Through the Prism: We Are One?

Preview, in Snippets

You are unwittingly helping to construct the world in which you live

The story of life on Earth is the story of increasingly complex cooperation

We are born coalitionist

Your culture never really leaves you

Absorbing its stories and values and symbols until you no longer question their importance

Like the worldbuilding of a fantasy novel

How arbitrary and provisional it all feels

There is nothing more human than believing in collective narratives

Humans have the strange cognitive property of being able to be manipulated into feeling more or less related to someone than we objectively are

Your sense of identity literally drives your perception of what is true

Norms are so powerfully linked with our brains, they can even manipulate the senses

We don’t just think about moral violations--we feel them

Created at lightning-fast determinations that precede conscious awareness

Friends, by definition, are part of the social self

Tribalism is the systematic weaponization of the human Tribe Drive and will be one of the twenty-first century’s greatest military tools in global competition

It may be the greatest threat humanity faces

Once in-groups exist, by definition, so too do out-groups

Both feature and bug, curse and blessing

An “Us verses Them” zero-sum mentality

What appears to be philosophical opposition is largely just tribalism

It doesn’t matter how improbable our collective story about reality is--I believe it because you believe it

We are one

Empathy is incredibly expensive

Malice, enmity, resentments: these are the emotions driving many

Contempt is the dissolver of unions; be mindful when this emotion crests to the surface of your consciousness, because it is priming you to eliminate a relationship

Perhaps there is some ancient wisdom embedded in their policy preferences

The ability to feel and act out of compassion for others can have a huge effect on your overall health

Without communication, it appears, there can be no intercourse

The more effectively we depend on each other, the greater our capacity to reach a state of true independence

By some miracle, you’re able to transcend that separation

It has power, if only because we believe it does; and that’s enough; all that is required is that we keep showing up, and never stop asking each other, “What are you thinking about?”

Preludes and Themes

A quote from a book:

Every reasonable creature knows that the worst thing any creature can do all day is think of themselves. If there are troubles in your mind, you should think first of the troubles of others; it is the essence of liberation. That is, freedom begins the moment we forget ourselves.

― Dave Eggers, The Eyes and the Impossible

Another:

As I stand behind him, it occurs to me just how much trust we put in other people. Complete strangers, friends. Everybody. Dalton's just sitting there, relaxed, trusting that I'm not going to lose my temper and stab him in the back of the neck with a fork. Every time we get into a car, we trust everybody else on the road. Every time we walk on the sidewalk, we put our lives in other people's hands. We'd never even leave the house if we actually thought about how little control we have over living and dying.

― Coert Voorhees, The Brothers Torres

Lyrics from a song:

We Are One

by The Offspring (1992)

We are one with ourselves
We don't give a shit about anyone else
Well it won't be wrong until our day in the sun is gonna stop
The walls come tumbling down

We are one
We are free
We are headed for obscurity
We are one
We are weak
We are gonna make ourselves extinct

Let it go
We're gonna let it go
It's real, we are one
You know it's true
Don't fuck with us or we'll fuck with you
It's a mentality that kills the best
We better stop
The walls come tumbling down

We are one
We are free
We are headed for obscurity
We are one
We are weak
We are gonna make ourselves extinct

We are one and it won't be news
When we hang ourselves with one collective noose
Well, it won't be wrong until our day in the sun is gonna stop
The walls come tumbling down

The bigger they are
The harder they fall

Another:

Not One of Us

by Peter Gabriel (1980)

It's only water
In a stranger's tear
Looks are deceptive
But distinctions are clear

A foreign body
And a foreign mind
Never welcome
In the land of the blind

You may look like we do
Talk like we do
But you know how it is

You're not one of us
Not one of us
No you're not one of us
Not one of us
Not one of us
No you're not one of us

There's safety in numbers
When you learn to divide
How can we be in
If there is no outside

All shades of opinion
Feed an open mind
But your values are twisted
Let us help you unwind

You may look like we do
Talk like we do
But you know how it is

You're not one of us
Not one of us
No you're not one of us
You're not one of us
Not one of us
No you're not one of us

A recent news article:

Chechnya Is Banning Music That's Too Fast or Slow. These Songs Wouldn't Make the Cut

"Musical, vocal and choreographic" works will be limited to a tempo of 80 to 116 beats per minute (BPM) to "conform to the Chechen mentality and sense of rhythm," said Dadayev, according to the Russian state-run news agency TASS.

"Borrowing musical culture from other peoples is inadmissible," Dadayev said, per a translation by The Guardian. "We must bring to the people and to the future of our children the cultural heritage of the Chechen people. This includes the entire spectrum of moral and ethical standards of life for Chechens."

Russian media report that artists have until June 1 to rewrite any music that doesn't conform to the new rule, though it's not clear how it will be enforced.

A different article, which I must introduce with: I love both and have never understood the instinct to make it a comparison or competition, like a zero-sum game where the more you like one the less you have to like the other.

Religious Believers Prefer Dogs Over Cats — by a Lot

- A 2019 study in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion found that religious believers are more likely to own dogs than cats.

- Researchers found that hardcore evangelicals are less likely to own pets than more the progressive religious.

- Pet ownership also skews political: Democrats prefer cats while Republicans choose dogs.

. . . The other comment I have is more speculative. Western religion is based on top-down authority. God gives directives; humans follow. This plays well with the psychology of dogs (which, to be clear, we also love). Dogs understand reward and punishment. If they could read, they’d love the Bible.

