Tribal Wisdom Quotes

There is an ancient tribal proverb I once heard in India. It says that before we can see properly we must first shed our tears to clear the way.

Being vegetarian here also means that we do not consume dairy and egg products, because they are products of the meat industry. If we stop consuming, they will stop producing. Only collective awakening can create enough determination for action.

Some of us are drawn to mountains the way the moon draws the tide. Both the great forests and the mountains live in my bones. They have taught me, humbled me, purified me and changed me.

This stuff of a past not worthily lived is also medicine.

[...] when you look at the world, you put on the goggles of custom, habit and tribal wisdom lest the truth make you insane [...] you see the world reflected in your own image; you see yourself reflected to the image of the world [...]

To become a true global citizen, one must abandon all notions of 'otherness' and instead embrace 'togetherness'. The world is no longer white, black, yellow and brown. Through love, tribes have been intermixing colors to reveal a new rainbow world. And as more time passes, this racial and cultural blending will make it harder for humans to side with one race, nation or religion over another. Therefore, practical wisdom should be used to abandon any cultural, social, religious, tribal, and national beliefs of alterity altogether. This is the only way mankind will truly evolve. Segregation is a word of the past. Unity is the key to a peaceful future.

City wisdom became almost entirely centered on the problems of human relationships, in contrast to the wisdom of any natural tribal group, where relationships with the rest of the animate and inanimate world are still given due place.

Within and around the earth, within and around the hills, within and around the mountains your authority returns to you.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you're on a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it's cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you've tried all these things, you're still going to have to dismount.

We are world citizens, but tribal chiefs won't let us cross the frontier

When God brought the first man his spouse, he brought him not just a lover but the friend his heart had been seeking. Proverbs 2:17 speaks of one's spouse as your "'allup," a unique word that the lexicons define as your "special confidant" or "best friend." In an age where women were often seen as the husband's property, and marriages were mainly business deals and transactions seeking to increase the family's social status and security, it was startling for the Bible to describe a spouse in this way. But in today's society, with its emphasis on romance and sex, it is just as radical to insist that your spouse should be your best friend, though for a different reason. In tribal societies, romance doesn't matter as much as social status, and in individualistic Western societies, romance and great sex matter far more than anything else. The Bible, however, without ignoring the importance of romance, puts great emphasis on marriage as companionship.

Conversation is an exchange of gifts. Native American tribal wisdom teaches that when you encounter a person on your life path, you must seek to find out what gifts you have for one another so that you may exchange them before going your separate ways. This seems true even of daily encounters with those we know well. We come into one another's presence bearing whatever harvest of experience the day has offered, and we foster relationship by making a gift of what we have received.

People, fearing their own extinction, are willing to accept and perpetuate hand-me-down answers to the meaning of life and death; and, fearing a weakening of the tribal structures that sustain them, reinforce with their tales the conventional notions of justice, freedom, law and order, nature, family, etc. The writer, lone rider, has the power, if not always the skills, wisdom, or desire, to disturb this false contentment.

The secret of life,” say the Utes, “is in the shadows and not in the open sun; to see anything at all, you must look deeply into the shadow of a living thing.

To leave the comforts of home, the mother world, one must have some place to go. Admittedly, the rites of passage of traditional cultures were to initiate the youth into a simpler society, a more homogenous culture than ours. As well, their interest lay not in the individuation of the person but in the integration of the unformed person into the collective definition of tribal masculinity. Still, take away such psychically charged images of identity, take away the wisdom of the elders, take away the community of men, and one has the modern world.

Mother nature gave us words to use them as a bridge among each other and advance together, but the humans with their ridiculous stupidity and shallow intellect have used those very words to create walls, blinded by their barbarian tribalism masquerading as pompous ideologies.

Marcion, in his two brilliant books, explained how the God of the Jews was not the God of whom Jesus spoke. He provided many examples that show that the Jewish god is only a jealous tribal deity. The Old Testament contains some genuine wisdom. However, it is very clear that the Hebrew prophets and rabbis gradually destroyed all trace of the Divine Feminine and worshiped the Demiurge. The same applies to the other main patriarchal religions: Islam and Christianity.

