INCURABLY TRIBAL?

WE ARE ALL SLAVES TO THE FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR

Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week, the internet has been awash in hypotheses as to who did it and why. Some folks are pretty darned certain.

• The killer was a trans activist avenging words with bullets.

• He was a Groyper who thought Kirk wasn’t far-right enough.

• He was just a mentally ill individual with a veritable melting pot of conflicting beliefs and access to firearms he probably shouldn’t have been in possession of.

• He’s not the guy they caught. Instead, the killer took Kirk out as part of an Israeli conspiracy to quell budding dissent among young Conservatives against US foreign policy on Israel.

Maybe they’re all somewhat plausible. Though the release of the alleged killer’s text exchange with his roommate/partner might cause an uptick in tinfoil hat stocks.

But we don’t know the truth of it, and perhaps never will.

What I find more interesting here, at least for now, is how Kirk’s assassination, like so many other Big News events, is an inkblot. A veritable Rorschach test for identifying what’s going on in the public psyche.

The inkblot doesn’t hold any truth to be told. But we humans see faces in the clouds and mythical creatures in the stars. We’re pattern-seeking primates, and we’re primed to see patterns that reflect our biases.

So, it’s no great surprise that a lot of Progressives protective of marginalised groups and Conservatives with varying degrees of skepticism around the trans rights movement buy the line that the killer was a trans activist.

Or that a lot of Liberals who can’t grapple with the dissonance of a fellow Liberal making use of the Second Amendment to shut down use of the First prefer to believe the killer sits more comfortably at the opposite end of the political spectrum entirely.

Or that individuals who recognize that it’s pretty rare for sane and sensible people to plan and carry out assassinations to conclude this really wasn’t as much about ideology as it was about yet another young person’s mental health issues not being dealt with.

Or that anti-war activists and conspiracy theorists alike are concerned that this could have been the latest in a string of state-backed assassinations of public figures whose profiles had become powerful enough to sway policy.

Everything is Rorschach backed by motivated reasoning.

And what this particular Rorschach test reveals is that we’re not on the same page. A lot of us aren’t even on the same bookshelf.

And that’s because we’re tribal.

NORMATIVE IS THE NORM

Most of us conform to the norms and values of the groups and networks whose opinions matter most to us.

For many people, that’s simply the communities they grew up in.

For many others, it’s their professional milieu.

And for most young people, it’s their peer group.

We’re not driven by truth-seeking. We’re driven by the desire to protect our pre-existing beliefs and identity.

So, we might pretzel ourselves into all sorts of loops trying to reconcile reality with narratives that support our in-group norms and values. Narrative coherence is more important than truth when it comes to remaining a member of the in-group.

The story has to be made to fit. The cherries are picked accordingly.

Facts don’t change minds when beliefs are tied to identity. Thus, logic is bent more easily than beliefs.

When we can’t make the story fit, we have a crisis of identity. We don’t know where we fit, if anywhere at all.

Some of us are most definitely in this camp and may identify as politically homeless.

In civilization’s current iteration, this is dangerous enough. Political homelessness means there is no safe haven. Why would anyone take in an unreliable ally who might undermine group cohesion?

In our ancestors’ times, defecting from the in-group was tantamount to suicide. One cannot afford to be shunned as an apostate or an infidel. We depend on each other for our survival.

LOYALTY IS A SURVIVAL STRATEGY

I’m not passing judgment here, just pointing out what decades of research into social identity has demonstrated.

As a social species, we are tribal by nature. Perhaps incurably so.

As such, we are slaves to the fundamental attribution error.

When explaining the behaviour of our out-group, we overestimate the role of their character or intentions while underestimating the role of contextual factors.

For our in-group, we do the opposite: we use context to make justifications while downplaying the role of character or intention.

That’s why we see some people who identify as Conservative going to town on orchestrating mass-firings of people who expressed pleasure or satisfaction in Charlie Kirk’s murder. They judge those people as despicable, not as people who are responding to (mis?)information they’ve been fed about the kind of person Charlie was.

It’s also why we see some people who identify as Progressive unironically decrying the hypocrisy of the Right for embracing cancel culture. They judge those people as disingenuous hypocrites, not as people who are disgusted by the use of a public or professional platform for revelling in schadenfreude.

Everyone picking a side is right to a point and wrong the rest of the way.

But that’s not how we see ourselves or our in-groups. At the level of our in-group, most of us are narcissistic.

Our people are more intelligent, more considered, and more morally pure than your people.

Your people are ignorant, selfish, and hateful. As such, you do not merit our empathy.

After all, we are the chosen ones destined for the promised land.

And we will trample you to get there.

This spells catastrophe for social cohesion. It results in civil wars and genocides.

We’ve seen this movie a bunch of times.

Unfortunately, we can’t simply get around this by shunning tribal affiliation altogether.

When someone departs their in-group they are slammed as having never been a true believer. After all, how could someone who truly believed possibly have been led astray?

Those who leave their tribe are apostates.

Those who don’t tribe up are infidels.

Neither are to be trusted. Both are punished.

That’s why moderate is the radical position in a world that demands you pick a side and to hell with nuance.

That’s the psychology that explains what we’re seeing when we watch the TwitFest equivalent of monkeys throwing shit at each other.

But we’ve gone awry somewhere.

TRIBE UP OR DIE

Back in the old Savannah days, we lived in much smaller groups. Dunbar’s number would cap this at around 150 people, usually made up of clusters of smaller groups.

(I think Dunbar’s number is disputed, but, for the sake of argument, let’s roll with it because the point isn’t the number, it’s the relative scale.)

