7.2 Why is it so much harder for us than it is for them?
November 2024 and beyond
“When we fight we win!”
But we didn’t win.
And what does that mean? We didn’t work hard enough? We didn’t have enough spirit?
Not so. It was a hell of a campaign. All those organizers, all those volunteers, knocking on doors, making calls, all that money raised. Remarkable what happened in such a short time.
Or does this loss mean the other side was smarter than us and more deserving. Well, that can’t be true. I mean, just look at them.
So what is true.
This fact for sure…
Politics is easier for them than it is for us.
Because they have one big advantage. Very big. The biggest…
They’re going with the flow of human history. They have the human operating system working for them and we don’t. Evolution has their back.
What do I mean by that? I’ll show you by telling you six hard truths.
If you hate them, I get it, because I hate them. I really hate them. But hating them doesn’t make them any less true.
And let me give you a warning…
I’m going to go deep and it’s going to get dark.
I’m sorry about that, but the trouble we’re in goes deep and people are hurting really badly, and I want to honor that hurting. A short blog post would not be enough.
So why am I talking about the human operating system?
First, because…
I want us to feel for ourselves.
I want us to get very, very clear that we’re taking on the biggest political challenge there is, much bigger than the ruinations of the Trumpers, the oligarchs, and the corporatists combined.
I want us to know the game we’re really in because then and only then can we get down to the deepest possible compassion for ourselves. Deeper than what most people ever get to in their lives.
Second, and here’s the good news, because…
The more deeply we feel for ourselves, the more fiercely we will fight for ourselves.
And for the people we care about. And for what we believe in. And for the future we want for our children.
Of course we need the Democratic Party to step up and change its ways, because…
Back in the 1990s, the Democratic leadership deliberately abandoned working families, which was its long–time base.
In fact, some Party leaders bragged they’d killed the New Deal. They turned their backs on their base so they could attract big donors, like investment bankers and the super wealthy. And it worked. They raised more money than ever.
All these years later, the Party is still following that self–destructive strategy. It’s still hemorrhaging working people. The 2024 election is proof of that.
Here’s a puzzle. During his term, Biden did lots of good stuff. So why wasn’t he more popular? And Kamala offered lots of good stuff during her campaign. So why didn’t she get the votes she needed.
It’s because stuff doesn’t count for much when what you really need is a radical transformation of a system that hurts so many people year after year. And…
When you’re hurting, stuff is just not enough.
So we need the leadership of the Dems to get its act together and fix this problem and fix it right now. There are lots of people talking about that and I’ll leave it to them.
But I believe we need to have a deeper conversation as well because our political strategies don’t stand alone. They have to…
Contend with the human operating system.
Which is the very source of human behavior. And the source of so much trouble for those of us who have our hearts set on making a better world.
Now let’s dive in and look at the deepest reasons why politics is harder for us. But as you read, please keep remembering that it’s in the darkest places that we find the deepest compassion.
1. Our tribal past still runs us.
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 always 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. 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.
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 to 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. 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 just these four: 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.
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.
Super–cooperation is 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. 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, 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 inside a 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 got the job done.
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 most likely would 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. Exploitation diminishes people, and causes dissension, and the tribe couldn’t afford that, and so did not allow it.
Instead…
They wanted everyone to be at their the best.
Similarly, our ancestors didn’t allow the mistreatment or neglect of children, like what’s widespread in our mass societies today. A tribe could not afford to wreck its children. They needed every single person to be an A-plus contributor, so they treated their children with great care.
You know the saying 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.
And guess what? Our ancestors who made the transition from troop to tribe were…
The very first community organizers.
They didn’t just organize one particular community. They organized the very concept and reality of community.
Now, I’ve been saying happy things about the tribal way of life. 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 our 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 the tribe. We loved that secure 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, is so much happier than the relentless daily power struggles of a might–makes–right troop.
So hooray for our fiercely egalitarian tribes. They brought us so many blessings. But they also brought us…
Trouble.
Because…
There’s an inside and an outside to our tribes.
Inside 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.
What do the following things have in common?
Hating people who are of a different race than us.
Hating people who have a different religion than us.
Hating people who have a different gender identity than us.
Hating people from a different social class than us.
Hating people because they’re in a different political party than us.
