Dom Alhambra

In the past six months, I’ve heard the term “tribe” and “tribalism” more than I had during sixth grade Native American studies. For the term “tribe”, I typically hear it in resignation that groups of people are desperate to “find their tribe” and will be consigned to parroting off the talking points of their chosen tribe’s ideology. With this connotation in mind, “finding one’s tribe” must mean to give up the facts of reality by finding support in others who serve as an ideological feedback loop. I mostly heard this term and phrase with regard to the 2020 United States election. Trumpers, white nationalists, antifa, woke liberals—groups of people, all disparaged for having collectively acted, thus described as having “found one’s tribe”.

I’ve been hearing the term “tribalism” with regard to the state of affairs for internet discussions, particularly on cryptocurrency forums. A small portion of each cryptocurrency’s fanbase will have re-read the website, white paper, and the founder’s remarks, and have created a mythological narrative for what their chosen cryptocurrency can bring to the world. And yes, 80% of cryptocurrency tech narratives involve saving the world from disaster, or at least Africa. These very few True Fans, having created this imagined world of global domination—I mean, adoption—lives in constant disappointment that the world is not moving fast enough to enact their dreams in the next two weeks.

But these very few True Fans, utopian visions in mind, start to see other cryptocurrencies doing similar things, maybe other things, or maybe even less things—and those cryptocurrencies are more popular! The True Fan is confused: the utopian vision already exists, why would others have not seen the true potential of this coin? Well, it’s because the others have been enticed by another coin’s own True Fan, who had shared their own utopian reality promised by the coin’s functionings. The ideological fight between coins ensue. Organized brigades of forums push for one savior-coin. Another coin’s fans respond with their own thoughts about the supposed mutual exclusivity of cryptocurrencies.

Finally, someone surveys the whole spat between coins, and says “We need to end this Crypto tribalism”. It must be embarrassing to the rest of the crypto forums that these True Fans care so much about a certain coin. It must be odd to see people collectively acting to promote a cryptocurrency.

In my eyes, these cases of “tribalism” and “finding one’s tribe” is embarrassing. But the criticism needs to be nuanced, for one can easily use these modern uses of “tribe” as weaponry against the important energy wasted on politics and financial technology: The energy to collectively act.

I believe that “tribalism” is an important state of human sociability. Humans evolved over 3 million years to organize into “bands”, which are groups of 10-50 people that nomadically thrived off the earth. A band is not an ideological group, but a group built out of necessity: There is power in numbers when living with nature. Families, at times structured very different from the 1950’s “platonic” image, worked together to share in the activities of food gathering, shelter-building and play. Being a close-knit as a roving, 50-person town can be, the band developed its own culture. The band culture is a mix of necessities, desires, and fears. Necessities, such as food, water, shelter, and clothing, were encoded into the band’s material culture. Desires like love or unrequited want may also be integrated into the oral stories of the band culture. Fears, like the compromise of necessities, personal virtue, or outright dangerous entities, will be reflected in the culture as well.

What I describe for band culture is the truer state of “tribalism”. It’s not a surprise that the word “tribe” would be the first punching bag within ideological battles. Since Ayn Rand used the word in her mid-20th century essays, we now associate “tribe” with something anti-intellectual, anti-individualist, primitive. Some may live in a zone of cognitive dissonance: Speaking to the respect of Native American tribes, while still using “tribalism” and “finding one’s tribe” disparagingly. Ask a Native American: Did they have to “find their own tribe”? No, their tribe was not chosen, their tribe was a birthright. Did the tribes have to worry about their own intellect or individualism or primitivism? No, they were doing fine on all fronts until the Western culture of desperate self-comparison came in.

I might conclude that the modern, disparaging use of “tribe” is the character assassination of a concept that possibly provides the best alternative to the ideological mess that we have going on with (post)modern culture.

Here’s the mess: The thing we’re calling “tribalism” right now is actually called radicalization, in which an individual is deliberately or accidentally brainwashed to accept a particular unreality, and is willing to actively support that unreality in psychological and physical ways, sometimes at the cost of their lives or others. No tribal culture built out of necessity seeks death for its children. Martyrs don’t exist within band-based “tribalism”; martyrs exist for the radicalized so that you can harvest both life and death for political capital.

The phenomenon gets even worse: The Crypto True Fan has been radicalized, and seeks to spread his gospel to anyone that will listen.

Reduce a person to the money they are worth, and let them personally invest that money into highly volatile technologies. Watch as that person starts to personally identify as that technology! They will obsessively check the charts to see what they are valued today. Many times they will feel resentful for being so “undervalued”. They will take pride in themselves during bull runs. “You are what you eat.” Remember that there has already been a couple casualties after the early-2020 stock trading extravaganza. Suicides of those who saw themselves as the money they now owe. They felt as if they were less than nothing.

Show me a cultural phenomenon that can cause someone to commit suicide and I’ll show you a phenomenon that can radicalize today’s innocent people into the future’s soldiers. These soldiers may likely never commit to physical combat, but they will proselytize on the corners of the internet for the rest of their lives; we do live in the age of information warfare after all.

However, culture, when unchallenged, is simply reality. When a person from another band arrives, there can be a total disconnect in all communication: Completely different languages and cultures mean even “universal” symbols weren’t actually universal. This misunderstanding can lead to a polite but fruitless interaction, a stress-inducing event when seeing something you don’t understand, or outright hostility toward the unknown entity as a defense maneuver.

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Tribalism fueled by necessity > Tribalism fueled by want.

I see now that ideological “tribalism” is a product of a culture of want. They want their constructions to be adopted by others, so they will go to great rhetorical lengths to make their want a “necessity”.

Human necessity does not go beyond food, clothing, shelter, and social comfort. Tribalism built out of these necessities of survival look into the facts of life and nature to best fulfill necessities.

Tribalism built out of human constructions—technologies, politics, products—are seeking to establish a newly constructed “necessity” without facts of life and nature—corollaries are built from cultural mandates, which muddles the difference between fact and fiction. There can be more hype surrounding the promise of human constructions than the realities provided by the physical reality.