https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FXpZ_eI5Sb0
Hello and welcome back to Navigating Patterns. What I’d like to discuss today is tribalism. And a lot of people use this term tribalism, which I very much dislike. I’m going to tell you why I dislike it, what the problems are with it, what definitions we seem to be acting on, and what definitions we seem to be actually using. And I’m going to try to talk about how to recognize tribalism and maybe what to do about it. And as always, I’m using my definitions here. Hopefully you’ll find them useful. If so, feel free to use them. If you don’t find them useful, throw them out. Or better yet, modify them to make them useful for you. So a lot of people throw this word around tribalism. And they sort of use it as a magical incantation to identify a problem. Like, oh, the problem is tribalism. And everybody nods their heads like, yes, absolutely, the problem is tribalism. But I don’t think anyone knows what they’re talking about. I don’t think… It’s not wrong. I mean, we’re tribal creatures, right? But because of the way we’re thinking about the world, because of the models that we’re using, we’re flattening things. And so when you invoke tribalism or when anybody invokes tribalism, what they seem to be doing is talking about two groups and only two groups and two groups on opposite sides of an issue. And that isn’t how the world’s laid out. Not to say there aren’t people on opposite sides of the issue, but they often don’t belong to tribes that act like that. So this is a narrative, a device that people use, this tribalism. And the narrative is something like, oh, you’ve got a group of people here, you’ve got a group of people there, and they just disagree on this one issue. But actually, we’re part of lots of tribes. Like every single one of us is part of a ton of tribes. And all of these tribes have their own identity, or at least we have our own identity within them. When we’re talking about issues, issues aren’t typically tribal. The things that we engage with that are tribal as humans are ways of participating in the world. So one way you can be tribal is in your religious beliefs. Another way you can be tribal is in your work. So one common work tribe is the working class versus the C-suite, the CEOs, and the management. Those are tribes. Those people have very little in common in many cases, but those are certainly tribes. And those tribes aren’t necessarily opposed, although sometimes it appears that way. And sometimes they act that way, fair enough. But first of all, tribalism isn’t a helpful way of looking at the world because we need tribes, we’re in tribes, that’s not going to change. So invoking tribalism is like saying, human or group of humans. Thank you, Captain Obvious. I see that. But you’re not defining a problem. You’re defining something that is observable in the world and true. That doesn’t make it a problem. But what is the problem here? What is the problem? And why is it that I say we need tribalism? So we need tribalism because we’re outstressing our sanity, right? In contexts. How do I know if I’m being a good working class guy? Well, you look at the other working class people, right, to some extent. How do I know if I’m being a good husband? You look at other husbands. How do I know if I’m being a good father? Well, you look at other fathers, right? You’re part of those tribes, potentially, or mothers, or whatever tribes you’re part of, but you’re part of lots of tribes. And you’re outstressing your sanity, your way of being in those tribes, those identities in those tribes. You also have identities in each of your tribes. And there’s a mutual narrative there, right? And that helps everybody to stay on track, right? It doesn’t mean you’re not going to transgress. Of course you are. But the tribe helps you. They’re like, oh, dude, you kind of, you know, come back to us, right? Or, oh, you can’t be in this tribe because, you know, you really need to do better. And there’s a lot of do-better narratives in the world. One of my favorite movies, Good Will Hunting, right? You know, where he gives this speech to him. He says, listen, we don’t want you here. You’re better than this. You shouldn’t be breaking rocks all day like us, right? You should go out and do what you can do and use your intellect. Fair enough. So sometimes the tribe kicks you out for your own betterment. Tribes are very useful. Very useful. They just don’t fight the way people portray, or at least not usually. So what is the problem? Well, the problem is that we’re squishing the world, right? We’re using this metaphor incorrectly. We’re making everything binary. This is part of our binary thinking problem. And you’ll notice that if you saw my first model video, first long form video on the channel, right? If you think of things in terms of you and others, that’s a binary relationship. It’s a false dichotomy, as it turns out. Not that there isn’t you and others. It’s a false dichotomy in that that isn’t the best way to