Speaking in Creation's tongues, hearing Creation's voices, the boundary of our soul expands. Earth has many voices. Those who understand that Earth is a living being, know this because they have translated themselves to the humble grasses and old trees. They know that Earth is a community that is constantly talking to itself; a communicating universe. And whether we know it or not, we are participating in the web of this community.

I resist racists, not intergrationists. I resist seditionists, not abolitionists. I resist propagandists, not journalists. I resist extortionists, not opportunists. I resist chauvinists, not feminists. I embrace activists, not extremists. I embrace nationalists, not terrorists. I embrace intergrationists, not racists. I embrace lobbyists, not imperialists. I embrace conservationists, not depletionists. I believe in liberty, not censorship. I believe in justice, not oppression. I believe in equality, not discrimination. I believe in unity, not conformity. I believe in freedom, not tyranny. I believe in democracy, not despotism. I believe in desegregation, not racism. I believe in fairness, not tribalism. I believe in impartiality, not classism. I believe in emancipation, not sexism. I believe in truth, not lies. I believe in charity, not greed. I believe in peace, not strife. I believe in harmony, not conflict. I believe in love, not hatred. I am a conformist and a futurist. I am a traditionalist and a modernist. I am a fundamentalist and a liberalist. I am an optimist and a pessimist. I am an idealist and a realist. I am a theorist and a pragmatist. I am an industrialist and a philanthropist. I am an anarchist and a pacifist. I am a collectivist and an individualist. I am a capitalist and a socialist.

Mountain’s realization comes through the details of the breath, mountain appears in each step. Mountain then lives inside our bones, inside our heart-drum. It stands like a huge mother in the atmosphere of our minds. Mountain draws ancestors together in the form of clouds. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the raining of the past. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the winds of the future. Mountain mother is a birth gate that joins the above and below, she is a prayer house, she is a mountain. Mountain is a mountain.

Christianity, for some, is neither faith nor reason—just reactive tribalism hiding behind the skirts of Mother Church.

Why climb a mountain? Look! a mountain there. I don’t climb mountain. Mountain climbs me. Mountain is myself. I climb on myself. There is no mountain nor myself. Something moves up and down in the air. Nanao Sakaki

Mountains have long been a geography for pilgrimage, place where people have been humbled and strengthened, they are symbols of the sacred center. Many have traveled to them in order to find the concentrated energy of Earth and to realize the strength of unimpeded space. Viewing a mountain at a distance or walking around its body we can see its shape, know its profile, survey its surrounds. The closer you come to the mountain the more it disappears, the mountain begins to lose its shape as you near it, its body begins to spread out over the landscape losing itself to itself. On climbing the mountain the mountain continues to vanish. It vanishes in the detail of each step, its crown is buried in space, its body is buried in the breath. On reaching the mountain summit we can ask, “What has been attained?” - The top of the mountain? Big view? But the mountain has already disappeared. Going down the mountain we can ask, “What has been attained?” Going down the mountain the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain disappears, the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain is realized. Mountain’s realization comes through the details of the breath, mountain appears in each step. Mountain then lives inside our bones, inside our heart-drum. It stands like a huge mother in the atmosphere of our minds. Mountain draws ancestors together in the form of clouds. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the raining of the past. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the winds of the future. Mountain mother is a birth gate that joins the above and below, she is a prayer house, she is a mountain. Mountain is a mountain.

It really works very well, but the trouble is that it feels so godly that much, if not most, religion is a belonging system more than a search for intimacy with God. Jesus was not into tribal religion, groupthink, and loyalty tests. Much of the institutional church is into them, however, and always has been. It works too well to call it into question. It holds us together and that feels like salvation, even if it is a very deteriorated form.

Our culture's official rejection of the Crone figure was related to rejection of women, particularly elder women. The gray-haired high priestesses, once respected tribal matriarchs of pre-Christian Europe, were transformed by the newly dominant patriarchy into minions of the devil. Through the Middle Ages, this trend gathered momentum, finally developing a frenzy that legally murdered millions of elder women from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries.

