Bill Anderson
Jul 22, 2017 · 1 min read

The words “tribe” and “tribalism” are very different words despite a commonality of letters. One can use what anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists have been using for decades, or one can make shit to be obtuse and jump on a broken bandwagon.

When used properly, as in with an actual historical scientific aspect the phrase “political tribalism” is a misnomer of a rather high order. Tribalism as used for decades doesn’t involve politics and isn’t political. When used to mean a vague grouping of people and then a fractionated sub grouping of that group, it is useless sophistry. Indeed the inevitable logical conclusion of such an exhausting exercise means fractionating down the individual and an individual does not constitute a tribe. On the other hand that means you ultimately have to realize is that what matters are individuals rather than artificial, and arbitrary, groupings of them.

Either words have a meaning and are thus meaningful, or they can be used however anyone wants, in which case they lack meaning and thus the sentences and arguments made with them lack meaning. Further, if you can’t actually define the term in anything but vague terms, you don’t have a usable term. What you’d have is just more post-modern nihilism.