Tag: tribalism

• April 16, 2024

  Overcoming Tribalism: A New Way of Thinking

   

  The most important thing to understand about tribalism and gang warfare is that it is deeply damaging to human societies and that it always has been for tens of thousands of years. We like to think that tribalism is somewhere else. It’s not where we exist; it is very far away and primitive. But the fact is that tribalism is something that we all naturally fall into for various complicated reasons in human nature. We tend to affiliate with groups that will make us feel protected, initially the family and the family unit. But it constantly expands to include people we trust in more significant circumstances, expanding to community, culture, and nation.

  Studying the impact of tribalism and its consequences is an important part of the sociology and anthropology of all normal human communities. At the same time, we need to think about the destructive aspect of tribalism that results …

• May 3, 2018

  Tribalism is Killing Us. Let’s Stop for Strategic Reasons

  There is hope if people on the Left and progressives admit how human it is and how human they are to be tribalistic, angry, suspicious and bigoted.

  I am from the progressives, and at this stage of American history, there is no question that the lion’s share of actual violence, literal and structural, comes from the white nationalist Right.

  But that does not mean that progressives are constructive, brilliant peacebuilders. They are not. Every step of the way progress in human rights has been focused on fighting and victories, not on reconciliation, not on building communities of trust, not on building a new society.

  We just build monuments to beautiful words by Martin Luther King, summarily ignore those words, and go on with a tribalistic war.

  Winning is through love not hate, winning is caring for your own as well as the stranger, winning is caring for very difficult people …

• December 2, 2014

  DEMOCRACY’S PARADOX

  (reflections on the 2010 decade’s upward tick of liberal idea dissemination, coinciding with the upward tick of reactionary trends in democratic voting)

  The weakness of democracy:
  The ballot box,
  For it is a private space of,
  Exposed tribalism.
  This is a paradox for,
  Democracy was meant as an antidote to tribalism.
  The strength of democracy:
  Agreed upon rights,
  Agreed upon universal commitments,
  Based on the unshakeable rule of law.
  This has upended,
  Tribalism’s death grip on history.
  This is also a paradox of human nature.
  What is to be done next?…