We have all the tools to build our societies anew, reform our ways of thinking, fix the inequalities and end the discriminations, and choose earnest wisdom over snippets of information, choose empathy over hatred, choose humanism over tribalism, yet we don't have much time or room for error while we are losing our planet, our only home, After the pandemic, we won't go back to the way things were before. And we shouldn't. 'What we call the beginning is often the end...The end is where we start from' (~T.S.Eliot, Little Gidding)

As an aside, Sheldon Rovin in his first draft of a guide to Systems Thinking, repeated this old chestnut: The often-quoted tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, ‘When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.’ However, in government more advanced strategies are often employed, such as: 1. Buying a stronger whip. 2. Changing riders. 29 3. Appointing a committee to study the horse. 4.    Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride horses. 5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included. 6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living impaired. 7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse. 82 8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed. 9. Providing extra funding/training to increase the dead horse’s performance. 10.  Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance. 3 11.  Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than live horses. 12.  Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses. And, of course… 13.  Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

These are serious fears. But they're not the real fear. Not the Master Fear, the Mother of all Fears that's so close to us that even when we verbalize it we don't believe it. Fear That We Will Succeed. That we can access the powers we secretly know we possess. That we can become the person we sense in our hearts we truly are. This is the most terrifying prospect a human being can face, because it ejects him at one go (he imagines) from all the tribal inclusions his psyche is wired for and has been for fifty million years. We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are. More than our parents/children/teachers think we are. We fear that we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice tells us. That we actually have the guts, the perseverance, the capacity. We fear that we truly can steer our ship, plant our flag, reach our Promised Land. We fear this because, if it's true, then we become estranged from all we know. We pass through a membrane. We become monsters and monstrous. We know that if we embrace our ideals, we must prove worthy of them. And that scares the hell out of us. What will become of us? We will lose our friends and family, who will no longer recognize us. We will wind up alone, in the cold void of starry space, with nothing and no one to hold on to. Of course this is exactly what happens. But here's the trick. We wind up in space, but not alone. Instead we are tapped into an unquenchable, undepletable, inexhaustible source of wisdom, consciousness, companionship. Yeah, we lose friends. But we find friends too, in places we never thought to look. And they're better friends, truer friends. And we're better and truer to them. Do you believe me?

I pray that you must have peace within yourself. Have you seen yourself lately. You are always angry & busy fighting. You are fighting everything & fighting everyone. First you had valid good reasons why you should be fighting. Now you have excuses why you are fighting. I pray that you have peace within yourself. Its foreigners your fighting. After winning. It's racism war your fighting. After winning. It tribalism your fighting. After winning. Its culture vs religion war your fighting. After winning. Its gender war ,boys verses girls your fighting. After winning . Its girls against other girls (feminine war) & boys against other boys (muscular war) your fighting. After winning . Its your thoughts against your heart war your fighting. After winning . Its your feelings against spirituality war your fighting. After winning. its something else your fighting................ Money you have. Status you have. Job and friends you have. Pride and ego you have, but I pray you have peace. and I pray that you have inner peace. Some battles you fight them but the real war is within yourself.

FORGIVENESS The political score from four scores ago doesn't matter to anyone anymore. So why are we still keeping a tally of all the scores? If we are not applying the lessons to be gained from yesterday's history to address the problems of today - then why does any of it matter? Does Babe Ruth's baseball score from 1917 matter to us today? No. Does it matter that Gandhi bickered with his wife, or that Lincoln got into a brawl over Sally at a bar? No. Then why do tribal matches that happened thousands of years ago still mean so much to us today? To keep us from moving forward? To remind us of our racial differences and indifference? To revive tribal bitterness? And what father or God would want his children to keep a record of every argument they have ever had with each other - if there is nothing positive - only harm - to be gained by constantly reminding them? Would a wise man steer his followers to hold onto past hurts - or to squeeze them for every drop of wisdom that could be gained from them - then release them? Isn't forgiveness a holy virtue? And if so, then why do we insist on keeping historical records of resentment? Is the Creator an advocate of love or hate? And if love, then why are we still pushing so much hatred? What is there ever to be gained from vocalizing hatred? Only MORE hatred. Who wants that? And why?

