Nicholas Wade

So the church came along and said, no, all that is incestuous and absolutely forbidden.

And so when people were on their deathbeds, the church would say, well,

You should leave all your money to the poor, meaning the church.

And the church became fantastically wealthy.

At one stage, it owned like half of Germany and a third of France.

The net result of this policy was that the tribes lost all their money and just disappeared.

Well, these basic instincts don't go away.

They just get sort of modulated.

So tribalism no longer exists.

If you asked an American what his tribe was, unless he was an American Indian, he would have no idea what you meant.

But you can still see tribalism operate in the form of nepotism.

So people will do anything to help their families, give them a leg up, and wherever possible, people will...

arrange as much of their wealth as possible goes to their surviving relatives so that they maximize the number of children they put in the next generation.

You mean based on race or just based on ideology?

Yeah, I think tribalism can sort of break out in almost any context because it's so inbuilt in our systems.

You embrace your friends and you hate or despise or kill your enemies.

And tribalism itself

hasn't really gone away.

It's just been transformed into the nation state.

So the nation state, I think, has emerged as the most effective way for humans to organize themselves.