3.1 Two bad choices, worse together
Let me give you a warning. This is going to get a little complicated…
But not a lot complicated.
The principles I’m presenting are straightforward. And if you understand them…
They’ll make it much, much easier to understand why we are in such trouble as a species.
Let’s begin by taking a brief look back at our history, then we’ll quickly catch up to the present.
Our very long-ago ancestors lived in might-makes-right troops, much like how chimps live today.
In those troops an alpha male ruled the roost. And there was a hierarchy. Which meant individuals were in constant competition with each other. Everyone jockeyed for position, trying to move up a notch and get a better deal for themselves and more power over others.
The alphas of course made out like bandits. They got the most food and the best food and they had access to the best females for breeding. Those further down the hierarchy got less food and less chance to produce offspring. They had less self-esteem and much more stress.
All this adds up to a simple fact…
Suffering was part and parcel of the way of life of troops.
Which I will call “troopism” to have a word that’s a parallel to tribalism.
Then next, somehow, and I wish we knew how, a remarkable transformation took place. Instead of continuing to live in troops, we developed tribes. And within these tribes…
We figured out how to become super-cooperative.
And fiercely egalitarian.
Tribalism fixed the main problem with troopism. We didn’t allow some to do well while others suffered. There were not longer any alphas. Or betas or gammas or deltas. No more hierarchy.
Instead…
We took care of each other, no exceptions.
And what a great way to live. It sustained us for tens of thousands of years. Long enough for it to settle into our genome and become part of our DNA. More than anything else it shaped what humanness is and made us who we are.
But there was a problem…
Our cooperative strategy was laid on top of our original competitive nature.
We were still creatures of DNA and DNA is competitive at its core. We didn’t get rid of that core. We modified it. We moved the competitiveness up a level. Now instead of individuals competing with each other…
Tribe competed against tribe.
Super-cooperation internally was matched by super-competition externally. And that competition could get ugly and bloody and brutal.
In our hunter-gatherer days, our DNA ran us. And the only value DNA has is that…
We survive long enough so we can reproduce and send our genes into the next generation.
Surviving meant we needed our tribes to survive and that meant we needed them to be as strong as possible. And as fierce as possible when under attack.
Studies by anthropologists and evolutionists have shown that external threats against a tribe strengthened the internal cooperation. Cooperation was in fact strongest when the tribe was under attack.
But most of us don’t need those studies to know the truth of this dynamic. We’ve seen it for ourselves. Groups that have gotten lazy and slipped into conflict and contention internally, suddenly pull themselves together when attacked.
And presidents and dictators know that there’s nothing like declaring war to pull a nation together, and quell complaints and rebellion. Not that this always works, but more often than not it does.
So conflict with other tribes worked for us because it strengthened internal tribal cooperation, which was the key to our success. And so what if some number of people died in the skirmishes and battles between tribes. In the big picture, our species sustained and grew and took over the Earth.
It turns out, then, that…
Tribalism sacrifices individuals for the good of the species.
That’s its thing, that’s what it does, that’s all it knows how to do.
I wish that way back then, our ancestors had pulled off a second great transformation. I wish they could have discovered how to bring tribes together in community, tribe after tribe after tribe until they had formed one giant global community. A community where we all took care of each other. A community founded not on DNAs obsession with reproduction, but with finding delight in…
Mutual nurturance and mutual advocacy.
I wish our ancestors had had the good fortune to transform tribalism into trans-tribalism. That would have spared our species so much suffering and brutality.
But…
That’s not what happened.
Tribalism was such an effective way of life, our ancestors didn’t just survive, they thrived. Their numbers keep growing, slowly and steadily for a long time. But then with the invention of agriculture they exploded.
And…
Then the tribal system broke.
It depended on small bands within relatively small tribes where everyone knew everyone, and everyone was held accountable to the well being of the group.
But with thousands of people, then tens of thousands living in the same city-state, competitive hierarchy come back into play.
And…
There were alphas again.
Mostly male. They did not operate solo but formed alliances with a band of alphas who supported them and together they defended their powers and their privileges. They became immensely wealthy off the labor of their subjects, the people at the bottom, who were most everybody. And who usually lived in deep poverty, malnourished, at the edge of starvation, stressed and suffering, because they weren’t just subjects, they were subjugated…
Their lives were not their own.
Did this mean that tribalism disappeared? Not at all. Remember it was rooted in our genome and it was the dominant force in our most recent past, a past that lasted for tens of millennia.
The tribal ethic of everyone being equal and taking care of each other was gone. But tribalism wasn’t. When the alpha ruler decided to start a war, he didn’t rally his subjects by saying…
Come join in this fight and risk your lives on the battlefield, so me and my pals can become even more wealthy and powerful than we already are.
