Tuesday, December 28, 2021

The Trouble with Tribalism

Let’s not think small here, and just list the enemies that go against your tribal allegiances. This made some sense in the distant past, when our challenges were mostly local: local food source, and other small tribes going after them.

Things have changed a lot since. The biggest enemy we have to fight against right now is our tribal past. What served us so well for thousands of years is now an obsolete concept. It’s no more about the survival of this tribe or that one, but about Homo sapiens as a species. We must wake up to the fact that, when seen from a global planetary perspective, we are a single species living in a fragile ecosystem. And it’s not about saving the planet. Earth was fine without us for most of its 4.5-billion-year existence. It’s about saving the environmental conditions that allow for us to survive as a species.

For the first time in our collective history, we must think of ourselves as a single tribe in a single planet. Tribes exist to guarantee the survival of their members. Given the current planetary and geopolitical stressors, if we don’t begin to think of ourselves in global terms as a single species as opposed to tribes fighting tribes, we risk letting our tribal past write our dystopian future.

We are a single tribe, the tribe of humans. And, as such, not a tribe at all.

- More Here

I have yet to meet a person who doesn't consciously supports one tribe or other without any sort of awareness. 


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