structure your models of the world, the binary thing. If you tribe and tribe different idea, different idea, that’s a bad mapping, right? And then they’re conflicting. It’s like, I mean, those are arbitrary distinctions and you can draw them. They’re just wrong, right? And it’s OK. Like you’re wrong. People are wrong. It’s cool to be wrong. But the important part is to recognize, oh, that’s wrong or it might be wrong. And therefore, right, we can we can fix it. So. Because we’re all part of multiple tribes and those tribes are based on participation, they’re based on things we do, not not how we feel about things, the way we feel about things doesn’t match our tribes in most cases. In some cases it does religious. You could you could say religious people have religious tribes and that those tribes are fighting something. But there isn’t an opposite end of that coin. Right. And for the most part, even even the stricter religions like the Muslims don’t don’t actually tend to as a large group act out their religious beliefs such that they’re beheading unbelievers and engaging in jihad, which is not to say that some aren’t. They are. But it’s not all of them. Right. And therefore putting them all in a tribe because they appear to have the same belief, at least on paper. Right. And sometimes when you talk to them, they say, no, no, no, we believe in this. We just don’t act it out. Well, if you’re not acting it out, you know, OK, that’s great. Don’t act out bad things. And also, if you’re not acting out good things, different problem, different problem. But it’s good to know that. Right. It’s good to know the difference between what people read, what people say, what people do and what people act out. Because doing things and acting things out can be considered a little bit different. And I’m not going to go into that now, but I will. I will. At some point that will happen. So the big problem with tribalism is this binary, this false dichotomy thinking and this compression of everything. Oh, well, there’s just two tribes and therefore that’s a good description of a problem. Again, it’s not a good description of a problem. But how do we recognize this? And, you know, for goodness sake, Mark, what does this have to do with patterns? And fair enough. I hope you’re starting to see some patterns, because if you watch the videos, especially in order in the channel, and hopefully not too quickly, because some of them take some some thought. I put a lot of time and thought into these and I get a lot of feedback and there’s a lot of compression in here necessarily. So, you know, chew over these things carefully. I think they’re worth taking seriously and playing with in your head so you kind of own what I’m on about. And again, if you have questions like, hey, I’ll answer questions on YouTube. Just put them in there. Basically. Patterns are ways we act out reliably or things that get acted out reliably or things that occur reliably or processes that continue reliably. And. When we’re talking about tribalism, we’re talking about a preference for our tribe over the pattern, the process, the procedure, right? And so it’s actually really easy to identify. Now, I don’t do this anymore. I used to do this all the time because, oh, it’s so much fun. It’s so much fun. But but I’m also a troll. So, yeah, like I troll people all the time. I used to put quotes on the. Previous president, right, that the current president did or vice versa, and then say, what do you think of that? And they said, well, that’s terrible. I think that’s great. And then you say, oh, no, no, I’m sorry. I got the I got it wrong. You know, this president didn’t say that president said it right over that person even right left wing, right wing, whatever. And then people invariably, at least on one side of the political spectrum, in my experience, which is very weird indeed that there’s an asymmetry there. We go, I don’t know. I don’t think so. I disagree. Or, you know, so they’re not sticking to the principle. That’s sticking to the principle, right? They’re preferring the person, the personality, the tribe over the principle, the pattern, the process, the process. The rules, right? Like, oh, well, my guy does it. It’s OK. When your guy does it, it’s bad. That’s tribalism. That’s tribalism. And it’s easy to identify. Like I said, you can just, you know, attribute a Barack Obama quote to George W. Bush or vice versa. All right. Or attribute a Trump quote to Biden or vice versa or whatever. You can mix and match. You do with governors. You know, whatever you want to do. You can prove tribalism very quickly. It’s an easy task. You can do it reliably. And then, you know, someone’s being tribal. The problem with this is, well, twofold. One is we subconsciously recognize this. All the people reliably subconsciously recognize tribalism. They do. They feel it. They feel it. They can’t articulate it, but they feel it. But they feel it. They feel there’s been a violation, a transgression, some sort of problem. And that problem is trampling