I was brought up in a tribe. My tribe was Evangelical, Fundamentalist Christian. You could be happy in that tribe…
…As long as you stayed in the tribe. As long as you did not question the tribe. As long as you obeyed the tribe’s rules.
Our tribe, like every tribe, functioned according to certain unwritten, group think dynamics. We signed up to the scriptures of the tribe and the creed of the tribe. We kept the dress code. We not only obeyed the rules, we judged and excluded the mavericks who broke the rules.
The tribe was strengthened by a continued awareness of threat. To bolster support we identified an “enemy” and went on the attack. We built our fortress and took pot shots over the battlements. We never won the war because it wasn’t about the war. It was about the identity of the tribe.
We felt strong when we identified the weakness of the enemy. We felt good by pointing out how others were bad. We put ourselves up by putting others down. We were driven by the sour fuel of resentment.
That was my tribe. It functioned like every other tribe. My tribe was religious. Yours might be political, sexual, ideological…whatever.
Tribes are like that.