of 30–40 or so people within relatively small tribes, where everyone knew everyone. And where we took very good care of each other, because our culture was now based on…
Mutuality.
And so we became…
Survival partners.
We were in this together. We depended on each other.
And what made this work is that we became…
Super-cooperators.
Among the million–plus species of insects, the ones that are far and away the most numerous and most successful are the ants, bees, wasps, and termites.
What do they have in common? They’re cooperative. They live in fiercely cooperative social groups.
But these guys run their cooperation on instinct. So it’s rigid. They have built–in rules they follow by rote. No thinking needed.
But we humans have developed cooperation based on learning. It involves thinking and strategizing and getting creative and making improvements as needed. So it’s much more challenging than the cooperation of the insects, but it’s so much more powerful.
And it’s…
The secret to our success.
It’s why we’ve been able to spread everywhere around the earth and live in all different habitats. It’s why our numbers have steadily grown until in the last couple centuries they’ve increased by magnitudes. And it’s why…
We’ve taken dominion over the earth.
Meanwhile chimps are stuck in their little patches of African forest, their numbers dwindling down.
The key part of our cooperative way of life was contribution…
Everyone contributed to the welfare of the tribe all day every day without fail.
If anybody got lazy and quit pulling their weight, there was an immediate response from the group, and it couldn’t be more serious. First the goof–off was shamed, and if that didn’t get him back on track, then he was shunned. Which was very painful, because remember, we’re a social–group species. We need to belong, we need to be in community with others.
In our modern society we punish people with solitary confinement where they’re locked alone into an isolated prison cell.
In the hunter–gatherer tribes of our ancestors, when a slacker was shunned…
He was locked out.
No one would talk to him. He became invisible to the tribe. And this was like…
A social death.
Shaming and shunning were powerful instruments of correction, so they usually worked just fine.
But if they both failed, then the problem person would be expelled. This was pretty much a death sentence because if you were kicked out on your own into the wild you would most likely not survive. And the loneliness would be unbearable.
In our current era, our mass societies run on mass exploitation which causes mass suffering. But our super–cooperative tribes weren’t like that at all…
They wanted everyone to be the best they could be.
The tribe couldn’t afford to have some people taking advantage of other people. They couldn’t afford the dissension that would cause. And exploitation diminishes people, and the tribe couldn’t afford that, and so did not allow it.
Similarly, they didn’t allow the mistreatment and neglect of children, like what’s widespread in our mass societies today. A tribe could not afford to wreck its children. Again, they needed every single person to be at their best, so they treated their children with great care.
You know the saying that it takes a village to raise a child. That was true in our hunter–gatherer days. The tribe wanted to be deeply involved in the raising of each child so each child would grow up to be deeply involved in the life of the tribe and deeply loyal.
I’m saying lots of happy things about tribes, but living in a fiercely egalitarian tribe was not a walk in the park.
It took serious discipline. And why? Because we were still fundamentally a competitive species. We did not change that. We laid a cooperative way of life on top of our competitive nature. Which meant that…
Super-cooperation asked a lot of us.
Really a lot, and yet not too much. It was doable. And even though the discipline of cooperation was challenging, we were okay with it because it gave us security. We were okay with the demands our tribe made on us because…
The better our tribe did, the better off we were.
There was a sweetness to this tribal life. We loved the feeling of belonging that came with being a member of our tribe. We loved that sweet sense of home our tribe gave us in the midst of a difficult and dangerous world.
And we fell in love with cooperation, not just for its survival value, but for its own sake.
Cooperating with others in common purpose, and nurturing each other, and taking care of each other is so much happier than the constant daily power struggles of a might–makes–right troop.
So hooray for our fiercely egalitarian tribes. They brought us so many blessings.
And yet they also brought us…
Trouble.
Big trouble. The biggest.
Because…
There’s an inside and an outside to our tribes.
Inside we look after each other. We love each other. We stand by each other. We even stand by people we don’t personally like all that much because they’re members of our tribe.
But…
Outside it’s a whole different story.
We’re like Jekyl and Hyde. Inside our tribes, we’re super–cooperative and caring, but all the wonderful things about tribalism stay within the boundary of the tribe. They do not extend to outsiders. Because…
As a tribe we’re self-centered.
We care only about our own tribe. To hell with all the others. In fact, every other tribe in the world is a potential enemy.
Maybe sometimes we make an alliance. We know how to do that if there is a mutual benefit. For example, we might team up with a neighboring tribe so together we can defend ourselves against a dangerous aggressive third tribe trying to take our hunting grounds from us.
But the minute the mutual benefit is gone, the alliance is gone, and that tribe is a potential enemy again.
And it gets worse because if another tribe is threatening us or we even think they might be threatening us, we consider them to be…
An existential threat.
Which is a matter of life and death. And that means we get to do to them whatever we think we need to do. We claim the right to attack and kill.
And it gets worse still. Because we consider ourselves to be…
Demigods.
But the people in other tribes, we consider less than us. And often less than human. And when they threaten us, we consider them to be…
Demons.
And so whatever we do to them is righteous and just. And nothing is too extreme.
Add all this up and it means…
Our tribal boundaries are bloody and brutal.
Tribalism has been the secret of our success. But now we’ve become too successful for our own good. Our numbers have exploded. There are too many of us. We’re drowning in ourselves.
We evolved to live in small bands, not in mega–societies of 30 million or 300 million, or a billion.
We’ve lost our fierce egalitarianism and we don’t know how to get it back. We’re trapped in the negative part of our tribal past and we can’t find an exit.
We’ve been a tribal species for so many millennia that tribalism settled into our DNA. It’s not just one more feature in a long list of what’s special about us humans…
It’s fundamental to who we are.
It’s the very heart of humanness. It’s the deep source of so much of our behavior.
So we can’t get rid of it overnight, or in a few years, or in a few hundred years. It’s not just in a few genes that maybe we could modify. Our whole genome is tribal.
The more danger we face, the more scared we get, the more we retreat into our tribalism. And the more desperately fundamentalist we get about it…
Which is exactly the wrong thing for us to do.
We have always bonded with our tribes in a visceral way. They were our units of survival. But we’ve never bonded with our species because there was no survival value in that.
But now there is. We’ve become a global community, so we need to transcend our tribal past and put our species first. Which as a species we’re not doing.
Still, despite this bad news, we don’t have to surrender to despair. We just don’t. Because as individual activists and in our small working groups and networks, we have the power to oppose tribalism and fight for ourselves and nurture ourselves in that fight.
It’s a cold, hard fact that…
What made us is now breaking us.
So then what?
