I want to provide a quote first, “Tribal thing, if you are not a part of someone’s tribe, the rules of social violence don’t apply to you. If you don’t consider certain people as part of your tribe, you can hunt them. You can prey upon them. You can steal their resources, so they starve and die. And who cares? They’re not one of yours. You can kill them without regret. And the only thing that does is bring glory to you and your tribe. You can enslave them. You can oppress them. They are lesser beings. You can use them. You can sacrifice them like pawns in a chess game … and you will not lose a night’s sleep, If it is a member of a hated tribe, you can take sadistic glee from their setbacks and losses. Or you can actively work for that tribe’s downfall and not only sleep will, but believe you are doing god’s work by lies, sabotage, torture, and murder. (God’s work even if it is in a secular cause) Or you can ignore them, dismiss them and their plight, and profiteer from it. And again you will sleep well that night. All this is made possible by the act of OTHERING, … you reduce anyone not in your tribe ti being less than human.”
How often have you wondered why those guys so easily rob us, hurt us or just relieve us of our “hard earned” resources? In our mind-state we can say to ourselves, “How could someone do that to another human being?” When I read this I think that maybe this is the answer and that this does not provide us a way to make it go away. Why?
Because, as I am understanding things, this is all part of being human and all part of the survival instincts. It is pretty much hard coded in human psyche, the lizard part of our brains. It also tells me, personally, something very, very important, we are and still will be tribal no matter how many lies we will tell ourselves to make us feel safe, secure and a part of a much larger whole that becomes society.
I am able to see it a bit more in everyday life. Like work, where the management often say we have to unite to become successful, we have to remove he silo’s (actually they should call them tribes and tribal mentality) and we have to become one whole unit (can you say tribe) to be the greatest <add in name of unit, division or company name here>! If this is true, why has it failed in implementation for the last six years of constant changes in the effort to become more successful and more economically viable?
Lets just say for the sake of this discussion that the quote is “right on.” If so, then why should we endure such emotional turmoil when we see video’s of those terrorists when they do harm to “others?” After all, if we understand that because we are not of their tribe and especially of their religious tribe we can begin to understand why they do this and why they seem so “unaffected” by the actions we might be able to start to understand ways to overcome this tribal mind-set and enable them to allow us to occupy the world side-by-side. Big IF here.
Taking it back down to tribal, honestly we all still do the tribal thing and other other groups. At work we in the Sysadm group are a tribe and therefore everyone else and every outside group is not our group therefore we find good reason why we resist the diminishing of our group to be absorbed by another group not our group, right?
Lets go another direction since this is a MA blog, one style or system is a tribe. A big tribe, but all the same a tribe. Look at the style/system as a particular society. As humans go this is much to big a tribe so we will naturally go to a much smaller one for survival therefore although we are of the style/system tribe will will make our own smaller and more acceptable tribe, i.e. the local style/system as a dojo, so to speak. Now we have a local, more cohesive and manageable and acceptable to instinct tribal sizes to survive.
Now, even the the acceptable tribe that is the local dojo we still gravitate toward smaller and more emotionally cohesive tribes, i.e. we now have the “Kyu” tribe and the “Dan” tribes. In other words the hierarchy of the dojo tribe. Within those tribes we will have more hierarchies but overall we know and accept the dojo tribes governance for survival. See the picture here.
This also means that although we may be members of that very large tribe we will still other them because they are not of the immediate tribe and we can see this in those big associations where the individual tribes pretty much ignore the big tribes requirements, especially those they feel are not conducive to the local tribes governing rules and scripts, except when it suits them.
Even when you look a the much larger honbu dojo style/system there are factions, local tribes, consisting of like minded sub-tribes that still do their own thing except when a gathering of tribes occurs then there is a whole different set of rules and scripts the smaller tribes are willing to endure until they return to their home turf.
Back on track, this may be an understanding that allows enlightenment as to why we all do what we do, we are all associated with sizable tribal stuff that is way beyond our instinctual survival instincts capacities and why we gravitate toward the smaller tribal settings, i.e. why we stay with family and the local friend networks. Why we tend toward smaller groups or units within a larger faction at work being the departments and actual business as a whole, it is a tribal instinct that is subconscious and may be the root of a lot of the stress and anxieties we all experience in an over crowded world of more and more people as we continue to expand faster than our humanity is capable.
Just sayin and just a thinkin!
Bibliography:
Goleman, Daniel. “Emotional Intelligence: 10th Anniversary Edition [Kindle Edition].” Bantam. January 11, 2012.
MacYoung, Marc. “In the Name of Self-Defense: What It Costs. When It’s Worth It.” Marc MacYoung. 2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment