Guest post: To avoid falling out with the tribe at all costs
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Yet one remained an enthusiastic collaborator.
It’s tribalism all the way down. My endless fascination with Scientologists taught me that attachment to a tribe is one of the great instincts that drives human behaviour — just as great as the sexual and pair-bonding instincts are. What the Scientologists demonstrate so vividly is the capacity to completely block out obvious facts if they pose a threat to their sense of belonging within their tribe. The Xenu space alien story is possibly the most obvious pile of bullshit ever conceived, and yet perfectly rational people will find ways to avoid dispelling it, for the sake of staying in the tribe.
Tribalism is the whole reason the myriad sports teams and sports stadiums and sports bars and sports television channels and billions upon billions of dollars in sports team branded clothing exists, for one thing. Football and hockey and soccer are pageants of warring tribes.
It’s the whole reason religion exists, too.
Same for youth subcultures like goth and grunge and hippies and punks.
Same for office and corporate culture, with its cringey jargon and its team-building exercises and its tedious gossipy politics.
Of course, most of those tribes are benign, most of the time. Sports fandom does occasionally turn into violent soccer hooliganism; corporate cultures become monstrously corrupt sometimes (Enron, anyone?); youth subgroups can become criminal gangs; and we all know that religion can turn people murderous.
As for why some people stick with their tribe after it turns dark while other people have the courage to resist, I wonder if it’s got to do with how one learns to cope with rejection in childhood. Perhaps there’s a parallel with attachment theory. Attachment theory says that the other major instinct that drives us to behave irrationally much of the time — human dating behaviour — splits people into four very distinct groups (secure, anxious, fearfully avoidant, and dismissively avoidant), and the factor that sets us off on one of the four trajectories is the early relationship between the infant and primary parent (almost always the mother). The brain wires up its “relationship management strategy” in one of four ways, based on the subtle cues it receives in those crucial first interactions with the mother.
I suspect there’s a “tribal in-group management strategy” that our brains wire up in early childhood, too. We learn early on how to navigate group dynamics — which things one should and should not say and do in order to avoid social punishment or even ostracization from our peers. From my own experience, I had an extremely atypical childhood: I was an absolute outcast. I was a poor kid in the ghetto who took the bus across town to the good, rich kid french-immersion school, which meant that I was absolutely despised by both my hard-knocks, underprivileged neighbours and my sheltered, overprivileged schoolmates. The physical abuse I endured from the neighbourhood boys and the psychological abuse I endured from the mean girls at school both took their tolls on me, but they immunized me against the drive to fit in, which I could clearly see had such a stranglehold on the other kids’ behaviour.
I learned not to fear the social cost of saying or doing something that would put me at odds with my peers. I suspect that ostracization is something I’m completely unafraid of — to this day, I just as quickly step into groups as part ways with them — because I never found belonging within a tribe in my childhood. I have absolutely no fear of telling a boss if I think something’s unjust at work, or walking away from a “scene” that I think is taking a wrong turn (See ya later, gay village community! Sayonara, “gender critical Twittersphere!” Adios, New Atheism!).
I suspect that for a lot of the people who stick with their tribes even when they’ve gone dark, they’re following a course of behaviour that they unconsciously trained themselves to act out in those early days of childhood play, learning to navigate the schoolyard social dynamics, and training themselves to avoid falling out with the tribe at all costs. I suspect they don’t even know that they’re doing it. I suspect all those so-called “skeptics” who’ve gone mad with gender nonsense don’t even realize that what drives their behaviour is an unconscious fear of being kicked out of the playground, cast off like a primordial ape, left to fend for oneself in the wilderness of the savanna.
The thing about tribalism is that it evolved in a kind of ape that was small and squishy and slow, but skilled in communication and cooperation. For that primordial ape, if you get cast out of the tribe, you are dead. If you don’t stick with the tribe you have, and you can’t successfully glom onto a new tribe after being cast out of the old one, you’re tomorrow’s lion turd.
In today’s world, it’s become counterproductive, just like our ravenous appetites for fat, sugar and salt have become counterproductive. But it’s not easy to fight the remnants of a selection pressure as powerful as that.
@Piglet,
Indeed. And the same can be said for our pair-bonding instinct: without the ability to bond an infant to a caregiver in early childhood, the child is dead. Later in adulthood, the ability for a male and female to bond together increases the chance of survival and reproduction, for obvious reasons.
So it’s clear to see why the partner-attachment instinct, like the tribal-attachment instinct, evolved in the African ape species homo sapiens — it greatly increases our survival chances.
Attachment theory adds an additional explanation: it proposes an explanation for why humans have a variety of different partner-attachment styles. Some of us bond for life (like swans do); others have a series of long-term bonds over the course of our lives (in the manner of Emperor penguins); others are completely promiscuous and never settle into long-term committed relationships (like most mammals, actually — and like too many of my exes, ha!); still others eschew even short-term bonds. It’s proposed that different humans show different partnering preferences because as the early human population ranged across the earth, the species evolved to thrive in a variety of different climates, which offered different advantages to different pair-bonding strategies. In some climates, it might be better to not be dependent on a single pair-bond for life, because if your partner dies, you could end up dead, too. The ability to pair strongly and then to also un-pair and re-pair with someone else when circumstances became perilous had an evolutionary advantage. In other climates, the benefits of a strong lifelong bond could prevail. In a lush climate with plenty of breeding opportunities, maybe near-total non-monogamy is the way to go.
So we’ve got inside of us the capacity to “switch on” any one of four mammalian pair-bonding strategies, and the circumstances of our initial childhood environment trigger which one we end up wired up to prefer.
The parallel with tribal bonding is that in some circumstances it’s better to be only weakly tribally bonded (tribally non-monogamous or flexible) and in other circumstances it’s better to have a strict instinctual attachment to stay with one’s tribe through thick and thin. So perhaps we’ve evolved different tribal-attachment strategies, too, and like our crazy mismatched dating personalities, humans have evolved more than one kind of tribal-attachment style, and childhood experience determines which one we end up instinctually gravitating towards for life.