The Fine Art of Tribalism

Liberals, Neoliberals, Tribes

Czeslaw Milosz’s university class, 1930

Deep down, what are people? Well, people are social animals. People are community-bound. People are….tribal. 

As much as I’ve read of social science, that seems to be the basic, inescapable conclusion. 

Liberalism, I’ve come to think, basically means the effort to get outside tribalism, to develop some sort of supra-identity that ranges beyond ethnic, religious, geographic, national identification. Liberal projects always point in this direction — towards the ‘citizen,’ towards ‘the universal rights of man,’ ‘the universal declaration of human rights,’ and so on. 

From the beginning of the liberal project, there was a fusillade of protest against this basic idea. Most memorably, Joseph de Maistre arguing against the French Constitution of 1795 wrote, “In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me.”

But the liberal project marches on and, for the most part, I’m happy to be part of it and happy even to participate in its myths: the crusading lawyer, the muckraking journalist, the whistleblower, the heroic civil servant, the just-the-facts detective. What all of these are dedicated to — and there are thousands of dramas celebrating their achievements — is the idea that it’s possible, often at great personal cost, to break allegiances based on community or kinship for the sake of the common good. The witness on the stand pointing out his former associates before the discerning eye of the law is as good an illustration as any of the liberal paradigm in action. 

With ‘neoliberalism,’ a new post-tribal identity seems to take effect; and if liberalism teaches you how not to be tribal, neoliberalism obliterates it. The only ironclad loyalty is to the bottom line — to the principle of making as much or doing as well as possible. “Shareholder ethics,” for instance, is very different from the ethics that most people learn as children in that it posits an absolute obligation to benefit oneself. I remember sitting in a production office once when a couple of executives were going over résumés for a position and one of them saying, “We want people who have already arrived — I don’t know how else to put it,” and both of them seemed very pleased with that summation, although, to me, it was an odd kind of tribalism: our only loyalty is to people who are already successful. 

Much of the genius of Succession is that it depicts what the neoliberal, ‘meritocratic’ system looks like in practice. In fact, it’s pretty much all tribalism, all cronyism — there are the Roys and there are families from similarly wealthy backgrounds and there are the “college drinking buddies” of the Roys who end up as their business colleagues and there are the people in the “meritocratic” structure who are almost utterly cowed by power and do everything they can to kiss it up to it — but there is also a neoliberal vision of pure “merit,” pure non-allegiance. In Succession, that’s embodied by Lukas Mattson, and [SPOILER] the overall arc of Succession is the family abandoning their “nepotistic,” tribal identity, selling each other out, and from, really, a misguided sense of neoliberal integrity, allowing Mattson to “do what he loves….cutting shit close to the bone,” and, ultimately, wrecking the family business.

So the question for anybody living in this era — much as the question for people in the 1790s was about whether they accepted a liberal identity or their old tribal ones — is about navigating between neoliberal and tribal allegiances. It’s becoming more and more clear for me that the neoliberal sensibility — which is basically an unfettered celebration of profit, power, and success — just isn’t going to work for me, so, for myself, I’m trying to figure out some other way of being. 

I wouldn’t expect anybody else to share my tribal affiliations — mine are very idiosyncratic — but what I would like is for people to figure out ways of orienting themselves in the world that make sense for them, by which I mean, basically, that they create their own tribe and are loyal to it. 

For me, I think I would articulate my tribe as the following: 

- I like writers. By which I mean people who are curious about the world and, in particular, are curious about their own interiority and who try to give a coherent, personalized stamp to their own perceptions. 

- I like people who have intensity, who have some understanding that there is only one life, that it is played for keeps, and that there is some ethical obligation somewhere in there to be the best possible version of yourself. 

- I like people who are less-than-fully satisfied, who recognize that everything, including success, carries a shadow with it and who are willing to constantly explore, and take risks, to understand better how their shadow works. 

Of course, there’s also the complicated tribe of people you actually know; your family, friends, institutions you’re part of, but that goes without saying. The tricker task — and more critical to orienting yourself — is to choose more of a fictive community, a tribe that exists in some kind of public space. 

And I feel like, through my life, I’ve been offered various of these fictive communities. In middle school and high school, the imaginary tribe wasn’t exactly ‘school spirit,’ the way that it allegedly was back in the ‘40s or ‘50s (although a surprisingly reactionary student body president ran on exactly that platform) — we were more ironic than that — but imaginal student life did seem to be entirely embedded in pop culture, we would do things like shout tag lines from advertisements at each other all day long, and if I wanted to conform just as much as anybody else I also very badly didn’t want to be part of this tribe any longer than I absolutely had to. Around this time, I discovered people like Milan Kundera and Czeslaw Milosz and was convinced that that was my real tribe: if only, if only, I’d been born into a repressive Eastern European regime. Of course, I had no idea what I was asking for — and anybody who was from this background would have set me straight if I’d ever met them — but it was a nice antidote to quoting Budweiser commercials all day long. And around the time I was in college, the Paris Review interviews seemed to be a glimpse of another kind of a tribe — not so much that the writers interviewed had such wonderful, successful lives but that they had no obvious affiliation, no ‘job,’ no institutional role, but all seemed to be fiercely well-read and engaged. 

With time, some other tribes seemed to present themselves. There was the tribe of my college cohort, which I would now think of as ‘neoliberal’ — many of them very smart, very talented, and for whom, as one person put it, making it “is the only thing.” There was a very New York tribe that was cynical about everything, was shrewd about everything, saw through everything — to the point where every action that was taken just so happened to be whatever was most convenient, the least bad option. There was a spiritual tribe that I strongly considered shifting allegiance to around the time I was 30, but I somehow felt, in the end, that the social aspects of it inevitably corroded the very real truths that were connected to the strenuous development of of one’s soul. There was a very communally-minded, do-gooderish tribe that I respected but that just wasn’t me; my makeup was just a bit more selfish, more inward-oriented than that. 

More and more, the search for a tribe seems to be more of a fictive, inner journey; people I’d never met and would never meet, people who had died a long time ago, were all very much part of the tribe. I started to feel — with a debt to the spiritual phase — that a person was basically a particular vibration; that a person had a responsibility to honor that vibration in whatever form that took; and that a person found their satisfaction in encountering other people who, in whatever way, had a similar vibration. 

What it became less of was a search for a clique — the clique seemed like a perversion of the idea of a tribe, because a clique limited itself to whoever happened to be around, kept coming up with imaginary shared qualities in whoever was already part of the clique, was exclusionary, and existed entirely for tactical ends. A tribe was something very different — in part because the members of a tribe often never met each other or were aware of each other’s existence, but, most importantly, because a tribe was inherently loyal to itself: had a set of shared values, was perfectly happy for any member of the tribe to ‘succeed’ more than other members of the tribe, but it was understood, in a way that it never would be with a clique, that the shared values of a tribe surpassed any value attached to success. 

In any case, that was just my journey — and anybody else would define their own sense of a tribe very differently. What I felt bad for (and what prompted my writing this post) was hearing about somebody who had really been working hard on something, really been sweating it out, and dealing with all sorts of flakiness from different people involved, and then had experienced sudden success when a single ‘influencer’ said something offhand about the project. Something about that felt all wrong: it felt like there were a lot of people who hadn’t gone to the trouble of choosing their tribes; and if they hadn’t put in that work then they were susceptible to whatever the neoliberal marketplace, to whatever ‘influencers’ told them — they ultimately had no tribe at all. 

Sam Kahn writes the Substack Castalia.