In our modern world the notion of tribalism is associated with many negative connotations, and especially with tribal bias, which is assumed to be an undesirable trait. A closer analysis reveals that the modern bias against tribalism is the result of conveniently sloppy research and a collective cognitive and emotional blind spot related to the collaborative potential of networked egalitarian human scale cultural organisms.

The trouble with tribalism

The article Tribalism is Human Nature (2019) in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science illustrates the perspective from which the Western discipline of psychology engages with tribalism:

Although tribal loyalties inspire many noble behaviors, they can impel humans to sacrifice sound reasoning and judgmental accuracy for group belonging and commitment. In other words, tribal loyalties can lead to tribal biases…

If beliefs are held fervently, compel strong emotional displays, or are costly to hold, they might function as honest (and thus trustworthy) loyalty signals. Perhaps perversely, dogmatism and resilience to contrary evidence likely enhance the persuasiveness of the signal, because they show that one is strongly dedicated to the group’s ideology in spite of potential consequences (e.g., being wrong about a difficult to answer question)…

Sincere beliefs generally lead to better and more zealous arguments than cynical hypocrisy. Therefore, people are motivated to favor and believe information that promotes their group’s interests and to resist information that opposes their group’s interests because it makes them more persuasive proponents of their group’s cause…

Humans are tribal creatures. They were not designed to reason dispassionately about the world; rather, they were designed to reason in ways that promote the interests of their coalition (and hence, themselves). It would therefore be surprising if a particular group of individuals did not display such tendencies, and recent work suggests, at least in the U.S. political sphere, that both liberals and conservatives are substantially biased—and to similar degrees. Historically, and perhaps even in modern society, these tribal biases are quite useful for group cohesion but perhaps also for other moral purposes (e.g., liberal bias in favor of disadvantaged groups might help increase equality). Also, it is worth noting that a bias toward viewing one’s own tribe in a favorable light is not necessarily irrational. If one’s goal is to be admired among one’s own tribe, fervidly supporting their agenda and promoting their goals, even if that means having or promoting erroneous beliefs, is often a reasonable strategy…

We conclude that tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition, and that no group—not even one’s own—is immune.

Refreshingly, at least the conclusion is broadly compatible with anthropological evidence, and the article does acknowledge several beneficial aspects of tribalism. The introductory sentences of the article however point towards a cultural bias in the premise underlying the researchers’ understanding of human evolution:

Humans evolved in the context of intense intergroup competition, and groups comprised of loyal members more often succeeded than those that were not. Therefore, selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be “tribal,” and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. Modern politics is one of the most salient forms of modern coalitional conflict and elicits substantial cognitive biases.

The highlighted assumption is a product of the internalised ableism commonly found in the science of biology. Only culturally well adjusted people in hierarchically structured empires understand the entire living world as inherently and primarily competitive, and have trouble imagining genuinely collaborative relationships between groups.

Around the margins of empires, we find no shortage of examples of egalitarian collaborative cultural environments, even though in our current time, the majority of humans do find themselves trapped in a social landscape of powered-up institutions.

Egalitarian collaborative groups operate highly effective conflict resolution strategies that prevent conflicts from escalating rather than on a naive denial of conflict.

Furthermore, the outlined reasoning about the ways in which beliefs within and between tribes play out lacks depth and nuance, by completely ignoring the role of human diversity within tribes and by glossing over the distinct ways in which different categories of beliefs shape human cultures. For example, persuasion by others is not necessarily the main source of beliefs.

The negative connotations of tribalism only materialise when tribes expand beyond human scale, or when tribes that have not developed a culture that nurtures egalitarian relationships between groups run into each other in resource constrained environments.

Humanity can no longer afford tribal warfare at any scale. This insight is not new. There is no shortage of counter examples.

Cultures that genuinely appreciate human diversity are well equipped to adapt to changing conditions, by establishing collaborative, egalitarian relationships between groups – with neurodivergent non-conformists from various groups establishing and maintaining the unconventional connections that catalyse the dialogue between groups.