Punishment doesn’t work on cats. They’re not designed that way. If you scream at a cat while he’s urinating on your carpet, he’s going to think, “Why is this ape yelling?” not “I shouldn’t be doing this.” You probably shouldn’t own a cat if you can’t come to terms with this feature of their psychology.

Cats understand rewards, which is why clicker training is so effective. They’ll never realize that urination + carpet = bad, but they will get that urination + litter box = treat, especially if you tether the treat to a clicker. (Clicker training also works for dogs, horses, and other animals.)

If you’re trained to believe in a god that doles out punishment to criminals and rewards the faithful, you’ll inherently understand dogs. By contrast, domesticated cats are the offspring of nature’s fiercest killing machine. They have no need for your punishment or deities, but they will accept your treats. Think of it as tithing.

A poem:

Matthew Shelton & Timothy Liu

BABEL

Scattered across the islands of the Galápagos archipelago there are half a dozen species of lizard that rely upon a method of communication comprised of what can only be called “push-ups.” When one lizard encounters another, each takes its turn bobbing head and torso up and down in a complex and jerky system of frantic interaction. By this means, lizards of each species establish territorial authority, reinforce social hierarchies, even engage in mating rituals.

It appears that these lizards evolved from a single species settling the islands from the mainland some 34 million years ago in what scientists have identified as two major waves of colonization. A small “Eastern Radiation” left two species endemic to San Cristóbal and Marchena, while the majority of lizards have come to inhabit the southern and western islands, spreading over time to the younger islands as the older were transported eastward, eventually eroding below sea level.

Each species has developed its own particular vocabulary, its own dialect of body language, to such an extent that each species might be said to “speak a different language.” Suffice it to say, when a lizard from one species encounters a lizard from another, bobbing head and torso up and down in a complex and jerky attempt at frantic interaction, try as they might they cannot understand each other. Lizards from one island are consequently unable to interbreed with lizards from another island. Without communication, it appears, there can be no intercourse.

—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
Tribute to Collaboration

And a word from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

eisce

n. the awareness of the infinitesimal role you play in shaping your own society--knowing that whenever you smile at a stranger, pronounce a word a certain way, laugh at a certain joke, or choose the slightly shinier apple, you are unwittingly helping to construct the world in which you live--a role both vanishingly small but also somehow daunting, making it that much harder to complain about the traffic, knowing that you are traffic.

Irish eisceacht, exception. Pronounced “ahy-shuh.”

You are unwittingly helping to construct the world in which you live.

The First Book

Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua D. Greene

I remember in college, way back in the 90s, getting into a debate with an acquaintance about the morality of homosexuality. He felt it was wrong, and provided his faith in the bible and his church's teachings to support his case. I told him that his evidence might support his argument, but I could see it wasn't the basis of his decision; he clearly had a strong gut reaction to the topic, immediate and automatic feelings at the mere mention of it, and was decided before we considered any evidence one way or the other. He didn't have to think, he just knew. And while I didn't sway his opinion, he had to admit I was right about his conviction coming from his "gut" and not his "head," and it made him pause and think.

Greene, in this fascinating and compelling book, posits that humans are essentially prosocial creatures and that groups--or tribes--are the primary unit of human evolution. We have evolved to instinctively cooperate with other members of our tribe because tribes do better in the world than individuals. Cooperation is self-interest. And the tribes that do best are those who out-compete other tribes. So, instinctively--biologically--we cooperate well within our own tribes and compete well against outside tribes. Which, in practice, makes for healthy communities, states, and nations that regularly experience conflict with and go to war against each other.

Our social instincts to cooperate are shaped by our tribes to automatically emerge as moral reactions.

Morality evolved (biologically) to promote cooperation within groups for the sake of competition between groups. The only reason that natural selection would favor the genes that promote cooperation is that cooperative individuals are better able to outcompete others.

However, different tribes, contexts, and experiences create different moralities. And since moral reactions emerge automatically--as "gut feelings"--other tribes automatically feel to us as different and wrong.

When tribes disagree, it’s almost always because their automatic settings say different things, because their emotional moral compasses point in opposite directions. Here we can’t get by with common sense, because our common sense is not as common as we think.

Us is primary. Humans instinctively favor Us over Me within tribes and Us over Them between tribes.

Tribes constantly warring against each other doesn't make for the safest, best world for all of us to live in, though. And, if you want to get along with others, you can’t trust your moral intuitions, for they exist for different purpose than inter-tribe harmony. So, after a long, deep dive into biology, neuroscience, psychology, and abstract philosophy to fully explain our situation, Greene proposes a way for us to overcome our tribal instincts for inter-group conflict: the traditional philosophy of Utilitarianism, or what he calls Deep Pragmatism.

Modern herders need to think slower and harder, but we need to do it in the right way. If we use our manual-mode reasoning to describe or rationalize our moral feelings, we’ll get nowhere. Instead of organizing and justifying the products of our automatic settings, we need to transcend them. Thus stated, the solution to our problem seems obvious: We should put our divisive tribal feelings aside and do whatever produces the best overall results. But what is “best”?

Greene makes a solid argument for Deep Pragmatism as the best approach for determining the Common Good, one that sits easily with my own instincts and philosophies--which means I enjoyed the final portion of the book but may not be the best judge of whether his approach is truly a convincing solution to this conundrum of human nature. Nevertheless, it's one worth reading and exploring. I also enjoyed the first parts of his book about biology and psychology but got bogged down in the abstract philosophy and found it a slog. Different readers might have different experiences. Regardless of enjoyment, this is a thoughtful, stimulating, and enlightening book.