These are incarnations of the brutal boundary issue of tribalism.
The good things about tribalism we keep within 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 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 this if there’s a mutual benefit. For example, we might team up with a neighboring tribe so together we can defend ourselves against a dangerously 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 thinking about threatening us, we immediately see them as…
An existential threat.
Which means it’s a matter of life and death. And so we get to do to them whatever we think we need to do. We claim the right to attack and kill.
Add all this up and it means…
Our tribal boundaries are bloody and brutal.
Tribalism has been the secret to 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.
Crucially, 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 has 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.
We can’t get rid of it overnight, or in a dozen years. It’s not just in a few genes that maybe we could modify or excise. Our genome as a whole is tribal.
Why did evolution add this divisive and damning boundary feature into our operating system? I don’t know, and it doesn’t know, and it doesn’t care, because it can’t care…
Because it has no heart.
So…
The tribal way of life which made us is now breaking us.
It’s so much easier to go with the tribal flow than to oppose it, because it’s built into us at the deepest level.
Which means it’s easier to make things worse, instead of making them better.
2. Tribal reality trumps real reality.
Back in our hunter-gatherer times, we humans loved to tell stories. Especially stories about our own tribe, because those stories pulled the tribe closer together.
But we also used stories to set us apart from other tribes. For example, we invented a flattering origin story for our tribe. We conjured up a superhero ancestor to increase tribal pride. And we devised a god of our own who chose our tribe as his favorite.
We kept developing the story of our tribe until it was no longer just a tale told around the campfire at night. It became so encompassing…
We lived inside it.
It became our world. It made us feel very deeply held, much more so than any chimpanzee has ever felt in its might-makes-right troop.
And now we lived in two realities at once…
Tribal reality and real reality.
Our tribal reality was the glue that held our tribe together, so it was primary. It kept us surviving and thriving.
But…
We needed it to work in partnership with real reality.
It didn’t matter if our origin story was fantastical or if the gods we made up were bizarre, it didn’t matter how crazy we got around the edges, as long as we could manage to stay in touch with real reality enough to practice our core discipline of survival, then we were okay.
But what if a tribe allowed fiction to invade that core and corrupt it? What if people got the idea into their heads that nutritious roots and berries were invented by the devil and should be shunned, or that poisonous plants had magic powers and were good to eat?
That tribe would be gone overnight.
What if elders started teaching children unreal lessons? What if they threw away their fire–starting tools, their bows and drills, and taught that fire could only be started with a mystical incantation and only when the gods were happy with us?
That tribe would regress into the rigors of a pre-fire life.
And once you deleted this kind of hard–won knowledge from group memory, it might take generations for the group to rediscover how to tame fire, if they ever did.
We’re living in a time when we need to get real, more real than we’ve ever been, because we’re up against crises we can’t story our way out of. We need to take smart and strategic action. We’ve invented the scientific method, and we need to call on it, because…
Science is a discipline of real reality.
Not that science is the answer to everything because it’s produced harmful results, like nuclear weapons, as well as good things, like medical advances.
But this explains why so many people trapped in tribalism have turned against science. Reality messes with their tribal stories and they can’t handle that.
But this explains why so many people trapped in tribalism have turned against science.
Reality messes with their tribal stories and they can’t handle that.
And we who want to make a better world have to work against this ancient suck of tribal stories. So it’s no wonder politics is harder for us.
3. A lie counts as the truth if you need it to make your tribal story work.
How can all these MAGA people believe Trump’s bald–faced, brazen lies? They’re not even clever lies, just down–and–dirty stupid lies.
The answer to that is simple, but it’s depressing because it says something so discouraging about us as a species.
If a lie makes our social reality work better, if it holds our tribe together better, then…
It stops being a lie and becomes part of our tribal truth.
Maybe somewhere down deep we know it’s a lie, but we stay vigilant and keep that knowledge buried.
And there’s one Big Lie that all human tribes tell themselves…
My tribe is exceptional.
Which means we are not like those others. We’re better than them. And always have been and always will be.
Every tribe believes this, even though it’s impossible for every tribe to be better than all the others. I mean, duh, that makes no sense. But this lie is essential to the tribal mentality.
First we established our own identity in contrast to the identities of other tribes. Then we added the value judgement that we were better than every other tribe.