In other words, tribes that don’t dehumanise non-conformists are well equipped to benefit from the cultural exchanges within the inter-tribe networks of non-conformists. This is consistent with what we know about the diversity of human evolutionary history, but this knowledge is only very rarely acknowledged in modern hyper-normative societies that are powered-up by super-human scale corporations and nation states.

The cognitive and emotional blind spot

More than 250 years of life in industrialised societies that no longer offer visceral experiences of being an integral part of a human scale cultural organism that operates an ecology of care has created a big cognitive and emotional blind spot:

1. Abstract group identities (such as brands, nation states, etc.) dominate the social landscape.
2. Relational group identities are limited to tiny “atomised” nuclear families, which are far too small to serve as viable survival units.

The analogy of the development of a cataract is a good metaphor – modernity makes us blind to our humanity and to the wonder of the big cycle of life.

Experience with human scale cultural organisms is now limited to small pockets of indigenous communities and to those who have (re)discovered the art of collaborative niche construction in egalitarian human scale worker co-ops.

In the Venn diagram of the acceptable cultures within the Overton window of the global mono-cult, indigenous, Autistic and other neurodivergent people are the complement set – they all reside on the slippery slope that runs all the way from “undesirable” to “non-human”, with “unacceptable” in the middle.

Implications

The implications are obvious to all those who live outside the hypernormative Overton window:

1. Lack of experience with de-powered dialogue and deliberation in Open Space – the assumption that power dynamics are at work in all social interactions, leading to feelings of social isolation.
2. Diffusion of toxic power dynamics into nuclear family relationships, leading to a lack of experience with nurturing and maintaining trustworthy relationships, amplifying feelings of social isolation.
3. Experiencing human relationships to be even less reliable and trustworthy than the anonymous interactions with corporations and national governments – many people entrust Google with more information than their life partners.
4. Ubiquitous real and perceived social power dynamics, prompting an obsessive focus on the WEIRD independence of the individual “self” – to some extent even pathologising healthy levels of mutual aid and interdependence at human scale.
5. A hypernormative culture dominated by abstract institutions rather than by relational ecologies of care, resulting in a complete lack of experience with egalitarian relationships between human scale groups, hence all the negative stereotypes associated with tribalism.
6. A feeling of paralysis and hopelessness, feeding the growth of the cognitive and emotional blind spot – modernity makes us blind to our humanity and to the wonder of the big cycle of life.
7. Proliferation of addictive behaviours, to compensate for unmet emotional needs, which are as essential for our wellbeing as our needs for nutritious food and clean air.

A current small scale example from the Civil Aviation Authority in Aotearoa New Zealand illustrates how these implications impact many workplace cultures. The top comment on this report hits at the larger cultural problems, which are in fact not limited to this country:

This is not unique to CAA, most government agencies/departments have poor management and force good people out. It appears to be a New Zealand issue: 
Ministry of Justice 
Ministry of health 
Ministry of Primary Industries
Department of Corrections
Auckland councils
just to name a few.
And people are quitting in waves even at a time when jobs as hard to come by.
I see it everyday and deal with it myself.

Toxic workplace cultures are common throughout the global mono-cult. They represent the visible tip of a toxic culture that runs through all aspects of modern life.

It is no accident that books such as ‘The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture‘ by Gabor Maté are popular.

Mutual aid and compassion in the here and now

AutCollab participatory research into cognitive dissonance shows that many Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people are “experts” at beating themselves up for making mistakes or for repeatedly being taken advantage of by those who have less scruples in playing the “normal” competitive game of homo economicus, which prioritises “successful” perception management over honesty and integrity.

Once we understand the full effects of the toxic institutional landscape on all participants, and combine it with timeless Daoist wisdom, we are well advised to assume that everyone is doing their best based on their unique history and sensitivity profile, which includes the priorities of the values that they live by.

In a competitive environment the priorities of the values that culturally “well adjusted” people live by usually differs from what they openly disclose. We can accept this source of cognitive dissonance as a fact, without blaming the individuals, and without assuming that everyone plays the “normal” competitive game, so that we retain the ability to extend trust to others.

