Tribalism: A Double-Edged Sword

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Someone over on Facebook GameB shared this and I'm about half way through. This guy's doing a pretty decent job of covering the good, bad, and ugly of tribalism and how it shapes both culture and conflict.

I doubt that anyone needs a video to realize how tribalism is like breathing. Its inescapable. And that its behind most of whats good, AND most of whats bad in all human activity.

Tribalism can be mild (rooting for the home team in a ball game), to extreme (martyring yourself for your group with a suicide bomb because you're convinced that your group is favored by god).

Laughter is often a form of instant tribalism.

I bond with you by making you (person B) laugh with me at person C (who isnt around), and then we both bond with person C by all three laughing at person D, and so on.

The trouble seems to be in how reliable a blind-spot it is. I think it's quite possible that we're finally starting to hit an inflection point that this is getting to be explicit common knowledge, a bit like cluster B personality profiles are getting there. My hope is that it gets to be something, at least in its culty format, that people learn to avoid as much as they've learned to avoid racism and sexism.