The Toxic Human Traits of Forming Tribes & Following Leaders
Humans’ Inherent Penchant To Identify With A Tribe & Idolize The Tribe’s Leader Is The №1 Cause Of Wars, Slaughter, & Human Suffering
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
Don’t blindly follow Leaders. Don’t let your identity be your tribe. Just be you.
People’s Identity Becomes Membership In Their Tribe
One of homo sapiens built-in propensities is human beings’ desire, often it is more of a compulsion, to intensely identify themselves as members of a group, a pack, a tribe.
People often believe that membership in the tribe will gain the individual more safety, more power, more respect, and possibly more wealth than the individual would have alone.
The tribe might be a race (“Thank God I’m White”), an ethnicity, a residence in a geographical region, a religion, a country, a company, a gang, a philosophy, or even a sports team.
If There Is An All-Important US, Then There Has To Be A THEM
The toxic part of this drive to very intensely identify oneself as a member of a group is that every group becomes an “us” and for every “us” there has to be a “them.” And, of course, every “us” must have a leader, a czar, a king, a commander, a general, a president, or a fuehrer.
Every pack requires a leader of the pack.
Unwavering Devotion To The Leader Of The Pack
That compulsion to primarily and intensely identity yourself as a group member leads to another of homo sapiens’ built-in defects — the compulsion to follow and often idolize the leader of your tribe.
That leader could be a politician, a religious prophet, a cult guru, a gang headman or a military commander, anyone from Caesar to Stalin, the Pope to Jim Jones.
Whatever title the leader uses, s/he assures the members that s/he will “fix things,” will “get the bad guys,” “get the money,” “get the respect,” or “get the power” that the followers believe that the tribe deserves.
We Are The Descendents Of Tribal Animals
I think that compulsion to be primarily identify oneself as part of a group, a tribe, a herd, a country, or a religion is derived from our ancestry as tribal animals.
Perhaps if we had descended from solitary creatures who were never part of a tribe we would not first and foremost identify ourselves as members of some racial, religious or ethnic group; we would not join cults and we would not idolize our tribe’s leader.
The Poison Of The Cult Of Personality
But we do create and join cults and idolize leaders. And blindly believing and following leaders ALWAYS creates bad events.
From whatever source that need to tenaciously cling to tribal membership derives, those members select a leader to whom they pledge their allegiance and often their lives. The more their identity is tied into membership in the group, the more they idolize the group’s leader.
And we all know how that turns out: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Jung Il, Jim Jones, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin . . . . Do I have to keep going?
There’s a verse in Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues that I quite like:
Look out kid,
you're gonna get hit
by users, cheaters,
six time losers
hanging round the theaters.
Girl by the whirlpool
looking for a new fool.
Don't follow leaders and
watch your parking meters.From Caesar to Hitler, Stalin to Jim Jones, the need, the compulsion to create and then mindlessly follow leaders is, in my opinion, a toxic human flaw. I think it starts with a desperate need to define an “us” that is then followed by the need to identify and demonize a “them.”
We’re hearing the chant lately: “You will not replace us.”
Who is the you? Who is the us? Replace you as what?
Getting Power By Praising US & Demonizing THEM
Did the aspiring leader first invent an “us” and a “them” as his strategy to gain power in the first place or did the us and the them always exist and he just identified and exploited the fear/hatred of them as his strategy for gaining power over us?
For Hitler the “us” was the Aryan race and the “them” was the Jews, but aspiring leaders can use the us/them tactic with any “us” and any “them.” Did your school teach you about the Crusades? The inquisition? The witch trials? Joe McCarthy and the hunt for communists?
From Jim Jones to Donald Trump, humans are suckers for making themselves into an “us” and then pledging slavish allegiance to some megalomaniac, wannabe leader who promises that he is going to protect our particular us from his target them.
I think the desire to be part of an us and them and the willingness to follow a leader into a battle against the them is baked into our homo sapiens’ DNA.
What Would Aliens Without Tribal Ancestors Be Like?
Wouldn’t it be interesting if we someday encountered an alien race that wasn’t descended from a tribal/pack animal, but instead was descended from a cooperative species? What would the social conventions be for a species that evolved in a cooperative environment instead of a “one leader/many followers” model?
Is the leader/pack template ultimately rooted in the fact that we are a bisexual species? Is it derived from the inherent competition between males for mates?
What if this theoretical alien species were asexual, that it had no parent/child bond, and their offspring were raised by the group/clan/herd instead of by the adult that gave birth to them?
Would such a species lack the must “belong to a pack; follow the pack leader; conquer the other packs” human model? Would it be inherently cooperative rather than competitive, social rather than adversarial?
I don’t know.
Idolizing The Leader Has Been The Biggest Cause Of Human Suffering
What I do believe is that the inherent human inclination to intensely identify as part of an us and blindly follow a leader who promises to protect us from and/or dominate a them has wasted more wealth, taken more freedom, and ruined more lives than any other aspect of human nature that I can think of.
Don’t blindly follow Leaders. Abandon intense allegiance to your tribe. Just be you.
— David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