This approach allows mutual aid to flourish in the cracks of the global mono-cult. I adopted the approach of not blaming individuals many years ago. This has kept me going over the decades, even during the dark times. It enabled me to repeatedly re-engineer my environment to what I was learning about myself and my environment. It does not make life painless, but

• not beating ourselves up,
• and at the same time extending compassion to people who are products of a toxic system,
• without engaging in futile debates with those who are not ready to learn,

saves a lot of energy. This is energy we urgently need to move beyond survival mode, to re-engineer our environment, and to make the big changes that genuinely reduce cognitive dissonance and heal the living planet.

By design, competitive cultures and especially digital social media trap us in futile debates and exploit our frustrations. Minimising exposure is essential for human wellbeing, in exactly the same way that wearing masks in public indoor spaces is essential for minimising the risks of catching COVID and other airborne diseases in this era of global pandemics.

This podcast by Rangan Chatterjee points people in the right direction, but as so many pieces of self-help advice for persisting in survival mode within the established institutional landscape, it stays clear of addressing the wider social issues. I always come back to W Edwards Deming’s brilliant synopsis of “collaboration” in a competitive social context:

“Pay for merit, pay for what you get, reward performance. Sounds great, can’t be done. Unfortunately it can not be done, on short range. After 10 years perhaps, 20 years, yes. The effect is devastating. People must have something to show, something to count. In other words, the merit system nourishes short-term performance. It annihilates long-term planning. It annihilates teamwork. People can not work together. To get promotion you’ve got to get ahead. By working with a team, you help other people. You may help yourself equally, but you don’t get ahead by being equal, you get ahead by being ahead. Produce something more, have more to show, more to count. Teamwork means work together, hear everybody’s ideas, fill in for other people’s weaknesses, acknowledge their strengths. Work together. This is impossible under the merit rating / review of performance system. People are afraid. They are in fear. They work in fear. They can not contribute to the company as they would wish to contribute. This holds at all levels. But there is something worse than all of that. When the annual ratings are given out, people are bitter. They can not understand why they are not rated high. And there is a good reason not to understand. Because I could show you with a bit of time that it is purely a lottery.”

– W Edwards Deming (1984)

I know that I can only keep cognitive dissonance down to survivable levels if I am embedded in a small trustworthy ecology of care that rejects the cult of homo economicus and that is committed to collaborative niche construction.

De-powering

Incrementally (re)learning how to nurture trustworthy relationships is a process takes time. There is no secret sauce that can accelerate the process of nurturing mutual trust one relationship at a time.

Watch out for snake oil vendors in the fast-paced world of easy 10-step programmes and other silver bullets. Attempts of establishing a thriving cultural organism can easily fall short of expectations due to a lack of experience with deep trust, which acts as a catalyst for organic growth up to human scale.

The process of on-boarding newcomers into a human scale cultural organism gets easier once three or more people have formed a core circle of deep mutual trust, for example by jointly operating a worker co-op over several years.

We can all contribute towards a global knowledge commons about experiences with egalitarian relationships between human scale groups – this is the path towards culturally adaptive strategies that strengthen communal and ecological wellbeing, building on available experiences within indigenous societies, worker co-ops, chosen extended families, etc.

Collectively we can tap into a wealth of knowledge and timeless indigenous wisdom.

We need commitment, we need community. We need to create spaces of trust. But for that, there’s tremendous work that we need to be doing. But I don’t think that any of that work will be possible, should we not have that commitment–that commitment that no matter how challenging and tremendously difficult it will be to reckon with these narratives and to dismantle these narratives. Because seeing the horror in the eye of all these narratives that we live by comes with tremendous understanding. It will leave us very fragile, very vulnerable, and most, of course, are not willing to do that, because we don’t feel safe. But if we are able to stand the heat and create these spaces, if we commit to do this kind of work for the benefit of the planet, then we may be able to learn that we can fly.

– Yuria Celidwen

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Jorn Bettin

Knowledge archaeologist by day and neurodivergent anthropologist by night at S23M

The more we help each other to question in ways we otherwise wouldn’t – and correspondingly discover new insights about the world and ourselves, the more we are able to learn from each other, and the more we start to understand each other. The gift that we all bring to the world is the (re)generative potential of all the trusted relationships that we co-create.

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