Wired for Tribalism [Part 1]
The Psycho-Experimental Argument against Mental Health Awareness Campaigns
“I’m Tibetan, I’m Buddhist and I’m the Dalai Lama, but if I emphasize these differences it sets me apart and raises barriers with other people. What we need to do is to pay more attention to the ways in which we are the same as other people.” (The Dalai Lama on X)
Engaging with the Kenyan media or otherwise, both on the left and the right, on the alleged nuclear threats in the Middle East, let me be the first to say the quiet part out loud. (In my cozy peaceful borrowed home) I don’t envy the American President, the Israeli Prime Minister and neither do I envy the Iranian president. This same attitude also applies to all those involved, at the behest of the media at home and abroad, in Wednesday's Kenyan Protests. (I still maintain my original posture, this is not how Kenya changes for the better)
But/and having said that, have you seen these adverts on YouTube about procrastination from Liven? They say it’s all in the genes!
Really? Are you sure about that? Where are the scientific studies that bear that out?
Wow! And if that’s true, doesn’t that mean that one requires gene therapy instead of a 12-week online course? Or does this twelve-week course also include gene therapy sessions?
Pardon my digression! But this stuff makes me mad, physically and figuratively speaking! But it all connects to the overarching point that I am trying to make.
Let me explain!
Last year’s tax protests, and Wednesday’s reenactment of the same (under the guise of commemorating those that lost their lives last year), have reminded me of the tribal clashes that have always been a staple of Kenya, if not Africa as a whole. The reason why the numerous tribes in Kenya -and the rest of African- are always engaging in wars of conquest, we are constantly and consistently told, is because they are tribalistic in nature and therefore they are bound to engage in tribal warfare once in a while, for resources, control etc. This is the reductive simplicity that many in the Western media or otherwise, have always said of Kenya and Africa as a whole (despite mounting evidence to the contrary). And it always felt like Kenya, and Africa as a whole was the only country and continent participating in these shenanigans.
But as I have been going deeper and deeper into history (the one that all therapists encourage their clients to do, and that is either too radioactive or irrelevant to be taught in class) I am slowly but sure discovering that all humans have always been (and still continue to be) tribal:
From April DeConick in The Gnostic New Age I learnt that the Greco-Roman populace, with their numerous gods and goddesses and their platonic gnostic dualism, dabbled in all sorts of conflicting tribal colonies socially and otherwise, as they tried to figure out the configurations of the immaterial (which they considered good) and the material (which they considered evil).
Therefore, historians such Tom Holland in Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar and Neville Morley in Metropolis and Hinterland: The City of Rome and the Italian Economy, 200 BC – AD 200 talk about aristocratic/class tribal colonies.
Sir Charles Darwin, a British aristocrat, in borrowing some of his ideas from Greco-Roman lore in his scientific argument of/for survival of the fittest, in his books On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, makes the case that humans evolved from tribal groupings of primates that could best survive their harsh environments. This kind of thinking, according to Dr. David Weikart in Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism, is what influenced social Darwinists such as Adolf Hitler to want to wholly erase persons of Jewish decent.
In the final paragraph of his book On the Origin of Species, Darwin said:
“In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”
Thus, from Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton in English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture psychological tribal colonies of nature and/or nurture were born!
And, since I see a lot of Greco-Roman wisdom pouring forth from Professor Jonathan Haidt (and many other psychologists of note such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung) books The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Coddling of The American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, I think it is safe to assume that he is borrowing from religious tribal colonies that he is seeing in the past and is trying to correct in the present.
From Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Old Régime and The French Revolution I learnt that the political concepts of “left” and “right” -which Prof. Haidt quotes religiously in his books - originated during the French Revolution in 1789, and they referred quite literally to where people sat in the French National Assembly: the royalists versus the republicans; the monarchists versus the revolutionists. This has slowly morphed into conservatives and/or progressives, conservatives and/or liberal, far-right and far-left etc.
Capitalizing, quite literally, on this left/right tribalism the infamous philosopher, theorist and economist Dr. Karl Marx, whose fingerprints are all over Asia and Africa, in The Communist Manifesto, talked about labour tribal colonies: the capitalist class (bourgeoisie) and the working class (proletariats).