And then…
We turned us into good people and them into bad people.
Even though we were really all just basic human beings running on the same operating system. But when we imagined that we were better than everyone else, we felt more deserving, which gave us a big ego boost and made us feel more motivated to fight for our tribe.
Then we took the next step in the arms race of tribal stories. We invented sacredness…
We decided we weren’t just better, we were holy.
We weren’t just good people, we were…
Demigods.
Our enemies weren’t just bad people, they were…
Demons.
And just that quickly we opened the door to unrestrained slaughter.
We were now prepared to go nuclear on each other, because if our enemies were less than us, if they were actually less than human, and worse, if they were dangerously demonic, that made them an urgent and terrible threat, and so if we engaged in no–limit violence against them, even pre–emptively, that counted as righteous action.
But in the very moment we turned our enemies into imagined demons…
We turned ourselves demonic for real.
It’s so easy to go with the flow of turning real people into tribal fictions. It’s backed by tens of thousands of years of human history. It’s a hell of a force. It’s something we have to work against as we try to create a more compassionate world.
So again, it’s no wonder politics is harder for us.
4. Tribal paranoia makes us do exactly the wrong thing.
If we believe that only the people in our own tribe are trustworthy, that means every other person in every other tribe is to be feared. And what’s the word for that?
Paranoia.
It was bad enough in our hunter–gatherer days when our worlds were smaller and we were only in contact with a limited number of other tribes.
But now we’re in contact with a global population of billions. If, apart from our own group, however we define it, everybody else on the face of the planet is our enemy, either currently or potentially in the future, that’s a whole hell of a lot of people to fear.
And if enemies and possible enemies make up the great majority of our species, then…
Why would we fight to save it?
We need to flip this script and take a revolutionary leap and become species–oriented. But instead, as a species, we’re doing the reverse. We’re following a strategy of…
Regression.
When we feel threatened, our first impulse is to retreat even deeper into our tribal fiction, because…
It feels like security, it feels like home.
But this is exactly the wrong thing for us to do.
The idea of a trans–tribal society is a pale, intellectual vision, while…
Tribalism is a vivid, visceral compulsion rooted deep in our genes.
Which makes it very, very hard to fight for our species in the same fiercely instinctive way we fight for our tribes.
Regression answers the puzzle of why large numbers of people vote against their own best economic interests. And why they stick with a leader who enacts policies that make them poorer and their lives harder.
It’s not stupidity. There’s a simple rule at play…
When you get scared, go more tribal.
Always obey the ancient drive to belong no matter what you have to sacrifice for that.
We’re set up for defeat by…
A paradox.
Belonging to our tribe is more important to us than survival, because for most of our history, tribal belonging has been…
The first requirement for survival.
What feels best to us is now what’s worst for us. If we continue to indulge ourselves in unrestrained tribalism, which has been the key to our survival, our species will die, and, ironically, every last one of our supposedly self–protecting tribes with it.
Our tribes have always been our units of survival, and that’s why we’ve bonded with them so intensely.
However, we’ve never bonded with our species because there was no survival value in that.
But we’ve become a global community, so now we need to leave our tribal past behind and…
Put our species first.
This takes serious personal effort and deep inner work and a difficult shift in mindset which is so much harder than going with the ancient flow.
Tribalism teaches us to fear people who are not like ourselves, but what we really need to be afraid of is…
Tribalism itself.
And then we need to do everything we can to disarm it.
5. We’re giving up on ourselves.
In our modern era, it turns out we’re not able to get rid of our tribal past. And the tribal way of life is not working. It can’t work because it was designed for small groups where everyone knew everyone else and was accountable to the group. It was designed for 30 people at a time, not 30 million or 300 million.
We don’t know how to make our mass mega–societies work. We just don’t. We can coordinate a whole lot of people to some degree. But we have not been able to get large numbers of people to live in deep, sustained cooperation with each other.
So here we are at the height of our numerical success and our technical prowess, and this is when we find ourselves facing the very real possibility of extinction.
Look at this sad world and you see nation after nation in trouble, wrestling with problems they don’t know how to solve. You see them giving up on democracy, because…
It’s too hard.
And then going all in for authoritarianism, a big scary word which simply means…
Moral abdication.
