3.5 Conforming vs. becoming your own person
Have you heard activists making the case for…
Being a noncomformist.
It goes like this…
Don’t be a sheep. Don’t let the politicians and elites tell you what to think and what to do. Don’t submit to a society that runs on mass exploitation and mass suffering. Don’t be a blind follower. Don’t conform. Have a mind of your own. Think for yourself. Make your own decisions. And…
Become your own person.
These are not bad arguments as far as they go.
But there’s a problem. To become your own person is not a simple act of willpower. Instead…
It’s a radical moral act.
It’s an anti–tribal act. It goes absolutely against the grain of tribalism. How so?
In our hunter–gatherer days when we lived in small tribes we all had to submit to the discipline of the tribe. Or to be more accurate…
We embraced the discipline of the tribe.
We were all die–hard conformists. We conformed to our tribe’s mores and way of life. And we were glad to do it because our tribe was our unit of survival. It was our only home. It was our place of belonging. It gave us security. It was where we were surrounded with people who looked after us as we looked after them in turn.
So let’s not get judgmental about people who are conforming, because this is built into us. It’s an essential part of the human genome.
And let’s honor ourselves for breaking with that conformity because we understand how the tribalism of our past is now killing us.
But then we need to ask more of ourselves than becoming steadfast nonconformists, because for too many people that means going off on your own tangent. It means flying solo. It means not just being an individual, but being…
Individualistic.
But we remain social animals. And we need each other now more than ever. And the answer to destructive togetherness is…
Not to get rid of the togetherness.
But to get rid of the destructiveness.
So what do we need?
A new togetherness.
And the path that gets us there goes through becoming our own persons. The activists who preach nonconformity are right on that point, but that’s not the end point.
We’re looking at a three–step process…
First, we reject tribalism.
Second, we do the work it takes to become our own persons, so we can make our own moral decisions, instead of leaving that up to a tribe.
Third, we gather ourselves into a new togetherness, based on mutual nurturance and mutual advocacy, where mutual means reaching across all the boundaries that divide us from each other and set us against each other.
Instead of jettisoning togetherness, we get to form new groups and networks. We get to work on developing a new global tribe, one which will embrace the entire human community.
But if we want to call this new togetherness a tribe, then we need to add a crucial adjective and call it…
A trans-tribal tribe.
And through this work, we’ll be providing our species with a new kind of…
Moral leadership.
Why does this matter? Because it’s not enough to protest the tribalism of our past. Our species is in such terrible danger that we need new leaders. And who are those leaders?
Activists who have their hearts set on trans-tribal morality.
And who understand it, and practice it, and get better at it day by day.
