Building a tribal mentalty

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Like many of us in this age, you often find yourself staring at the glare of the blue screened box or the glowing tablet, searching for something that you know exists but you have yet to find. Mere empty laughs that sate most men do nothing to fill your stomach. The honey-sweet lies to sell the latest box of processed sugar turn to bitter lies to your ears.

Birds of a feather flock together. People cluster in groups, not just to stand around the coffee machine and make endless chit-chat about the minutia of the day, but to enjoy discussion, find an occasional hand to help, and to have friends and allies against the fickle hand of fate.

Some cultures filled this need with the struggle to hunt food, fight the seas, or to make great journeys. Others filled it with danger and promise, and filled both the you and the old with the knowledge that they were part of something more.

Modern society offers none of that.

What you are looking for has a very old name.

Tribe.

It is the base for all human societies since at least the dawn of recorded history until the 2nd Industrial revolution, and in many respects even more recently. It is the second most basic building block, after the immediate family, known to exist. Yet, in our age of amazing technology, of planes that can carry you in a padded throne to exotic lands in hours, of packages delivered overnight from distant places, of instant gaming from around the world, you do not have a tribe.

Think about the past month of your life. How many of the people you met in person, outside of your immediate family, can you trust? How many people can you call up in two weeks to help with moving, how many people can you borrow a couch from? How many of those people can you have a cup of coffee with and discuss the world with? How many of those people can you share your innermost thoughts and fears? How many people would drop everything and help you at 3 AM in the morning?

For the overwhelming amount of people out there, the answer is very few to none. And for those with different interests than the majority, it's even harder to find people on the same wavelength. Our atomized society has weakened or shredded almost all forms of non-work interaction. For individuals without their own immediate geographically close families, the most common non-work interaction is at the local bar, with it's atmosphere of constant interruption, alcohol-fueled behavior, and social inanities.

To have people who you can depend on, you must have people who can depend on you. More precisely, people to whom you are loyal, as they are to you. As some would ask, what measure is a man who can rely on no one? While you know you can be relied on, how do other people know they can rely on you? For that you need a tribe, one that knows it can trust it's own. You must know who is with you, and who is not with you. It is the base of the thing we call civilization.

To fill that need in your heart, the hunger in your soul, you need a tribe.

Sounds like a short version of "Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State" by Engels. I think there's some truth in the notion that the human race has descended into some kind of dystopian nightmare, essentially I think society has become too big. But I comfort myself with the idea that for all its shortcomings, it's still possible to find some small groups who are reasonably co-operative, caring, sharing, non-judgemental etc.

I don't want to be a member of a "tribe." I'm barely okay with being a member of a "family."

I don't really like to "depend" on people per se.

Believe or it not, I like people; I don't have too many misanthropic tendencies.

But I don't want to get in an interdependent sort of relationship of "you scratch my back, I scratch yours."

Where I lose you... is just exactly what you are implying.

I can understand your mentality, but I don't get where you're coming from. Are you suggesting that autistic people form some kind of alliance? Like we're all apart of an autistic tribe? Or are you just angry about modern society?

I've been the odd person out all my life having little to no friends and significant lack of "tribe". I find it easier to just deal with people online because people offline generally don't want to involve themselves with other people. Online people are more receptive and reciprocate a bit more. Now sure most of these people are not only people I can't call on to help me move, go to their houses or better yet even know their names for that matter but that doesn't matter for they all serve their own purposes.

Human beings are pack animals just like the chimpanzees that make up 98% of our DNA, we have to be because by ourselves we are completely weak and would be food for bears, wolves, and mountain lions.

Perhaps some of us are just not the tribal kind?

I like people, too, but I find it hard to create occasions to socialize, or to go to such events.

Part of it is sensory. If there is an event somewhere and I have to negotiate a stressful journey to get there, I probably will be too exhausted to do much but recover when I get there, so I often just don't go unless I am in a very good state before hand.

More than that, I don't trust people, I think for rational reasons. Why should anyone expect to trust people outside their families? Why should I share my inermost thoughts and fears with people who I don't know intimately? Some people are not trustworthy. Finding out which ones are take time and experience.

I think the idea of the pre-industrial tribe as a sort of nurturing place of sharing, belonging and trust is a fantasy. The thing that is appealing about urban environments is that you aren't trapped by a small a group the way people can be in small towns. Being the odd one out in a small community can be horribly oppressive. Tribes can be brutal to nonconforming members.