When a large number of people get overwhelmed with making tough decisions in a complex world filled with difficult moral dilemmas, they just give up. Then pivot and pick…
A Leader who will make all their decisions for them and tell them what to do.
It doesn’t matter to them if the Leader is a buffoon, a braggart, an idiot, and morally corrupt. They don’t care if their lives get worse, or if they have to sacrifice and suffer because the Leader is making bad decisions, because…
They just want to be free of responsibility.
Whatever it takes.
And what we’re seeing in the global shift toward authoritarianism that that…
We as a species are giving up on ourselves.
We’re giving up on humanness itself. And that’s so dangerous because…
There’s no one to take care of us but us.
So of course when we activists and organizers call on people to step up and join us in taking vigorous, decisive action to shape a better future, our call is impulsively refused by so many who are deep in despair. Which makes our work really hard.
6. Nihilistic tribes endanger all of us.
Given that we, as a species, have stopped believing in ourselves, and stopped fighting for ourselves like we need to fight, it’s no surprise that despair is in the ascendancy, that it’s going global.
What we’ve got as a result of all our intractable problems ganging up on us all at once is…
Despair that takes people so deep into helplessness, they erupt into rage.
The rage of destruction.
How do you form a nihilistic tribe? You take a traditional tribe and you remove the inside part…
The mutual nurturance and mutual advocacy.
You get rid of the sweetness, but…
You keep the us-versus-them boundary part.
You keep the brutal and bloody part.
So you get…
The downside of tribalism without the upside.
This kind of tribalism cannot sustain the life of our species. It’s a premature surrender to death. Nihilists are…
Dying before they’re dead.
What do people do when they get lost inside their rage and can’t find their way back out? They decide to…
Burn it all down.
Which is the ultimate in despair, and the ultimate in rage.
How do nihilists end up in such a bad place? It’s because, despite their bravado, nothing really means anything to them anymore.
It’s hell of a challenge to play against the game of traditional tribalism. But to play against this vicious new game of nihilism, is many times more difficult.
The worst thing about these new tribes is that…
Nihilists see any offer of nurturance as an existential threat.
And it is a threat, not to them personally, but to the nihilist way of life which they are holding onto with a death grip.
So if you come to them with gifts, offering to improve their lives, they see you as the enemy. They checkmate themselves by themselves.
We’ve got an alternative: trans-tribal nurturance.
Take a breath if you want. What I’ve given you is a lot. And none of it is easy or fun. But…
This is reality.
It’s what we’re up against when we try to organize human beings politically.
And here’s another problem, a bonus hard truth. And aren’t you happy to hear there’s one more?
Most people hate politics.
They hold it in contempt and want nothing to do with it. Except maybe for the gossipy bits.
But…
Politics is how we do our collective moral decision-making.
It’s…
How we decide to take care of each other. Or not.
It’s how we decide to work together. Or not.
It’s how we decide to save ourselves. Or not.
And this means…
If we fail at our politics, our species will fail.
And right now we’re failing more than we’re succeeding.
So what do we need? First…
We need our politics to be genomic.
Which means playing a bigger and deeper game. It means doing our political work at the level of the human operating system. We need to understand the human psyche and human motivation all the way down to the bottom, down to the source. And we need to take our treacherous OS into account every time we design a political strategy or campaign or action.
Second…
We need our politics to be trans-tribal.
Because divisive, tribal–based politics can’t cure the tribal fundamentalism that’s killing us.
What does “trans–tribal” mean? It means…
We’re transcending the tribalism of our hunter–gatherer ancestors, with its compulsive divisiveness.
And…
We’re transcending the new tribalism of the nihilists, with its commitment to death.
And in this transcending, in playing against the tribal way of life, we’re actually opposing our operating system. Remarkable! We’re the only species that can do this.
We live in a time when it’s possible for individuals to take the first giant step into a trans–tribal future. There are so many more steps necessary and I don’t know how far we’ll be able to go, but…
Why not go as far as we can?
Here’s something I find encouraging. An awful lot of activists and organizers are already denizens of the trans–tribal realm, and day by day are living their way deeper into it.
There are blessings that come with this new kind of human togetherness. When you go trans–tribal, you get to enjoy reaching across boundaries to make deep and lasting friendships. And sweet intimate partnerships. And mixed families. And you get to take delight in bringing very different people together in common cause.
