> Homo sapiens, if the anthropologists are right, has been on Earth for
> about 200,000 years. Until the last 10,000 or so of those years, he
> lived in small tribal villages, consisting of a few dozen to a few
> hundred members --- small enough that all of its members knew all of the
> others, indeed, had known each other all of their lives. They midwifed
> one another's births, tended one another's illnesses, shared one
> another's possessions, and married one another's cousins. They knew and
> trusted one another, and had dense, intimate relationships among one
> another. They needed no formal ethics nor any political structure to
> govern their affairs, simply because each was and had always been a
> part of every other’s life.
>
> But with the rise of civilization --- the culture of cities ---
> those bonds could not be maintained. People found themselves living in
> large communities in which most of the people around them were
> strangers, with whom they had no familial or other personal ties, and
> often very little else in common. People began to notice the differences
> among them --- differences in coloration and bone structure, in habits
> of dress, in temperament and mannerisms, in interests and tastes, and
> eventually even in religion and language. They acquired individuality.
>
> In tribal societies there is no free will, and no individuality. All the
> myriad choices we today are constantly obliged to make are prescribed by
> the tribe; they're part of the tribal consciousness, codified in tribal
> tradition, the "folkways" of the tribe. How one dresses, what one eats,
> where one lives, how one earns a living, the choosing of mates, the Gods
> to be worshipped and the rituals for worshipping them, all the petty
> rules governing the tasks of daily life and the "standard methods" for
> performing them, are absorbed from the tribe, without question and
> without the need for thought.
>
> There is no individuality to speak of in these groups, because all
> members have known and interacted only with each other since birth, and
> they are locked into a resonance. There is no politics, no debate, no
> alternate point of view on any matter --- and as a result, almost no
> innovation. Tribal cultures can remain all but static for thousands of
> years, with only a slight refinement in spear points to indicate any
> time has passed at all. Australian Aborigines, for example, when
> encountered by Europeans in the 18th century, were making
> didgeridoos indistinguishable from those made 20,000 years earlier. In
> all that time they never added another instrument to their musical
> technology.
>
> That resonance, however, cannot be maintained in larger groups, because
> the required intimacy is impossible. The group becomes too large for
> everyone to know and interact constantly with everyone else; hence one
> soon finds oneself in the company of strangers. And because they've all
> been subject to slightly different influences, they begin to differ in
> all the ways indicated above.
>
> The breakdown of that resonance represented a huge transformation, not
> merely of the social structure, but of the human psyche. The traditional
> tribal control mechanisms, based on age and personal stature, gave way
> to formal systems of governance --- politics. The tribesman’s intuitive
> sense of right and wrong, which derived primarily from his personal ties
> to and regard for his fellows, gave way to formal systems of ethics.
> Indeed, ethics, like law, is a code for regulating behavior among
> *strangers* --- among people who have no personal interest in one
> another’s welfare.
>
> Every utopia conceived in the last 5000 years has been an attempt to
> recapture the tribal consciousness. The Garden of Eden story embodies
> this "fall from Grace" --- the loss of mankind's oneness with God and
> Nature, his "alienation," his exile into a world of strife and
> temptation, where he seems to have free will and must constantly choose
> between good and evil, between this course of action or that, relying
> only on his own judgement, and must suffer the consequences when his
> judgments go awry.
>
> All these laments of lost innocence and utopian strivings are atavisms
> -- they are psychic echoes of our tribal heritage, the social form honed
> over the course of our 3 million year primate history. All of our fellow
> primates still practice that form, and until the rise of civilization,
> so did all humans.
>
> It would be surprising were our brains not adapted to that social form.
> They have evolved syncronously with that form, and thus may be expected
> to function optimally in that environment, in many ways. So it is not
> surprising that we miss that form, or that we long to regain it. We are
> ducks out of water, trying to find our way back to the pond.
>
> Hence we remain "wired" for tribal life. We long for it, impossible
> though it may be. And often we try to recreate or or substitute for it,
> by immersing ourselves in cults or joining in totalitarian movements.
> The cult seeks to insulate itself from the "society of strangers;" the
> totalitarian movement seeks to subdue it and impose a tribal-like
> conformity, a synthetic common identity and purpose --- usually
> resulting in much bloodshed.
>
> All of politics is totalitarian in its motives and aims, even if it
> sometimes eschews its more brutal methods. Politics is the perpetual
> contention of interest groups for power --- especially the power to
> define the "public interest" (which is always, of course, the interest
> of each particular contending faction) and to conscript all members of
> the community into its pursuit. The very existence of that competition,
> however, reveals the absurdity of that concept and the futility of its
> pursuit. Where a public interest actually exists, such as in an insular
> tribal society, there are no arguments about what it is, and no need to
> convince or convert or conscript anyone into its pursuit. Politics is a
> strategy for attaining a goal which is in principle unattainable, as
> evidenced by the very existence of that strategy. Where a "public
> interest" or a "tribal consciousness" exists, there is no need
> for politics, and it does not appear.
>
> It is time to align our conceptions of society to the realities of its
> structure.