One of the characters that the late British journalist and historian Paul Johson talks about in Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky is Karl Marx and his intellectual impact on today’s academia. Picking up on this theme economist Thomas Sowell in his many works, talks about the conflicting visions created by the now existing intellectual tribal colonies; of left and right; conservative and liberal.
Dr. Sowell in addressing some of the follies advanced by intellectuals when it comes to Race and Culture: A Worldview, hits at what the late activist Steve Biko, and former South African president died and fought for, respectively. That is, for the abolition of racial tribal colonies that were disproportionately against colored persons (and the whole country as a whole).
Contemporarily, because of the pain, socially or otherwise, that we desperately want to get rid of at all costs, the late Dr. Paul Rand in his book The Gift of Pain talks about leper colonies that set apart the normal and the lepers. (Though this practice has abated, the caste system is still largely practiced, taught, encouraged and tolerated).
The caste system isn’t unprecedented, ancient cultures had it and new cultures have redesigned it to create tribal generations as Dr Jean Twenge in her most famous books IGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us and Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future.
And once you follow Dr. Twenge to truly understand what it means to be super- connected you find out that every youtuber or social media content creator (etc.) is now talking about or urging you boost his/her algorithm numbers by joining his or her tribe. This is further reinforced by algorithms (allegedly from China and other nefarious narcissistic persons) which are addictively sucking anyone and everyone into a loopy narcissism-filled algorithmic cycle.
I say all this to say that whichever way you want to slice humans are tribal/socialist by nature and practice (this, in my humble opinion was taught erroneously in one of my classes that some people are tribalistic/collectivistic, while others were individualistic/modern). Human beings are socially, psychologically, religiously, emotionally, economically, politically (etc.) tribalistic.
To paraphrase the whole premise that Prof. Haidt’s book is trying to tackle in The Coddling of the American Mind, HUMANS ARE ALL WIRED TO BE TRIBALISTIC!
We all tend to racially, socially, psychologically, religiously, emotionally, economically, politically (etc.) emphasize the differences that set us apart from one another and raises barriers with other people: for survival etc. This is our blessing and our curse.
This is the reason why many of the protestors in Kenya (of which many are Gen Z) feel like -and assume- that they are first generation to feel like they are feeling and to do what they are doing. This is the reason why President Trump will go to war protecting his own, even as the president of Iran will go to war protecting his own! Research papers have even been written to advance the idea of tribalism.
What does this have to do with mental health: especially mental health campaigns? You ask.
When mental health activists -just like the Gen Z protests- go on media tours touting a polysemic term, vaguely defining their terms of reference, peddling a loaded, terrifying and racial colonial phraseology while rubbishing and poopooing their own historical pasts collectively and individually then it does two things.
Tribally, it gives people on the opposite spectrum like Dr. James Davies, Allan Horwitz, Dr. Thomas Szasz, Richard Grinker, Richard Keller, Jock McCulloch, Meghan Vaughan, Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, Dr. Peter Breggin, Paula J. Caplan (etc.) the tribal audacity and genuineness to genuinely cry foul saying that mental illness is a socially constructed, pharma-funded, elite-orchestrated myth that is quite literally -and iatrogenically- doing more harm than good.
At the same time, there is another side that Westerners -or many Western educated elites- don’t seem to understand when it comes to an African understanding of mental illness. If I viewed, anyone as being under the curse of the gods (spiritually, culturally, socially etc.) as the reason for your madness, as Ben Okri, the late Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o point out in their novels (and many other ethnographers point out in their books), then there is no other way to truly address this marginalization and stigmatization if you don’t address the god part of the equation!
You might shout till you are blue in the face that it is wrong to marginalize and stigmatize the mentally ill but that doesn’t mean that marginalization and stigmatization won’t happen; that doesn’t mean that marginalization and stigmatization will suddenly come to an end.
Actually, it might cause the marginalization and stigmatization to actually increase.
Why? You ask.
Because these vulnerable persons are now being paraded publicly to be fully known and identified as persons with mental illness: genetically and otherwise. This is exact opposite of what mental health activists are fighting against: they want solidarity but instead they are creating a whole new tribal group of persons to be discriminated against.
….to be continued next week where I will give concrete examples of this actually happening!
For an in-depth exploration of this topic, be on the look-out for my upcoming book The Love of Christ Jesus and Mental Health.
Photo by Matthew Ball on Unsplash