Instead he pushed the tribal button…
The enemy wants to attack us and destroy us. They want to take our livestock, which we depend on for our sustenance. They want to take our farmland. They want to kill you and take your daughters for breeding. We need to pull together and attack them before they attack us.
Now let’s come forward to our own time. I was born in 1945, the same year World War II ended. That war still holds the record for the number of dead and for tribal brutality.
The Germans convinced themselves that they were the superior race. The best in the world. The best in all of human history. Way ahead of anyone in second place. Like the British or the Danes who were okay, but not anything like as good as we Germans.
Then there were the Slavs in the East. Look at the depth of their poverty. They live like animals. So they’re less than human. Which means we get to kill as many millions of them as we want and take their land for ourselves.
But the Jews? They’re a special case. Because they’re demons. They’re an existential threat to us. So we have to kill every last one of them. That’s our duty.
World War II was driven by…
A fierce, raging, diabolical tribalism.
And the Nazi leaders didn’t just use it to mobilize the masses, they were caught up in it themselves.
Yet the alphas of the Nazi leadership, including the top generals, indulged themselves and took and took and took, and made themselves obscenely wealthy. They lived the high life while the populace survived on rations and soldiers were sacrificed in ever increasing numbers on the battlefield.
This was…
Tribalism inside troopism.
In our own time, as I write this in the summer of 2025, we’ve got rapacious billionaires and heartless corporate leaders speaking the language of tribalism but in service of themselves.
They have gigantic egos so they clash with each other and compete for status, but they have a priority they hold in common in a tribelike way…
To protect the powers and the privileges of the elites.
Which means themselves.
They pretend to be advocates for tribes of people further down the hierarchy. To the white majority they say…
People of color are taking away your privileges, and you have to have privileges, otherwise your standard of living will suffer, and your identity will be lessened, and you won’t be able to hold your head up anymore and you won’t be able to lord it over other people anymore and you won’t get more than your share which is how it used to be and could be again.
They tell conservative Christians…
You are under attack. Even though you’re the #1 religion in the world, with bigger numbers by far than any other, you’re being victimized. There is a war against Christmas. The non-Christians and lesser Christians are trying to take Jesus away from you by claiming that he cared about the poor and outcast, that he was concerned for the welfare of all of God’s children. They are making it sound like Jesus was “woke.” But you know better. He was a conservative.
They tell the nation…
Immigrants are criminals, they’re dangerous, they are a threat to the very existence of our country (even though they are the ones harvesting your food crops, building your houses, and working jobs you don’t want to do.)
They tell men…
Women need to be controlled by you. Otherwise they’ll continue developing minds of their own and gaining political power, and they’ll get the upper hand and male privilege which is already in serious decline will disappear altogether and you’ll be at the mercy of females eager for revenge.
Here’s maybe the worst thing about the alphas we have in the US today. They driving millions of their fellow citizens into poverty and desperation. And they are doing this…
On purpose.
Eagerly. With no apology. And no shame. They’re proud to have the power to hurt so many people all at once.
Truth is, the more millions these alphas have under their control, and the more they can make those millions suffer…
The more alpha they feel themselves to be.
The more they feel like righteous alphas, not pretenders. They want to feel like the fabulous alphas of the past—the pharaohs, the Caesars, the Hitlers.
What we have today, and have had throughout recorded history is human society structured and run…
By the worst of troopism integrating the worst of tribalism.
But it shouldn’t be like this, because we have our big brains and after all we’ve used them to do big things in the past, like create…
Remarkable medical technologies.
Which means we are living much longer lives with less pain and debilitation.
The internet.
Which has brought us all kinds of new possibilities for connecting with each other.
Artificial intelligence.
Which we hope will produce more benefits than problems.
New energy sources.
Which include sucking oil out of the ground, splitting the atom, harnessing sunlight, and big new sustainable surprises on deck.
So…
We should be able to create a happy and sustainable world, shouldn’t we?
But instead we’ve got global despair…
And still mass suffering and still brutal wars.
It seems like we should be able to figure out the problem of human togetherness, but…
It’s still a problem we are very far from solving.
And time is running out.
Both historic structures for human society are failing us. It’s not like our way of life is just fine if we could only get rid of suffering and warfare. There’s no way we can get rid of these scourges until we change our way of life…
Radically, fundamentally, irreversibly.
So what’s the plan? You know what I’m going to say…
Engage in deep activism.
Not that it can work miracles. Not that it can give us any guarantees. It’s just that of all the things we could do, this is the most promising.
Next let’s answer the question…
Why step outside the tribal game?
What does that mean? What will that give us?