The notion that communism and Nazism are polar opposites stems from the deeper truth that they are in fact kindred spirits. Or, as Richard Pipes has written, "Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism". Both ideologies are reactionary in the sense that they try to re-create tribal impulses. Communists champion class, Nazis race, fascists the nation. All such ideologies--we can call them totalitarian for now--attract the same types of people. Hitler's hatred for communism has been opportunistically exploited to signify ideological distance, when in fact it indicated the exact opposite. Today this maneuver has settled into conventional wisdom. But what Hitler hated about Marxism and communism had almost nothing to do with those aspects of communism that we would consider relevant, such as the economic doctrine or the need to destroy the capitalists and bourgeoisie. In these areas Hitler largely saw eye to eye with socialists and communists. His hatred stemmed from his paranoid conviction that the people calling themselves communists were in fact in on a foreign, Jewish conspiracy. He says this over and over again in Mein Kampf. He studied the names of communists and socialists, and if they sounded Jewish, that's all he needed to know. It was all a con job, a ruse, to destroy Germany. Only "authentically" German ideas from authentic Germans could be trusted. And when those Germans, like Feder or Strasser, proposed socialist ideas straight out of the Marxist playbook, he had virtually no objection whatsoever. Hitler never cared much about economics anyway. He always considered it "secondary". What mattered to him was German identity politics.

Although a youth culture was in evidence by the 1950s, the first obvious and dramatic manifestation of a culture generated by peer-orientation was the hippie counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan called it “the new tribalism of the Electric Age.” Hair and dress and music played a significant part in shaping this culture, but what defined it more than anything was its glorification of the peer attachment that gave rise to it. Friends took precedence over family. Physical contact and connection with peers were pursued; the brotherhood of the pop tribe was declared, as in the generation-based “Woodstock nation.” The peer group was the true home. “Don't trust anyone over thirty” became the byword of youth who went far beyond a healthy critique of their elders to a militant rejection of tradition. The degeneration of that culture into alienation and drug use, on the one hand, and its co-optation for commercial purposes by the very mainstream institutions it was rebelling against were almost predictable. The wisdom of well-seasoned cultures has accumulated over hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. Healthy cultures also contain rituals and customs and ways of doing things that protect us from ourselves and safeguard values important to human life, even when we are not conscious of what such values are. An evolved culture needs to have some art and music that one can grow into, symbols that convey deeper meanings to existence and models that inspire greatness. Most important of all, a culture must protect its essence and its ability to reproduce itself — the attachment of children to their parents. The culture generated by peer orientation contains no wisdom, does not protect its members from themselves, creates only fleeting fads, and worships idols hollow of value or meaning. It symbolizes only the undeveloped ego of callow youth and destroys child-parent attachments. We may observe the cheapening of cultural values with each new peer-oriented generation. For all its self-delusion and smug isolation from the adult world, the Woodstock “tribe” still embraced universal values of peace, freedom, and brotherhood. Today's mass musical gatherings are about little more than style, ego, tribal exuberance, and dollars.

If you can actually see a world full of harmony, beyond the tribal world filled with tribal hatred and conflicts, it would automatically become your reality, and that reality of your mind would outpour into the world through your actions, thus it would become the reality of the world you live in. It all begins with perception and realization.

Stop quarreling, once and for all, because once you stop quarreling, your children will stop quarreling, and then their children - and slowly the world will eventually turn into a real civilized, sentient and serene society. Your ancestors tore this whole world apart into pieces and now you are doing the same. Don't repeat their mistakes my friend and take control of your world - not your neighborhood, or your state or your country - but your world, because the whole world is your family. My Christianity is the best and your Islam is the worst - my America is the best and your Russia is the worst - my India is the best and your Pakistan is the worst - my Bulgaria is the best and your Turkey is the worst - my Britain is the best and your France is the worst - stop this 'mine and yours' business once and for all and start thinking as 'ours' - our America - our Russia - our Christianity - our Islam - our Britain - our France - our Bulgaria - our Turkey - all of it either belongs to all of us or to none of us. Stop thinking tribal and start thinking human.

Here's the difference between knowledge and wisdom, if I told you to go grab a big bag of knowledge and bring it back to me you would find it will contain some truth and a lot of untruths. But if I told you to go grab me a big bag of wisdom and bring it back to me you would find that it's full of nothing but the truth. Knowledge does not require truth, but wisdom is always universally true. When you gain wisdom, you get a sense that you've truly only learned something that you already knew was true. This is why...Knowledge is of the past, Wisdom is of the future. We find Tribal Existence when we Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Our collective wisdom is an antidote to a society gone mad, Rules often fail us, and incentives often backfire, But our collective wisdom can and will help rebuild our mad world.