Tribalists and nihilists don’t get to do this. They have to stay within their boundaries and they miss out on so much. And look what they’re doing to their kids, restricting them, diminishing them, scaring them about anyone not like them, and…
Turning them into haters.
Going trans–tribal is the most important work any of us can do if we’re to have any hope at all of saving our species.
Sure climate change is an urgent threat, but it’s secondary. If we can’t recruit large numbers of people into working cooperatively and coherently toward becoming one unified global tribe, grounded in mutual nurturance and mutual advocacy, then we’re never going to solve the climate problem or so many other problems we’re facing.
So going trans–tribal gives us…
The sweet satisfaction of the deepest meaning.
And now for a really radical idea. What if in the course of practicing our trans–tribal politics we make the tribalists and nihilists…
Envy us.
Because of the personal growth we get to do, because of the relationships we get to have, because of the deep meaning inherent in our work, and because we get to shake off the grievous tribal harness of the past.
Going trans–tribal is a way of taking care of ourselves that goes way beyond the typical how–to advice about taking a hot tub and getting a massage at the end of a hard week.
We deserve to do this deepest kind of self–care, just because. But it matters politically as well.
Back in my 20s and 30s I was what I call a “sacrificial–savior activist.” Which means…
I’m sacrificing myself to save you.
Or to save my community. Or to save the world. Which is what I thought I was doing.
I saw lots and lots of activists working hard to make things better, really a lot, but not nearly enough. There was so much more work to be done.
So I figured I had to do more. I should do the work of two or three or four. Even though I was already maxxed out.
This sacrificial approach to activism hurt me and diminished me and made me less effective instead of more effective.
And where did this mistake come from? It came from caring about people and the world. But my caring took a wrong turn and turned against me.
Truth is…
We need many, many more people in our movements.
But when you hear the phrase “nonprofit activist” or “community organizer” what picture comes to mind? An earnest but dragged–down burnout? That’s what way too many people see, and it’s not appealing.
During the years when I was a sacrificial leader, people patted me on the back and thanked me for my work and told me what a good guy I was…
But they did not want to live like me.
How great would it be, though…
If we could make trans-tribal politics attractive.
Massively attractive.
What if we could demonstrate with our lives that going trans–tribal is a good way to live. A very good way. Deeply rewarding.
What if we could actually make people envious so they would come to us and say, “Teach me how to live like you. I want the blessings you have.”
Does that sound like pie in the sky? Maybe. Time will tell. But every new person we attract is a victory deep with meaning.
And instead of babying people…
How about if we challenge them?
In the old days, everyone contributed to the welfare of the group all day every day and they felt good about it, really, really good.
Now what have we got?
Tens of millions who drift along, ignoring politics, doing nothing to nurture their community or nation or species. Maybe they’re overwhelmed by their lives. Maybe they’ve lost hope.
Tens of millions, like the MAGAs, who refuse to give up their privileges, their advantages, their unfair powers, their ability to exploit other people and make their living at the expense of people who are suffering. Even if that means the destruction of their country.
And how many people vote Republican while secretly hoping the Democrats win because they know the Democrats will make their lives better. But they’re not going to quit their tribal identity, not if it kills them.
And what are we activists and organizers supposed to do about all that? Are we supposed to play savior against those odds? No thank you.
And don’t we ever get to challenge those people to step up and do their personal work and grow up politically and have the guts to change and come join us and contribute to the welfare of everyone?
It’s not like we’re asking them to sacrifice and suffer, because…
They’d get to enjoy the very real rewards of their transformation.
And the life of a hater is hateful, and they’d get free of that.
When we activists and organizers live boldly as champions of trans–tribalism, when we take a stand with our lives for what’s best in humankind, when we show the way out of our tribal past into a better future, then…
Even when we’re losing, we’re still leading.
And here’s the best thing about going trans–tribal. We get to upgrade love…
We get to make of our love something way better than the tribal default evolution gave us.
Rich Snowdon
PS: If you’re interested in going deeper into the issues I’ve raised here, especially looking at how we activists and organizers can hold ourselves with deeper compassion, I’d be very glad to talk with you. You can contact me here.