That's the review. Here are numerous excerpts to more fully capture his thoughts (bolded emphasis, where it occurs, is added).

Our brains, like our other organs, evolved to help us spread our genes. For familiar reasons, our brains endow us with selfish impulses, automatic programs that impel us to get what we need to survive and reproduce. For less obvious reasons, our brains impel us to care about others, and to care about whether others do the same. We have empathy, love, friendship, anger, social disgust, gratitude, vengefulness, honor, guilt, loyalty, humility, awe, judgmentalism, gossip, embarrassment, and righteous indignation. These universal features of human psychology allow Us to triumph over Me, putting us in the magic corner, averting the Tragedy of the Commons.

These cognitive gizmos are used by all healthy human brains, but we use them in different ways. Our respective tribes cooperate on different terms. We have different ideas and feelings about what people owe one another and about how honorable people respond to threats. We are devoted to different “proper nouns,” local moral authorities. And we are, by design, tribalistic, favoring Us over Them. Even when we think we’re being fair, we unconsciously favor the version of fairness most congenial to Us. Thus, we face the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality: moral tribes that can’t agree on what’s right or wrong.

Solving a problem is often a matter of framing it in the right way. In this book I’ve tried to provide a framework for thinking about our biggest moral problems. Once again, we face two fundamentally different kinds of moral problems: Me versus Us (Tragedy of the Commons) and Us versus Them (Tragedy of Commonsense Morality). We also have two fundamentally different kinds of moral thinking: fast (using emotional automatic settings) and slow (using manual-mode reasoning). And, once again, the key is to match the right kind of thinking to the right kind of problem: When it’s Me versus Us, think fast. When it’s Us versus Them, think slow.

Modern herders need to think slower and harder, but we need to do it in the right way. If we use our manual-mode reasoning to describe or rationalize our moral feelings, we’ll get nowhere. Instead of organizing and justifying the products of our automatic settings, we need to transcend them. Thus stated, the solution to our problem seems obvious: We should put our divisive tribal feelings aside and do whatever produces the best overall results. But what is “best”?

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Why should any creature be social? Why not just go it alone? The reason is that individuals can sometimes accomplish things together that they can’t accomplish by themselves. This principle has guided the evolution of life on earth from the start. Approximately four billion years ago, molecules joined together to form cells. About two billion years later, cells joined together to form more complex cells. And then a billion years later, these more complex cells joined together to form multicellular organisms. These collectives evolved because the participating individuals could, by working together, spread their genetic material in new and more effective ways. Fast-forward another billion years to our world, which is full of social animals, from ants to wolves to humans. The same principle applies. Ant colonies and wolf packs do things that no single ant or wolf can do, and we humans, by cooperating with one another, have become the earth’s dominant species.

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Morality is a set of psychological adaptations that allow otherwise selfish individuals to reap the benefits of cooperation. . . .

The essence of morality is altruism, unselfishness, a willingness to pay a personal cost to benefit others. . . .

Biologically speaking, humans were designed for cooperation, but only with some people. Our moral brains evolved for cooperation within groups, and perhaps only within the context of personal relationships. Our moral brains did not evolve for cooperation between groups (at least not all groups).

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Morality is nature’s solution to the problem of cooperation within groups, enabling individuals with competing interests to live together and prosper. What we in the modern world need, then, is something like morality but one level up. We need a kind of thinking that enables groups with conflicting moralities to live together and prosper. In other words, we need a metamorality. We need a moral system that can resolve disagreements among groups with different moral ideas, just as ordinary, first-order morality resolves disagreements among individuals with different selfish interests.

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Nowhere is our concern for how others treat others more apparent than in our intense engagement with fiction. Were we purely selfish, we wouldn’t pay good money to hear a made-up story about a ragtag group of orphans who use their street smarts and quirky talents to outfox a criminal gang. We find stories about imaginary heroes and villains engrossing because they engage our social emotions, the ones that guide our reactions to real-life cooperators and rogues.

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Cooperation evolves, not because it’s “nice” but because it confers a survival advantage. . . .

From simple cells to supersocial animals like us, the story of life on Earth is the story of increasingly complex cooperation. Cooperation is why we’re here, and yet, at the same time, maintaining cooperation is our greatest challenge. Morality is the human brain’s answer to this challenge. . . .

We have cooperative brains, it seems, because cooperation provides material benefits, biological resources that enable our genes to make more copies of themselves. Out of evolutionary dirt grows the flower of human goodness.

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Empathy, familial love, anger, social disgust, friendship, minimal decency, gratitude, vengefulness, romantic love, honor shame, guilt, loyalty, humility, awe, judgmentalism, gossip, self-consciousness, embarrassment, tribalism, and righteous indignation: These are all familiar features of human nature, and all socially competent humans have a working understanding of what they are and what they do. . . . All of this psychological machinery is perfectly designed to promote cooperation among otherwise selfish individuals . . . There’s currently no way to prove that all of this psychological machinery evolved, either biologically or culturally, to promote cooperation, but if it didn’t, it’s a hell of a coincidence.

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It is plausible, if not inevitable, that we are more aware of the pain we suffer at the hands of others than of the pain that others suffer by our hands. Our society’s nervous systems—the media, word of mouth—are far more likely to broadcast messages about our own group’s painful experiences than about the painful experiences of others. As a result, our moral biases may, in some cases, be built into the systems that we use to perceive events in the world.

