Why tribalism wins ?. For this we need to consider what would be the alternative of tribalism?. Individualism. However individuals collaborate to achieve goals . The act of collaboration leads to competition between different kinds of ideas . Here there is big difference between complicated ideas which require deep study which cannot be done over short period of time and simple ideas which require less study. The more complex an idea, the less numbers of people shall be able to follow and the simpler an idea, its easy enough to get many to support them. It should also be easier to get many to debunk them as well. But here we end up with cognitive biases of the mind. No matter the ease with which one might debunk the simple idea, one might still not win the case for the complex idea precisely because it is complex, one might debunk it in favor of another simple idea. This leads to evolution of rhetoric, branding, a way to compress very complex set of ideas into simple enough ideas that can gain support .
In all this, we are now faced with the logistics of how ideas are disseminated , the fidelity with which they are disseminated, all options are made available, how well are all options equally explained. All this requires commitment of workers. So, the requirement of nuance, the logistics of the entire exercise, the need to motivate workers , the simple minded ideas and rhetoric one needs to deploy to win over others to one’s side , especially if one’s own ideas are too complex. This leads to a need for improvisation, rhetoric, taking advantage of cognitive hacks of our minds.
And once these methods are put in place, this machine becomes self sustaining, the use of cognitive hacks will keep getting deployed. All this lead to dominance of tribes over individualism.As it will be the efficiency of how these are run that shall decide the success.
Individualism also leads to spectrum of different positions. As Steven Weinberg once put it, “Without religion, good people will be good and bad people bad, with religion, to get good people to do bad,that takes religion”. As simple as this might sound, One might discover that the personalities of these “good people” might diverge from each other as well. If so, one might find that these good people might further divide themselves as their individual exploration space would be different from each other, their cognitive capacity, their methods of reasoning and subjective experience might all differ. The narcissism of individualism leads to the bizarre culture of validating people for discovery of their personal truth , popularization of phrases like “speaking your truth” comes to the mind. The narcissism of individualism will lead to a culture of much internal bickering and be taken over by the more tribal groups, whether they be internal or external.
Truth is not easy to find for all. At some point one has to go by trust due to the impossibility of one individual gaining perfection in diverse fields .Even in one field, one is far away from experts. This is true at both at the level of knowledge but also at the level of governance. The requirements of building systems of governance to scale leads one to also trust large numbers of people as part of the system. The constraints alone make Tribalism seem necessary. Add to it the divergent thinking styles of people to it along with diverse beliefs of people, how can it not be the case that tribalism would win. Once a tribe is formed based on certain markers, it becomes self sustaining and change the world in unique way in consonance with those tribal markers.
The difference is one therefore as to how an eco system of tribes tame themselves over time and evolve strategies of not trying to out compete each other to harmful effects but to help enable each other and to also solve the trouble of freeloaders .
In absence of clear cut answers one can only go by heuristics and methods to help us. In science and math, it is the consistency of methods, experiments that helps us. They act as guard rails . We need to educate people about guardrails, one such guard rail could be skin in the game and belief in progress in incremental steps, experimental groups one can track over period of time and test for intervention rather than to force experiment on everyone with no way to convince others that one’s ideas are indeed true.
Hmm, I assume none of commenters have been to Sri Lanka.
Seem to get the impression SL is part of greater India by the readers.
First and foremost we do not have upper caste varnas. The highest caste is Farmer/Govigama/Vellala. 50% of the society and within which old feudal class.
Almost on existent now among the Sinhalese. More prevalent among the Tamils.
Its a polyglot country where all and sundry have been visiting or invading over 2000+ years. 500 years under colonization, starting with Portuguese.
Of course everyone in this country is âPureâ Sinhalese or Tamil. Not much different from Americans. You are just supposed to become a Sinhalese (I am mutt, mainly Tamil/Kalinga)
Even with all that admixture, we are the darkest (in general) in South Asia and Asia. The Brahmin commenters run Sri Lankans/Sinhalese down as the low caste Dalits who emigrated from India with Aryan pretensions.
That said we dont seem to be doing too bad, even after a 30 year civil war. Compare and contrast the stats, Life Expectancy, Literacy. GDP/capita is no measure of the egalitarian country. The US has so much higher GDP/capita but misery and poverty of the inner cities has no comparison to rural poverty in SL.
ZachNote: I notice Sri Lankan Tamils in the West have alot of swag. They are into gangster culture and what not; completely different to their TN counterparts.
I copied the below data from Wikipedia; Sri Lanka, India & Bangladesh acquit themselves fairly well. Pakistan’s showing is absolutely disgraceful; shame on the Pakistani leadership. Also Pakistan’s behavior in Afghanistan has dragged down that country to the shits as well; I understand Afghanistan was a proxy in the 80’s but supporting the Taliban after that, well that was an absolute effing disgrace!
A rough calc shows South Asia to be a 3 trillion dollar economy for appropriately 1.8 billion people. That’s an absolute disgrace by comparison since East Asia is an 18 trillion dollar economy with a slightly less population (the US is a 20 trillion dollar economy with a sixth of the population). It may just be that the festering sore of Indo-Pak relations may have a greater human and economic cost than one-offs like the American Civil War, the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
[172][172][173][174]
[174][175][176]
(km2)
[177]
(2017)[178]
(per km2)
(2017)[179]