Michael Morris

The reason it feels good when we're in a like-minded group and everybody knows your name and everybody understands you is because we have needs that get satiated by that experience.

It's part of the human nature.

We live in very large communities that are bound together by shared ideas, by the sort of legacy of inherited culture.

And that set of shared ideas enables the circle of trust between

to be much broader in our species than in other species.

We can trust people beyond kith and kin, beyond our relatives, beyond the people that we see every day, because if someone shares our culture, if they share those ideas that we operate with, they are predictable to us.

We can understand their actions.

We can predict what they will do.

We can coordinate and collaborate with them.

So in my book, tribes are a very good thing, and tribes are what made us human.

They're what got us out of the Stone Age.

Their church is a community bound together by shared ideas.

Their country is one.

Perhaps the company they work for has an organizational culture.

Maybe they're part of a profession like,

lawyers or engineers, where there's a lot of shared frameworks that come from your training.

They give you a common worldview with the other members of that profession.

So we inhabit multiple tribes in our lives.

And one of the things that that leads to in the way that our cultural psychology works is that not all of our identities

can operate at once.