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The VMPFC (emotional center of the brain), in healthy people, integrates many pieces of information gained from experience and translates that information into an emotional signal that gives the decision maker good advice about what to do. And once again, this advice, this gut feeling, may precede any conscious awareness of what’s good or bad and why. This explains why people with VMPFC damage make disastrous real-life decisions, despite their good performance on standard laboratory reasoning tests. They “know,” but they don’t “feel,” and feelings are very helpful.

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The Tragedy of the Commons is averted by a suite of automatic settings--moral emotions that motivate and stabilize cooperation within limited groups. But the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality arises because of automatic settings, because different tribes have different automatic settings, causing them to see the world through different moral lenses. The Tragedy of the Commons is a tragedy of selfishness, but the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality is a tragedy of moral inflexibility. There is strife on the new pastures not because herders are hopelessly selfish, immoral, or amoral, but because they cannot step outside their respective moral perspectives.

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Our taste for punishment is useful, but it’s not infallible. Just as our taste for fat and sugar can make us obese in a world full of milkshakes, our taste for retribution can crate a criminal justice system that satisfies our taste for punishment while undermining our social health.

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When tribes disagree, it’s almost always because their automatic settings say different things, because their emotional moral compasses point in opposite directions. Here we can’t get by with common sense, because our common sense is not as common as we think.

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Appeals to “rights” function as an intellectual free pass, a trump card that renders evidence irrelevant. Whatever you and your fellow tribespeople feel, you can always posit the existence of a right that corresponds to your feelings. If you feel that abortion is wrong, you can talk about a “right to life.” If you feel that outlawing abortion is wrong, you can talk about a “right to choose.” If you’re Iran, you can talk about your “nuclear rights,” and if you’re Israel you can talk about your “right to self-defense.” “Rights” are nothing short of brilliant. They allow us to rationalize our gut feelings without doing any additional work.

Rights and their mirror images, duties, are the perfect rhetorical weapons for modern moral debate. As we saw in the preceding chapters, our automatic settings issue moral commands, telling us that certain things are not to be done while other things are to be done. These feelings correspond more or less perfectly to the concepts of rights and duties. If we feel that an action is simply not to be done, we can express this feeling by saying that it violates people’s rights. And likewise, if we feel that an action is simply to be done, we can express that feeling by appealing to a corresponding duty. . . .

Talk of rights and duties aptly expresses our moral emotions in two ways. First, when our gut reactions tell us what we must and must not do, these commands come across as nonnegotiable, reflecting the inflexibility of our automatic settings. . . . Such feelings can be overridden, but the feeling itself is, so to speak, unwilling to negotiate. . . .

Second, we embattled moralists love the language of rights and duties because it presents our subjective feelings as perceptions of objective facts. We like this because our subjective feelings often feel like perceptions of things that are [external], even when they are not. . . .

Arguing about rights is a dead end. When you appeal to rights, you’re not helping to resolve the issue. Instead you’re pretending that the issue has already been resolved in some abstract realm to which you and your tribespeople have special access.

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Why are social conservatives opposed to “big government”? It’s not because social conservatives are staunch individualists, like their libertarian allies. I suspect that social conservatives are wary of the U.S. federal government for the same reason that they’re wary of the United Nations. Both are trans-tribal power structures, willing and able to take from Us to give to Them. (Or to impose the values of Them on Us). Social conservatives are perfectly happy to give money to their churches and other local institutions that serve their fellow tribespeople. But when the federal government takes their money, they think, it goes not to hardworking people who just need a helping hand, but to “welfare queens”—to Them. It’s not accident, I think, that the former slave states are also the states that (in the eastern United States) most reliably vote Republican. For many, what appears to be a philosophical opposition to “big government” is, I suspect, largely just tribalism.

What appears to be philosophical opposition is, I suspect, largely just tribalism.

Interlude

A recent news article:

The Politics of Fear Itself

Trump and his supporters have a deep investment in promoting fear. At almost every Trump rally, the former president tries to frighten his supporters out of their wits. . . .

For many Trump supporters, then, fear is not so much the cause of their support for the former president as a justification for it. They use fear to rationalize their backing for Trump. They have a burning need to promote catastrophism, even if it requires cognitive distortion, spreading falsehoods, and peddling conspiracy theories.

But why? What’s driving their ongoing, deepening fealty to Trump?

Part of the explanation is partisan loyalty. Every party rallies around its presidential nominee, even if the nation is flourishing under the stewardship of an incumbent from the other party. . . .

Human beings have a natural tendency to organize around tribal affiliations. . . .

Trump not only validated hate; he made it fashionable. One friend observed to me that Trump makes his supporters feel as if they are embattled warriors making a last stand against the demise of everything they cherish, which is a powerful source of personal meaning and social solidarity. They become heroes in their own mythological narratives. . . .

Malice, enmity, resentments: These are the emotions driving many Trump supporters. They’re why they not only accept but delight in the savagery and brutishness of Trump’s politics. They’re why you hear chants of “Fuck Joe Biden” at Trump rallies. His base constantly searches for new targets, new reasons to be indignant. It activates the pleasure center of their brain. It’s a compulsion loop.

A concept from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Lumus

the poignant humanness beneath the spectacle of society

Your culture never really leaves you. Its rhythms are encoded in your heartbeat, its music embedded in the sound of your voice. Its images make up the raw material of your wildest dreams, your deepest fears, even your attempts to rebel against it. So it’s hard not to get swept up in the spectacle of it all, absorbing its stories and values and symbols until you no longer question their importance. It’s as if there’s a circus whirling around you all the time, so overwhelming that you keep forgetting it’s there.