At this scale, everyone knew everyone directly. Groups were large enough to both defend their territory when needed and to pool and share resources to distribute risk and reward.

If we didn’t tribe up, we were at massive risk – from predators, from rival groups vying for scarce resources, and from the fragility of simply needing to eat with no guarantee of success in hunting and foraging.

There ain’t no one among us who could possibly be descended from a lone wolf.

Tribes were typically made up of extended families or closely related groups. They were bound by evolutionarily driven reciprocity: I will provide for you today such that you will provide for me tomorrow, and our genes will be passed on.

Cheaters, freeloaders, and traitors were punished. Exclusion was a death sentence.

So, it’s no surprise we developed a bunch of instincts to support tribal continuity. We learned to trust and favour ‘us’ more than ‘them’. We learned to be cautious around, or even hostile toward, ‘them’.

And with reputation linked to survival, we learned to really give a shit what others think of us (although it’s cool these days to pretend we don’t). Virtue-signalling might thus be baked into our DNA.

TRIBALISM IN THE ABSTRACT

But most of us no longer live at the scale at which we can know and care about everyone we live alongside. A few millennia of ever-increasing complexity have elapsed since the Savannah days.

In smaller communities it’s still possible for people to see their neighbours as ‘us’, not ‘them’, and thus to be cared for and worked with in support of mutual survival. We see this after natural disasters where small communities band together brilliantly to take care of each other, often making up for shortfalls in government support.

But at the level of cities, countries, the world? We’re living at an unwieldy scale. We cannot see everyone within a city or a country, much less the whole world, as members of our tribe. I’d love it if we could, but I don’t think it’s in us.

So, we tribe up over abstract identity instead. That identity could be based on all manner of interests, from cultural norms to religious practices to political affiliation. People tribe up over their support for causes, and all manner of -isms.

Our survival instincts have been channelled into abstract affiliations at the ironic expense of ground-level social cohesion.

So, instead of looking out for our neighbours, we’d sooner throw them under the bus for daring to disagree on matters that are not intrinsic to our survival. Like whether we should be allowed to say what’s on our mind. Or whether someone we don’t want to marry should be allowed to marry another person we also don’t want to marry.

We behave as though people we’ve only ever interacted with in virtual form might come to our rescue in literal terms if the going were to get tough for us on the ground.

And we behave as though our neighbour, who might otherwise have helped us rebuild our house after a storm, deserves to be ostracized – and thus rendered unable to help us – if they disagree with us over which political party should be in charge of the money printer (which they all wield in the exact same way).

In growing beyond our means, we’ve lost sight of our immediate horizons.

We shouldn’t expect the whole world to get on the same page about anything. We have competing needs, and resources are not so freely abundant that we can just give everyone an equal share and then sit around a (fucking massive) campfire, holding hands and singing Kumbaya.

So, what should we do instead?

THE PRINCIPAL PRINCIPLE

Resilience at the community level requires, first up, recognition of who is in our community.

By all means connect with an abstract community that shares some of your more niche beliefs. There’s nothing wrong with identifying with your favourite football team so long as you’re not roughing up fans who favour another footie team because of it.

I personally identify with metalheads worldwide. But I’ll happily have a beer with a boot-scootin’ countryphile.

Just don’t tribe up in the abstract at the expense of connecting with a tangible community at ground level – those people around you who might actually be able to help you in a crisis.

And, for the love of all things natural, do not express schadenfreude at your neighbour’s misfortune lest you be treated as someone undeserving of compassion when your time of need arrives.

Resilience at the individual level requires that we live in service of our values. At the community level it’s no different.

It’s just that bit harder to negotiate a collective set of values. But it’s far from impossible.

Our values are our deeply held principles about what is good, right, and important. Some values might seem to conflict – for example, we might crave freedom but also crave security, which undermines the extent of our freedom. In practice, these values can coexist provided we are flexible and not absolutist.

While it might seem hard to negotiate our values collectively, there are abundant examples all around us that we are doing just this. After all, the reason most of us don’t go around routinely killing or stealing isn’t because we’re scared of consequences; it’s because we actually think killing and stealing are wrong in most contexts.

So, our values guide our behaviour and decision-making not just at the level of the individual, but also at the level of the wider community.

We get into trouble when we try to build rigidly structured systems of beliefs atop the foundation of our principles. Codifying principles in a way that is inflexible results in ideologies that do not play nicely in the sandbox with the other ideologies.

Compassion is a great example of a value, or principle. The principle of caring for others in need and alleviating suffering guides us to help our neighbours, give to charities, and provide a shoulder to cry on.

Ideologies built on compassion are as diverse as Conservatism (supporting family, community, and moral order to prevent people falling into suffering), Liberalism (ensuring everyone has equal opportunities to flourish), Socialism (protecting people from exploitation and hardship), Religious Humanitarianism (helping the needy through faith-based service), and Environmentalism (taking non-human life and future generations into consideration).

All of these are very noble and hard to argue against. And yet we find ourselves arguing against them when we commit ourselves to one, because the rigidity of structured ideologies precludes their peaceful coexistence.

And ultimately, we act against the very principles our ideologies were built upon when we fight for one over another.

What works at one level of abstraction works at all levels of abstraction if it truly works at all. If you’re living in accordance with your values, you are likely to play nicely in the sandbox with others. And your community will be all the more resilient for it.

So, the tldr?

Get off the internet.

Stop watching monkeys throw shit at each other.

Stop throwing shit at the other monkeys.

Sit with the question: what are my values?

And just get on with life, applying your principles in practice.

Say hi to your neighbours once in a while.

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