Maybe the most connection you can really get that meets the kind of needs you are talking about is a small circle of friends.

I assure you my views are not based on Herr Engels' works.



It's low-trust large-group existence, while we're wired for high-trust small-group existence. The problem there is that online communication, in general, is extremely low-context and has no cost of entry or exit. People can join WP today, post tomorrow, reciprocate on Friday, and be gone on Saturday, and have paid no cost, other than the time to type words, for entry or exit. It also creates a situation where any good "signal" is drowned out by "noise".



Yes. All mammals sleep and have long gestation and maturity periods, which dictates in large part the tribal requirement (not necessarily "pack animals", which has some....other issues).



Yes, travel is stressful, which is why modern tourism and travel bears no relation to historical levels of travel.

I am not advocating trusting random people, a tribe that trusts random people will not be long for this world, at least in it's original incarnation. You generally need to have an out-group to have an in-group (it can be done in reverse as well). That said, to advance and protect one's interests, one does need other people. None of us have eyes in the back of our heads, after all.

There's no realistic way a pre-industrial tribe could exist without a high level of trust, sharing...by modern standards, not needed. Depends on the size of the tribe and as we're going into larger levels of organization. Adults with families were not going to take risks if they didn't feel that their children will be taken care of in their absence.

Comparison to modern rural areas might not be apples to apples. A modern rural area, at least in the Western world, has already had some serious out-gassing of residents who wanted a different lifestyle, a person is not born into the area and has no where else to go without any backing. It's a completely different environment in post-Industrial western environments than it was previously, with some fairly interesting implications.

Experience tells me that I would likely be in an out-group, whatever group I happened to be in.

For example, see the preview in this book about traditional small rural communities in Japan: The Japanese Rural Community: Norms, Sanctions, and Ostracism

In some other pre-industrial contexts, autistic people might have been seen as possessed by demons or afflicted by angry gods, or just under the influence of the spirit world. There are accounts from a variety of cvultures of shamans and other magical people who seem likely to have been neurologically atypical. Some modern people romanticize this, but looking closely at it, it doesn't sound very appealing.

No, not all mammals have long gestation periods nor do all have long maturity periods, wolves live like 12 years and a deer's gestation period is only like 6 months.

I'm sure you didn't steal your ideas from him. Just that I think he'd probably have agreed with a lot of your post.

No.

For those that do not wish to simply accept being mere atoms floating around in an indifferent if not hostile society, however, there has to be an understanding that there is strength in numbers, and more than that, having people who have your back. The current status quo is not in our favor. In the absence of a supporting social structure, each one of us, no matter how well situated, is still an island. Look around, do readers see a shortage of social anxiety on this site?

Yes, many of us, myself included, have been burned by untrustworthy people. That doesn't change the fact that we are probably the population the most impacted by social isolation in the world. Not in the west, in the world. Will readers read this post here on WP and change that instantly? I'd be very happy if that happened but I don't expect that. What will happen is that as we move towards a more tribal mentality, we understand that we have our own in-group of fellow high-trust small-group people. One of the first steps towards that mentality is to understand that yes, there are other people out there who think the same way, and yes, people are moving forward on putting together projects, both online but particularly offline.

I spent a week earlier this month out in New Mexico working on a physical offline location. The people there, from across the country, are working on other locations. Others, some of whom are working in public, some of whom are still in preliminary work, are working on their own projects. Each time we strengthen our bonds, we move more towards a world where we don't have to wait for the glowing tablet to shower us with the latest updates from some far away event, but a world where we build our own places, our own events, our own futures.

Numbered:

1. People, Neurodiverse or NT, are stronger in loyal groups.
2. To advance our interests, we need to build bonds of trust, loyalty, and tangible connections.
3. The historical building block of civilization, after the immediate family, is some form of tribe. No point in reinventing the wheel.
4. A tribe, or any other pooling of resources and effort, works only if those inside it can be trusted, otherwise you have what the economists call a "Free-loader problem".
5. The best applicable way known to modern western civilization to build trust and tangible connections is to work with others, and show that all parties are capable of that high-trust environment, or can be quickly pushed outside the high-trust environment.
6. At this time, the effective way to advance our interests is to build and test loyalty and tangible connections, or "Building a Tribal Mentality"
7. Some, through not exclusive, ways to do this are to encourage more high-trust discussion, offline gatherings, joint projects, offline projects, and Neurodiverse-affiliated organizations.