over the pattern or the process, right, or the principle. And I’ll argue those are basically the same thing. I’m talking about patterns. Principles are patterns that you follow reliably, right? Processes are patterns that reliably get followed and continue. So they’re types of patterns. So when these patterns are violated, we know. We know. But if we’re not articulate, and most people aren’t articulate, fair enough. Not everybody can be articulate. I can barely be articulate most days. So they’ll know it. They’ll get angry. They’ll have an emotion. And then you can deny their experience or acknowledge that maybe something’s wrong. And that’s problematic for different reasons because you can’t know somebody else’s emotions. But it’s so simple that we subconsciously recognize it. And then what do you do about it? What can we do? And honestly, my advice is don’t engage tribalists. Don’t. Tell them they’re being tribal. Sure. And then walk away. Smile and nod. Do what you got to do. Get out of that situation. Those people are going to end up angry, resentful, and projecting psychologically. That’s their only option. I’m not saying give up on people who are being tribal. I’m saying call it out because I believe you call everything out. You should always speak the truth. Whether you can or are going to act on your speaking of the truth is a different issue. But you should certainly always call these things out. Otherwise, it’s not fair to the other person because they don’t necessarily know what bubble they’re stuck in or how they’re being the problem that they purport to dislike or anything. And so they’re still out pursuing their sanity. And if you don’t tell them, by the way, what you’re doing is wrong, they may not know. And that’s not fair to them. And it’s not fair to you. And it’s not fair to everybody else because they’ll continue. And the best thing to do is to avoid it. And then you might ask, well, how do I know if I’m being tribal? Well, I mean, you can try the same trick on yourself of switching quotes around. You know, you could have somebody else do it to you and see if you’re being tribal. You know, if you don’t have principles that you’re adhering to that you know that you can explain, the odds that you’ll fall into tribalism are very high because principles take real work and tribalism takes no effort at all. Effectively, when you’re preferring the person over the pattern, either the person’s charismatic. So charismatic people always bother me because it’s like, oh, that’s dangerous. I like them. That’s a problem. If I like somebody, it’s a real problem because I’m like, oh, now I’ve got to watch out. I’m going to be extra careful. And it’s hard to it’s hard to be extra careful. It takes more energy and you don’t want to be. But you can’t you can’t outsource truth and correctness to charisma. And we do that all the time. Right. We find somebody who speaks well and we’re like, aha, they speak well and they make these really complicated, smart sounding stories. Eric Weinstein. And then you’re like, aha, they must be smart. It’s like, maybe not. Or maybe they’re not as smart as they think. Or maybe they’re very smart. And the story they’re telling you is bad or wrong or evil. I don’t know. The evil genius is a thing. Could be. So you can’t rely on looks, articulation, how intelligent somebody appears, how good their narrative is. You have to rely on a combination of those things, plus your own checks, plus checks with other people. That’s why I was engaged. People disagree with me. And I do all the time. And it’s really annoying because I’m disagreeable and I don’t like it when people disagree with me. But I do it because it makes me better. And that’s what you need to do is try to make yourself better. So you can catch yourself in your preferences. If you’re denying facts or somebody’s telling you, no, no, no, no, this this happened and then you’re no, I don’t believe you. I need to see evidence first. When you didn’t first provide evidence, you’re probably being tribal. And this is a lot of what I do to people is I say, hey, look, I’m willing to change my mind. Bring the evidence. Just bring it to me. Show me the thing that you looked at that brought you to that conclusion. And if somebody asks you that and you can’t bring them the data or explain to them how you came to that conclusion, you get a look at how you came to that conclusion. And tribalism is a really good place to start. Like, am I just being tribal? Because you could be. And of course, the way out is to understand these models of the world that you’re using are binary and dichotomous and too simple. Most of the things in the world have a middle position at the very least. But a lot of things in the world have lots of positions. Somebody, in fact, most most people in America, it turns out, don’t want the Roe v. Wade, the abortion laws overturned. They don’t want that, even though they’re religious, even though they don’t they quote protest pro-life, which is not against abortion, by the way. That