How Radical Individualism Leads to Tribalism: A Selection from David Brooks’ The Second Mountain (2020)
“People who are left naked and alone by radical individualism do what their genes and the ancient history of their species tell them to do: They revert to tribe. Individualism, taken too far, leads to tribalism.
Hannah Arendt noticed the phenomenon decades ago. When she looked into the lives of people who had become political fanatics, she found two things: loneliness and spiritual emptiness. ‘Loneliness is the common ground of terror,’ she wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. . . .
People who are experiencing existential dread slip into crisis mode: ‘I’m in danger! I’m threatened; I must strike back!’ Their evolutionary response is self-protection, so they fall back on ancient instincts for how to respond to a threat: us versus them. Tribalists seek out easy categories in which some people are good and others are bad. They seek out certainty to conquer their feelings of unbearable doubt. They seek out war—political war or actual war—as a way to give life meaning. They revert to tribe.
Tribalism seems like a way to restore the bonds of community. It certainly does bind people together. But it is actually the dark twin of community. Community is connection based on mutual affection. Tribalism, in the sense I’m using it here, is connection based on mutual hatred. Community is based on common humanity; tribalism on common foe. Tribalism is always erecting boundaries and creating friend/enemy distinctions. The tribal mentality is a warrior mentality based on scarcity: Life is a battle for scarce resources and it’s always us versus them, zero-sum. The ends justify the means. Politics is war. Ideas are combat. It’s kill or be killed. Mistrust is the tribalist worldview. Tribalism is community for lonely narcissists.
These days, partisanship for many people is not about which political party has the better policies. It’s a conflict between the saved and the damned. People often use partisan identity to fill the void left when their other attachments wither away—ethnic, neighborhood, religious, communal, and familial.
This is asking more from politics than politics can deliver. Once politics becomes your ethnic or moral identity, it becomes impossible to compromise, because compromise becomes dishonor. Once politics becomes your identity, then every electoral contest is a struggle for existential survival, and everything is permitted. Tribalism threatens to take the detached individual and turn him into a monster.”—David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for the Moral Life (2020)