But there are still moments when you manage to tune out the fanfare--taking time in nature, in solitude, or in some other culture entirely--getting away long enough so that when you return to normal life again, you’re able to look around with fresh eyes, and see how abnormal it really is.

You take in all the scenes and sideshows happening around you. It doesn’t quite feel like reality anymore, more like the worldbuilding of a fantasy novel. You have no idea who came up with this stuff, but you can’t help but be impressed by their tireless dedication to fleshing out even the most mundane details. The vaunted marble halls of politics and business and religion and the arts, each buttressed by its own rules and standards and practices, booming with the echoes of a billion conversations that everyone seems to take so very seriously. Rituals of status and fashion, the mythology of the markets, pop-culture think pieces, and waves upon waves of breaking news. You wonder how you ever managed to get so invested, following all these stock characters, and all their little dramas and debates. Who said what to whom? What does it all mean? What will happen next?

You’re struck by how arbitrary and provisional it all feels. Though it has all the weight of reality, you know it could just as easily have been something else. You realize that all of our big ideas and sacred institutions were designed and built by ordinary human beings, soft-bellied mammals, who shiver when they’re cold, dance around when they have to pee, and lash out when they feel powerless. So much of our culture exists because someone was hungry once, someone was bored, someone was afraid, someone wanted to impress a mate, prove someone wrong, or leave their kids a better life.

The circus is so big and bright and loud, it’s easy to believe that that’s the real world and you live somewhere outside it. But beneath all these constructed ideals, there is a darker heart of normalcy, a humble humanness, that powers the whole thing. We’re all just people. We go to work and play our roles as best we can, spinning our tales and performing our tricks, but then we take off our makeup and go home, where we carry on with our real lives. None of us really knows what is happening, what we’re doing, where we’re going, or why. Still we carry on, doing what we can to get through it. Even the roar of the city can sometimes feel like a cry for help.

Inevitably, within a few days or weeks at most, you’ll find yourself getting swept right back into the big show, even though you know it’s all just an act. That’s perhaps the most amazing thing about a society: even if none of us fully believes in it, we’re all willing to come together and pretend we do, doing our part to hold up the tent. If only so we can shut out the darkness for a little while, and offer each other the luxury of thinking that little things matter a great deal.

We know it’s all so silly and meaningless, and yet we’re still here, holding our breath together, waiting to see what happens next. And tomorrow, we’ll put ourselves out there and do it all again. The show must go on.

Latin lumen, light, brightness + humus, a particularly rich and dark component of soil, made of decayed organic matter. Pronounced “loo-muhs.”

A society: even if none of us fully believes in it, we’re all willing to come together and pretend we do.

The Second Book

Our Tribal Future: How to Channel Our Foundational Human Instincts into a Force for Good by David R. Samson

A fascinating book that incorporates a vast amount of information from biology, anthropology, neuroscience, sociology, and other fields devoted to the study of human nature from many diverse perspectives, all as they consider our innate coalitionary instinct to form cooperative in-groups in opposition to competing out-groups. This is what Samson calls the Tribe Drive. He shares a deep, nuanced understand of this core human feature and its ramifications as both a blessing and a curse: being part of tribes makes us healthier and more whole, but at the cost of perceiving other tribes as enemies.

The reason the curse came with the blessing is because humans have the strange cognitive property of being able to be manipulated into feeling more or less related to someone than we objectively are. When it’s the former--scientists call this pseudokinship--we are overcome with empathy and perform amazing acts of altruism by donating to, advocating for, adopting, and loving humans that are not related to us; when it’s the latter--scientists call this pseudospeciation--we can be convinced that these same non-related humans are akin to vermin, cockroaches, pathogens, and other various animals we consider nasty. This is the playground of the propagandist ideologue that uses the power of the cursed bug in our hardware to drum up xenophobic hatred of the out-group.

Samson proposes many ways to maximize the blessing of our tribal instincts to better our lives and to counter the curse by minimizing conflict between tribes. For all the knowledge and information he offers, though, I found the pragmatic sections disappointing. He's too literal in his desire to restructure society as a collection of tribes, delving into group cohabitation arrangements and communes, and too naively idealistic and utopian in his answers to international conflict. Nevertheless, the tools he provides for understanding our Tribe Drive make this a book well worth reading. Definitely recommended.

That's the review. Here are numerous excerpts to more fully capture his thoughts (bolded emphasis, where it occurs, is added, as are my thematic headings).

TRIBAL IDENTITIES

Tribal signals are everywhere, but we are, for the most part, not conscious of them. They effuse around us, and the computational powers of our brains are programmed to spend incredible amounts of energy churning out predictive models of human behavior on the basis of these cues. Just as body language is an important component of human communication, so, too, is our tribal language. If humanity is to survive the twenty-first century, we need to become conversationally fluent in the tribal languages instinctually spoken by different coalitions within our species.

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Our perception [via our five senses] did not evolve to understand reality. Its primary purpose evolved to fulfil the prime directive: find food, have sex, and don’t die in the attempt. The latest scientific data on our perceptual equipment is revealing a totally counterintuitive fact. If the choice is between truth or fitness—fitness trumps truth. . . .

When a human is forced to pick between truth and tribe, truth ends up in second place. . . .

Your sense of identity literally drives your perception of what is true. . . .

Our brains, crafted by evolution and subject to the Tribe Drive, rationally influence us to happily discard the truth of reality if it ever conflicts with the truth of our tribe.