Olar Ethil, who was this recent ascendant?’ ‘Twice brought into the world of worship. Once, by a tribal people, and named Iskar Jarak. A bringer of wisdom, a saviour. And the other time, as the commander of a company of soldiers—promised to ascension by a song woven by a Tanno Spiritwalker. Yes, the entire company ascended upon death.’ ‘Soldiers?’ Errastas was frowning. ‘Ascended?’ Confused. Frightened by the notion. ‘And what name did he possess among these ascended soldiers?’ Mael asked. ‘Whiskeyjack. He was a Malazan.

Thomas Berry, in The Dream of the Earth,

I took the opportunity to complain about our typical government approach of making the same mistakes again and again. I said, “It reminds me of the ancient tribal wisdom that goes, ‘When you’re riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.’ Well—in Washington—we sometimes do things differently.” I explained: When we find ourselves riding a dead horse, we often try strategies that are less successful, such as: buying a stronger whip, changing riders, saying things like: “This is the way we’ve always ridden this horse,” appointing a committee to study the horse, lowering the standards so that more dead horses can be included, appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse, hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse, harnessing several dead horses together—to increase speed—attempting to mount multiple dead horses in hopes that one of them will spring to life, providing additional funding and training to increase the dead horse’s performance, declaring that, since a dead horse doesn’t have to be fed, it’s less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore, contributes more to the mission than live horses, and my favorite—promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

In tribal cultures, shamans or healers often experience an illness that gives them the insight they need to heal themselves and then bring wisdom to their people. We are still operating with the archetype of the wounded healer who has learned to cure himself and find the gold in his experience.

Jewish Ideas Daily In Defense of the Nation-State By Diana Muir Appelbaum Friday, October 5, 2012 In [Daniel Gordis’] new book, The Promise of Israel: Why Its Seemingly Greatest Weakness Is Actually Its Greatest Strength, Gordis weaves the work of political theorists and historians into a compelling case for the nation-state in general and Israel in particular. … the governments that have produced human rights such as personal liberty and the rule of law have most often been ethnically based nation-states … Gordis quotes intellectual historian Mark Lilla, who notes that while Western Europeans have forgotten “all the long-standing problems that the nation-state, as a modern form of political life, managed to solve,” … [Zionism] remembers the wisdom of borders and the need for collective autonomy to establish self-respect and to demand respect from others. … European and American opposition to Israel … reflects the fact that Israel is the archetypal nation-state, and nation-states have fallen from favor in intellectual circles. Until recently, republics have arisen only in small city-states and, usually, only briefly. Apart from these cases, in all of human history only a few ways have been found to organize political life. There is the intense and appalling tribalism of Afghanistan. There are empires in which conquering Herrenvolk oppress conquered peoples. There are dictatorships and monarchies in which individuals may have comforts or privileges but not rights. There has been the universalizing ideology of Marxism, which has produced brutality and death on an unimaginable scale. Then there is the nation-state. The nation-state gives no assurances of the universal peace and justice promised by Marxism, Islam, or the human rights movement. It claims merely that it will attempt to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for its citizens. The nation-state does not claim it will bring peace or justice to the whole world, only that it will work to bring these benefits to a particular people living on a particular piece of land.

You be wise to stop yo’ negative ways, mister.

Traditional Native peoples, on the other hand, have been trained to Listen. They place so much importance on Listening that tribal groups have developed the talking circle ceremony in order to share the inner wisdom that comes from Listening. The primary purpose of the talking circle ceremony is to Listen to people’s innermost feelings about an issue. Each participant in the talking circle is a reflection of Spirit, so the words spoken in the circle are considered sacred and holy.

If we are not applying the lessons to be gained from yesterday's history to address the problems of today - then why does any of it matter? Does Babe Ruth's baseball score from 1917 matter to us today? No. Does it matter that Gandhi bickered with his wife, or that Lincoln got into a brawl over Sally at a bar? No. Then why do tribal matches that happened thousands of years ago still mean so much to us today? To keep us from moving forward? To remind us of our racial differences and indifference? To revive tribal bitterness? And what father or God would want his children to keep a record of every argument they have ever had with each other - if there is nothing positive - only harm - to be gained by constantly reminding them? Would a wise man steer his followers to hold onto past hurts - or to squeeze them for every drop of wisdom that could be gained from them - then release them? Isn't forgiveness a holy virtue? And if so, then why do we insist on keeping historical records of resentment? Is the Creator an advocate of love or hate? And if love, then why are we still pushing so much hatred? What is there ever to be gained from vocalizing hatred? Only more hatred. Who wants that? And why?