that that’s definitely something I got to cover, too, is that whole thing, because that’s that that’s interesting. Their position is not to overturn the current order because they believe in order, but their position is still to make sure this doesn’t happen a lot or something or doesn’t happen with our tax money. Right. Or something like that. And that’s a perfectly fair position. Like, they’re not being unreasonable. There’s nothing wrong with a position like that. And that’s the problem. Like, if you said, they’re saying like, look, it can be legal, but we don’t want it to happen. Fair enough. Like, you know, killing killing people when they attack you is legal. If they break into your home in most states, you can shoot them. But we don’t want that to happen. But it is legal. You know, so it’s a reasonable position for a lot of things. And there are lots of situations like this where people just assume, oh, well, they’re tribal. But there’s a lot of non-religious people who are totally against abortion. And again, they don’t necessarily want to make it illegal, but they also don’t want people doing it. Fair enough. Like, again, that’s a place you can stand. Like, that’s a position you can hold. You know, you say we don’t want to jail anybody for doing what they think they must or maybe what must happen under certain medical conditions or whatever. But we also don’t want people to take advantage of it and use it as a way out of their personal responsibility. We don’t want them using it just to use it because people do that. Like, we’re humans. So casting those people in a tribe when some of them are religious and some of them are not is a little weird. And casting the people who are staunch against with the people who are like, it’s fine if it’s legal, but I don’t want my tax money going toward it. Or it’s fine if it’s legal, but I want clear boundaries around it. I don’t those aren’t the same people. They don’t even have the same ideas on the same topic. So they’re not in the same tribe, at least not with respect to that. And they’re not going to try it up to do anything necessarily, even though they seem to agree, at least on the core issue, they don’t agree on what to do about it. And that means they’re not in a tribe. And this is the problem. Like, we are not in single tribes. That’s not how that works. And all of our tribes are based around participation, things we do, not ideas we have, thoughts we have or political positions. Political position is not a tribe. It’s never been a tribe. It’s never going to be a tribe. That isn’t the way the world works. Engage seriously with the models. So you understand non-political dichotomous binary thinking models. These binary thinking models are no good. Don’t use them for anything except in extremely limited circumstances. And your life will be better off. Now, I hope I’ve been able to explain some of why I don’t like tribalism, why I think it’s bad framing for the most part. But it’s not wrong. It’s not an incorrect way to conceive of the world. It’s just the way we’re using it is wrong. We’re using it to flatten the world. And the world is not a flat place. It’s very complicated in some sense. In fact, it’s probably not complicated. It’s probably complex. That’s probably what it is. So it’s important to take these things seriously and to avoid this tribal behavior. I’ve given you, I think, some tools at least to find other people being tribal. And then some ways to deal with that is to call it out and just walk away. And I hope that I don’t have a tribe of YouTube watchers on my channel because I know a great deal of the members at this point. And they don’t have the same ideas on anything. So we got all kinds of people with all kinds of ideas all over the place. So let’s be less tribal. Let’s try to call out tribalism where it actually exists, where people are actually preferring a group of people or a person over a process or a pattern. And let’s make them aware that they’re doing that. And I think it’s fair to call those people for whatever they’re being as being unprincipled at the moment. Saying, oh, you’re being unprincipled at the moment in the moment or about this issue and see if that helps. But I don’t have a great deal of hope. The tribalism narrative is so deeply embedded and it’s so simple and so easy to divide the world into two like that. You know, right into as the song by Tool goes. But that is a terrible way to think of the world. And the world really is much more complex, much more wonderful and filled with potential. And the best potential that we can manifest in the world is to is to give each other an idea of of when we’re transgressing and help the people that we know to feel OK in telling us when we’re transgressing or when they think we’re transgressing and working out those differences as they arise. And hopefully all the members of my little YouTube tribe are watching this video and enjoying it. And I just want to thank everybody, whether you’re part of my tribe or not, for your time and attention.