The Two Laws Of Tribalism: Biological Laws for Purpose and Motivation

Stress, depression and anxiety have been a major problem in the modern world. Suicide rates continue to climb without much promise of decline. Most of us can agree that there is something wrong.

Maybe understanding our history might help. I’m not talking about our immediate history, but evolutionary history. Maybe, just maybe we can achieve a better way of living by learning about tribes.

Millions Of Years Of Tribal Living

Humans have lived in tribes for a very long time. Around 2 million years humans descended from the trees and lived on the open lands in Africa. We would live in smaller groups, usually 150 people or smaller.

In contrast, our modern way of living is pretty recent in the history of the universe. We only started living in larger groups 10,000 to 12,000 years ago with the birth of agriculture. This is a fraction of time compared to our tribal living.

For those 2 million years tribal living was fundamental to our way of life, but these past 12,000 years we’ve forgotten that way of living.

Tribe Economies

It’s weird to think of hunter gatherer tribes as having an economy, but in his book My Ishmael Daniel Quinn compares our…