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There is nothing more human than believing in collective narratives. These tribal narratives were the glue that kept our camps, bands, and tribal signals and symbols coordinated in collective action and resilient to a host of existential challenges throughout human evolution. . . . Faith is the ultimate fitness coalitionary alliance signal. It says to your compatriots, “It doesn’t matter how improbable our collective story about reality is—I believe it because you believe it. We are one.”

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There are several trade-offs of living in a camp, embedded in one band of many that share language, ritual, and custom. The external-oriented cost is the propensity of in-groups to pseudospeciate out-groups by dehumanizing the “other.” The internal-oriented cost is the continuous threat of exile or capital punishment if one does not adhere to the social norms and rules of the group.

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Humans are wired in a way that makes a group experiencing adversity stronger and mentally more resilient—where the adversity itself is recollected with fondness and nostalgia.

How do we use this feature of the human code to bootstrap our honor groups? The answer is surprisingly simple—do challenging, hard, adversity-spurring activities together to forge stronger bonds with our life partners. . . .

Thus, if you are trying to find friends, a solid approach to assessing people of like mind is to look in places where such activities take place—whether it is a spin class, hot yoga, or martial arts. These activities need only to simulate adversity to start a chain reaction of bond building. For a non-physical example, adversity activities can be completely imagined. Cooperative video games, board games, and even tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) are ways to imagine and play out how a group could overcome adversity together. Nothing beats the real thing, though; camping, hiking, or any type of group activity that takes people out of their comfort zone generates valuable data of someone’s true nature.

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The forging of bonds between people by way of ritual weaves together powerful forces of attachment—shared history, experience, and overlapping goals glued together by sacred values such as honor and loyalty. Friendships, transcending kin selection and not held hostage by reproduction, are an incredible moral achievement by our species; rituals can cement these bonds in something beyond words, in action itself.

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US vs. THEM

All tribes are, in effect, a type of secret society, and the passwords to unlocking full rights and responsibilities of membership reside in the symbols used to verify that one is part of the tribe. . . . If others recognize your signals as honest, you pass the test and are treated with a positive bias and, buttressed by your shared identity protective cognition, given tribal privileges. Humanity had a new way to promote cooperation . . . but at a terrible, horrific cost. Once in-groups exist, by definition, so too do out-groups. It was both feature and bug, curse and blessing.

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“When we reach a certain level of familiarity with our close social others, to some extent our neurons don’t know the difference between ourselves and other people. . . . Our brains do this . . . by including familiar others in our neural representations of self, in our brain’s mapping of what is self and what is other, what is us and what is our friends.”
- Sara Rose Cavanagh, 2019

“The insula (insular cortex) activates when we eat a cockroach or imagine doing so. And the insula and amygdala activate when we think of the neighboring tribe as loathsome cockroaches. . . . This is central to how our brains process ‘us and them.’”
- Robert Sapolsky, 2018

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Norms are so powerfully linked with our brains, they can even manipulate the senses. One study demonstrated that visceral disgust made people more judgmental. Evolution crafted a brain from old parts. It works with what it’s given, and this results in embodied cognition that can be literally felt in our nervous system. Moral violations trigger the same neural stuff that makes you reflexively spit out bad food, gag, or vomit. This reflex protects you from ingesting pathogens and toxins. We don’t just think about moral violations—we feel them. The most powerful factors driving these cognitions are emotional and automatic. The implications are significant because this means that Us-Them distinctions, spurred on by the amygdala and insula, are created at lightning-fast determinations that precede conscious awareness.

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If you are jealous of a “friend,” that’s a good indicator that you aren’t actually friends. Friends, by definition, are part of the social self, and so if you feel bad about someone else’s success, it is likely you don’t consider them close to you on the self-identification scale. Scientists use a social intimacy scale that can measure self-identification by way of perceived inclusion of the other in the relationship. Friendships can vary in intensity, and a stronger friendship is one where you perceive things that benefit the other friend as though they benefited yourself. This is a simple visual way to assess the quality of your friendships; when your best friend succeeds, it should give you the same serotonin and dopamine rush as though you yourself were the victor.

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EMPATHY

The worst outcomes of tribalism are not the consequence of a moral crisis but in fact an energy crisis! The frontal cortex—the part of your brain that is the utilitarian calculator of whether or not it is worth doing the hard thing now for a better outcome later—undergoes serious cognitive strain when assessing whether or not to help a stranger or out-group. Close relationships do not get taxed this way, and so our empathy pool can be drawn on automatically and unconsciously with no cost to ourselves.

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Do we actually have the capacity to rationally take broader points of view, from which our interests are no more valid than the interests of others? . . . . Put simply, thinking impartially among all is energetically costly. . . .

Empathy is incredibly expensive. Several studies demonstrate that the cognitive “costs” of empathizing with someone distant are shown by increasing people’s cognitive load (i.e., making their frontal cortex work harder by forcing it to override a habitual behavior); they become less helpful to strangers but not to family members. “Empathy fatigue” can thus be viewed as a literal demonstration that the frontal cortex is challenged more and exhausted more readily when people are in a state of repeated exposure to out-group pain. This same cost, however, is not incurred among people considering their in-group. Human empathy, at times, appears feeble. Anyone with humanistic sensibility that “cares about you” truly does feel your pain, but to expand this same feeling to everyone is impossible because it’s too finite and expensive a resource to spread itself across billions of strangers.

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RACISM

Tribalism is the worst kind of manifestation from the Tribe Drive. It is the belief that different identity-based coalitions possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another. . . . If racism is the belief that skin color can distinguish people as superior or inferior, then tribalism—using skin color as a predictive factor in group identity—is the root code of this phenomenon. This is profound because if we want to solve racism, we have to understand tribalism.

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The science shows that Homo sapiens are not actually born racist—but we are born coalitionist. This is a godsend, because coalitions are, by nature, malleable. We can shape them in prosocial ways. We are not destined to be a racist species. With science’s help, it is a disease we can cure.

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HAPPINESS & MEANING

According to self-determination theory, humans need three foundational elements to live satisfactory lives. They need to feel that they are competent in their work, they need to feel that their life is being lived authentically, and they need to feel that they are socially connected. These are what positive psychologists call intrinsic values; the emerging science of happiness and well-being shows us that they are significantly more powerful predictors of a life well lived than extrinsic values such as money, status, and beauty.

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When people are actively engaged in a cause, their lives have more purpose . . . with a resulting improvement in mental health.

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By every factor—from our neural architecture to the kind of cultures we create and participate in—loneliness is one of the most powerful predictors of well-being. Lonely people exhibit (i) worse cognition, (ii) less resilience, (iii) less prosocial behaviors, (iv) less ability to learn and adapt, (v) more anxiety and depression, (vi) poorer immune strength, (vii) and live in a state of greater social risk. Ultimately, living the life of a loner is inherently more dangerous.

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Studies show that by nearly every metric, parents’ experienced happiness—moment to moment—bottoms out and marital satisfaction doesn’t return to normal levels until children leave home. That’s a long, hard dip in happiness. Yet, there also seems to be evidence that having children is one of the most powerful sources of meaning a human can experience. Attachment, specifically the connection experienced with another form of developing life, is often cited as the overriding factor that trumps the in-the-moment experienced pleasure of happiness. There is a magic in the struggle, a social struggle, that adds the spice of purpose to one’s life.

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There is a principle known as the dependency paradox. This is the idea that people are only as needy and insecure as their unmet needs. When effective communication meets the individual’s needs, they can then turn their attention outward. Therefore, the paradox is that the more effectively dependent people are with one another, the more independent and daring they become when facing the outside world. Although often contextualized within the context of pair-bonds, this applies to relationships of any type, and it can apply to groups too—the more effectively we depend on each other, the greater our capacity to reach a state of true independence.

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RANDOM

[Testosterone] is about the psychology of identification, status, and dominance. . . . Testosterone isn’t the aggression hormone—it is the status maintenance hormone. And if maintaining status requires one to be more generous, kind, and prosocial, testosterone will prime those behaviors. In one study this was demonstrated by elevating the participants’ sense of pride based on honesty. When subjects decided how many resources they would keep versus publicly contribute to common pools, testosterone actually prompted the players to reduce their lying in the game and increase their generosity. In the right context, where good reputations increase social standing, testosterone is prosocial.

POLITICS

Modern political tribalism is a tool of statecraft. There is growing evidence that tribalism is the systematic weaponization of the human Tribe Drive and will be one of the twenty-first century’s greatest military tools in global competition. It may be the greatest threat humanity faces.

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Political tribalism is a loyalty to the ideology of your political team irrespective of facts. In this framework, tribalists never concede an inch to other tribes. It is an “Us verses Them” zero-sum mentality, where “they” are seen as morally suspect and morally dangerous while “we” are morally righteous by comparison. . . . Political tribalism is about identities and the deeply rooted emotions that protect them from harm. Even lies themselves are not exempt. One study showed that even when you know your team is lying, it’s OK, because it’s for the moral good. “Your team’s lies are a sign of moral decay, but my team’s lies are morally justified."

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Moral panics are especially attractive to ideologues—as they serve as a gold rush of virtue currency to their tribe—they provide a way of usurping the current status hierarchy. . . . The weirder and more extreme the beliefs purported, the more virtue currency an adherent can rack up and use to attain greater tribal status.

That these partisan passions end up alienating potential allies who may otherwise (with a little humility and openness to inquiry) befriend is not the point. The point is to achieve status within their in-group. Along the way, they damage relationships, sow division, and push otherwise good people into defensive camps. They are a large part of the reason why so many people in our society have contempt toward each other and—in its worst expression—dehumanizing disgust for other members within it.

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Both the political left and right are guided by evolutionarily honed instincts. The hunter-gatherer groups of the Paleolithic selected camp and band members that were neither overly tyrannical, stingy with collective resources, nor prone to freeloading. Any of these would pose a grave threat to the stability of the camp. With a tyrant, you have a single human (typically male) attempting to monopolize mates and resources through coercion, resulting in an antisocial agent that threatens the well-being of everyone else in the group. Foragers are central place provisioners and therefore share calories they find in their environments in a kind of group calorie insurance policy. With freeloaders, you are put in just as much risk. If you have individuals in your camp that take resources without contributing to the overall welfare of the group, it is obviously a detriment. Both present serious, even existential problems to the survivability of the group. Thus, two strains of righteousness evolved, where humans were deemed immoral if they took more than they gave, didn’t share their winnings, or tried to use physical dominance to serve their own interests. The answer to this immorality . . . was capital punishment or excommunication from the group.

