Principles vs Tribes

It is not a "principle" if you only adhere to it when you benefit from doing so.

Tribalism is innate, and it exists for a reason. Social trust has been shown to correlate strongly with prosperity, and the simplest mechanism for achieving social trust is preference for family or otherwise closely-related people. Given “survival of the fittest”, tribalism improves fitness. People with shared upbringings or values can reasonably expect each other to act in ways that are congruent with group well-being.

Thousands of years of tribalism-focused societies saw relatively slow improvements in technology and wealth. Then came an explosion of something different: Societies that not tribal affiliations or ethnostates, but rather, were founded on principles. The United States, with its Constitution, is the most prominent example. A principle is a counterintuitive thing for a human being; it requires him to prefer members of the outgroup even over his own family members should his family member run afoul of the principle. In short, it is anti-tribalism.

The elevation of principles over tribalism enabled an explosion of prosperity by creating “trust” beyond the tribe. No longer was collaboration effectively bounded by Dunbar’s number. This growth has never been set in stone, though. It will always be human nature to revert to tribalism. Moreover, much needs to be said about which principles we prefer. Not all principles are beneficial, and tribalism is preferable to bad principles.

This Substack will particularly focus on the principles that have correlated (almost certainly causally) with Western prosperity. We will define our terms and discuss their merits. Along the way, we’ll also comment on current events and their relationship with various principles, as well as the many examples of tribalism posing as principle.