A recent cross-sectional study in two states, Ohio and Florida,37 showed that the rate of death in those states was strongly associated with political party affiliation—after May 2021, when vaccines were freely available to all adults, the death rate for Republican voters was 43 percent higher than for Democratic voters. The long echo of the negative public response to COVID-19 has led to greater resistance to all forms of vaccination, putting children at risk for diseases like measles and polio that had almost been eradicated in the developed world. This may be the most consequential example of distrust of science in modern history. This circumstance is utterly contrary to the way a person or a nation should respond to a threatening pandemic: political party should be set aside in favor of clearheaded and objective assessment of the facts. But with our current separation into divisive tribal communities, the opportunity for thoughtful considerations of options—for achieving wisdom—has mostly been lost. The consequences have been truly tragic.

Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes. In his splendid work Preface to Plato (Harvard University Press, 1963), Eric Havelock contrasts the oral and written cultures of the Greeks. By Plato’s time the written word had created a new environment that had begun to detribalize man. Previously the Greeks had grown up by benefit of the process of the tribal encyclopedia. They had memorized the poets. The poets provided specific operational wisdom for all the contingencies of life — Ann Landers in verse. With the advent of individual detribalized man, a new education was needed. Plato devised such a new program for literate men. It was based on the Ideas.

Resistance feeds on fear. We experience Resistance as fear. But fear of what?   Fear of the consequences of following our heart. Fear of bankruptcy, fear of poverty, fear of insolvency. Fear of groveling when we try to make it on our own, and of groveling when we give up and come crawling back to where we started. Fear of being selfish, of being rotten wives or disloyal husbands; fear of failing to support our families, of sacrificing their dreams for ours. Fear of betraying our race, our ’hood, our homies. Fear of failure. Fear of being ridiculous. Fear of throwing away the education, the training, the preparation that those we love have sacrificed so much for, that we ourselves have worked our butts off for. Fear of launching into the void, of hurtling too far out there; fear of passing some point of no return, beyond which we cannot recant, cannot reverse, cannot rescind, but must live with this cocked-up choice for the rest of our lives. Fear of madness. Fear of insanity. Fear of death.   These are serious fears. But they’re not the real fear. Not the Master Fear, the Mother of all Fears that’s so close to us that even when we verbalize it we don’t believe it.   Fear That We Will Succeed.   That we can access the powers we secretly know we possess.   That we can become the person we sense in our hearts we truly are.   This is the most terrifying prospect a human being can face, because it ejects him at one go (he imagines) from all the tribal inclusions his psyche is wired for and has been for fifty million years.   We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are. More than our parents/children/teachers think we are. We fear that we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice tells us. That we actually have the guts, the perseverance, the capacity. We fear that we truly can steer our ship, plant our flag, reach our Promised Land. We fear this because, if it’s true, then we become estranged from all we know. We pass through a membrane. We become monsters and monstrous.   We know that if we embrace our ideals, we must prove worthy of them. And that scares the hell out of us. What will become of us? We will lose our friends and family, who will no longer recognize us. We will wind up alone, in the cold void of starry space, with nothing and no one to hold on to.   Of course this is exactly what happens. But here’s the trick. We wind up in space, but not alone. Instead we are tapped into an unquenchable, undepletable, inexhaustible source of wisdom, consciousness, companionship. Yeah, we lose friends. But we find friends too, in places we never thought to look. And they’re better friends, truer friends. And we’re better and truer to them.   Do you believe me?

The people around us seem to be dressed in every kind of clothing from every nation and era in human history. I see people dressed in modern military uniforms, animal skins, togas, tribal regalia, European and Japanese armor, robes, breeches, long dresses, short dresses, and suits. Some people wear not much clothing at all. It's as though we're on the back lot of a movie studio and actors from a hundred different exotic movies mingle together. But these people are real, not costumed performers.