The mark of this moral evolution remains in both the left and the right today—with the politics of the left being focused more on legislation against monopolies and redistributing resources, and the politics of the right being more focused on anti-freeloading strategies that manifest in the form of fiscal conservatism. The politics of libertarianism are intrinsically anti-tyrannical, pushing against any government overreach. All politics then is a weird bleed-through of our evolved instincts as camp-dwelling creatures. This realization is a powerful mental inoculant that provides mental antibodies against the worst forms of political tribalism. Both parties, in their hearts, serve a moral end that exists because, not in spite of, being a prosocial species. Consider this the next time you look upon someone who identifies with another political tribe. Perhaps there is some ancient wisdom embedded in their policy preferences.

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One of the most effective ways to begin reversing our political tribalism is by removing contempt. Contempt is one of the most predictive expressions of behavior that foreshadows divorce in married couples. It is used by political parties to declare the other side unworthy of the benefits of public good. It is used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for abuse or torture. Contempt is the dissolver of unions. Be mindful when this emotion crests to the surface of your consciousness, because it is priming you to eliminate a relationship.

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In recognizing the enemy’s sacred symbols, you are also recognizing their right to be proud, their right to unity, and connection to their identity—all basic human needs.

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By positing group-level selection, Darwin deflected the blow of the paradox of how and why prosocial traits evolved: “Although a high standard of morality gives but a light or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe . . . an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another.” Yet this argument has a glaring deficit: destructive conflict is not eliminated, but punted up the hierarchical rung to the next level of intergroup interfacing, where the cancerous conflict can metastasize once more and spread even greater devastation.

This is important. It explains why cooperation has not run roughshod over competition. For example, two ethnic groups may opt not to go to war with each other by forming an alliance, but it could be to serve the function of becoming a super-tribal coalition that can exact even more catastrophic violence upon another population. Violence, death, and lethal competition in this model are not extinguished but delayed, only to be applied later on a greater scale. When Rome dominated their rivals with the testudo, a final tenet was enacted. The scale of cooperation—and conflict—was elevated to a higher multitier level, where in order for other groups to survive, they, too, would need to elevate cooperation as their dominant strategy. Empires and civilizations were born in this primordial supertribal soup, and so, too, was a level of warfare never before seen by our species.

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I want to live in a world where I have both irreplaceable relationships in my local honor group, camp, and community and where those irreplaceable relationships also receive the benefits of a super-tribal society that has roads, universities, hospitals, and police as an added layer of insurance for my in-group.

I want to live in a world where I have both irreplaceable relationships in my local honor group, camp, and community and where those irreplaceable relationships also receive the benefits of a super-tribal society that has roads, universities, hospitals, and police as an added layer of insurance for my in-group.

Concluding Thoughts

A recent article:

Our Bodies Are Chronically in “Threat Mode” - but Being Kind Recalibrates Our Nervous System

Being compassionate to others can actually reset our consistently stressed systems back into our default “rest mode”, causing all kinds of positive effects to our overall health. . . .

Our adrenaline-fueled, “on-the-go” lifestyles have us operating mainly in threat mode, which can be one of the reasons we contract a variety of different illnesses. . . .

The constant over-stimulation of our nervous systems caused by our fast-paced way of living also makes us much more inclined to jump to (often judgmental) conclusions about other people. This kind of quick judgment dulls our own ability to act out of compassion for others. That, in turn, leaves us operating in a constant threat mode, which has negative long-term effects on our health.

Kindness and compassion reset us into “rest mode”, starting in the nervous system.

The ability to feel and act out of compassion for others can have a huge effect on your overall health. . . .

Instead of a quick response that is often based on fear, anxiety or stress, our response time is slower and more deliberate, which tends to result in more effective, more creative and more compassionate actions. We are able to change the responses we have to events because we are allowing the executive control area of our brain to function at the highest level. . . .

In theory, over time, being kind and compassionate can actually slow down the aging process in some of the cells of our body.

Just as showing compassion can recalibrate our nervous systems out of threat mode and back into resting mode, experiencing compassion or kindness from others also has a positive impact on our systems. . . .

The positive ripple effect that comes from being kind doesn’t just impact our health, but it can also impact our interactions with others and set off a positive chain reaction with far-reaching benefits across entire communities. Resetting our own systems into resting mode by taking ourselves out of threat mode can allow us to process things more clearly and make better choices.

In a world where you can be pretty much anything, be kind. It’s good for your health.

A part of a concept from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Gnossienne

the awareness that someone you've known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life

. . . And yet, by some miracle, you’re able to transcend that separation. Over the course of years spent together, sharing your lives side by side, you feel something begin to take shape in the air between you, some third thing that takes on a life of its own. It’s like putting two images together and flickering them back and forth until they appear to spring into motion, infused with a life that wasn’t there in either one alone. When the interplay between you slows too much, the illusion is broken, and you recall your separateness. The best you can do is try to keep it going, keeping up the rhythm of all the little daily gestures and exchanges, the call-and-response of daily life, and hope it all works out.

There will always be a certain distance between us. Maybe the cynics are right, and love is only ever an illusion. But maybe it’s the sacred kind of illusion, like the shimmering blue gods who appear to shepherd children. It has power, if only because we believe it does. And that’s enough. All that is required is that we keep showing up, and never stop asking each other, “What are you thinking about?”

It’s not about getting an answer to the question. It’s the act of asking, of trying to reach across the gap, working through the mystery—that is what’s worth holding on to. That’s the feeling that must be kept alive, even if we never find the right words to express it.

It has power, if only because we believe it does. And that’s enough. All that is required is that we keep showing up, and never stop asking each other, “What are you thinking about?”

Summary, in Snippets