The fear of the Lord is not only the beginning of wisdom (Prow 1:7), but also keeps people from sinning (Ex. 20:20). God wants them to know he had rescued them; he also wants them to know he is not a domesticated deity happily dispensing tribal blessings. He is not only a good God, but a terrifying, awesome God.

In our love for the people we are born again, not as petty animals fighting the trivial battles of tribalism, but as genuine humans - humans who can think - humans who can feel - humans who can act.

Tried a lot many countries, races and religions, To tie me up with their rugged exclusivities. But my heart is too grand for any one sect, So I dance naked without any cultural amenities.

You want to fly, I say break your chains first.

In a civilized world there is no my people and your people, it's all one people.

One of the most important – and sudden – changes in politics for several decades has been the move from a world of information scarcity to one of overload. Available information is now far beyond the ability of even the most ordered brain to categorise into any organising principle, sense or hierarchy. We live in an era of fragmentation, with overwhelming information options. The basics of what this is doing to politics is now fairly well-trodden stuff: the splintering of established mainstream news and a surge of misinformation allows people to personalise their sources in ways that play to their pre-existing biases.5 Faced with infinite connection, we find the like-minded people and ideas, and huddle together. Brand new phrases have entered the lexicon to describe all this: filter bubbles, echo chambers and fake news. It’s no coincidence that ‘post-truth’ was the word of the year in 2016. At times ‘post-truth’ has become a convenient way to explain complicated events with a simple single phrase. In some circles it has become a slightly patronising new orthodoxy to say that stupid proles have been duped by misinformation on the internet into voting for things like Brexit or Trump. In fact, well-educated people are in my experience even more subject to these irrationalities because they usually have an unduly high regard for their own powers of reason and decision-making.* What’s happening to political identity as a result of the internet is far more profound than this vote or that one. It transcends political parties and is more significant than echo chambers or fake news. Digital communication is changing the very nature of how we engage with political ideas and how we understand ourselves as political actors. Just as Netflix and YouTube replaced traditional mass-audience television with an increasingly personalised choice, so total connection and information overload offers up an infinite array of possible political options. The result is a fragmentation of singular, stable identities – like membership of a political party – and its replacement by ever-smaller units of like-minded people. Online, anyone can find any type of community they wish (or invent their own), and with it, thousands of like-minded people with whom they can mobilise. Anyone who is upset can now automatically, sometimes algorithmically, find other people that are similarly upset. Sociologists call this ‘homophily’, political theorists call it ‘identity politics’ and common wisdom says ‘birds of a feather flock together’. I’m calling it re-tribalisation. There is a very natural and well-documented tendency for humans to flock together – but the key thing is that the more possible connections, the greater the opportunities to cluster with ever more refined and precise groups. Recent political tribes include Corbyn-linked Momentum, Black Lives Matter, the alt-right, the EDL, Antifa, radical veganism and #feelthebern. I am not suggesting these groups are morally equivalent, that they don’t have a point or that they are incapable of thoughtful debate – simply that they are tribal.

Yesterday, she said, referring to the collective past of her tribe, the people of these forests knew the secret. They made the finest silk thread from the cocoon of a beautiful sleeping butterfly. The women reeled the silk thread on the spinning wheel, slowly and gently. Such delicate work it was, that the silk remembered, at last, the moth which had created it. And the women were awed at the silver shine of the silk produced. If the silk is so divine, they thought, what must be the beauty of the butterfly waiting to be born? They stopped breaking the cocoons and looked for the crimson wings of the butterflies emerging from the torn nests of raw silk. The sight took them aback. They became sages and storytellers. My mother’s mother was one of them.

Yesterday,’ she said, referring to the collective past of her tribe, ‘the people of these forests knew the secret. They made the finest silk thread from the cocoon of a beautiful sleeping butterfly. The women reeled the silk thread on the spinning wheel, slowly and gently. Such delicate work it was, that the silk remembered, at last, the moth which had created it. And the women were awed at the silver shine of the silk produced. If the silk is so divine, they thought, what must be the beauty of the butterfly waiting to be born? They stopped breaking the cocoons and looked for the crimson wings of the butterflies emerging from the torn nests of raw silk. The sight took them aback. They became sages and storytellers..