2.1 Reckoning with allegiance
It’s really pretty simple. For most of our history, down through all our hunter–gatherer years…
Tribal allegiance trumped personal love.
That’s because human survival happened in tribes. Our unit of survival was the tribe. That’s how evolution designed us. We didn’t survive individually or in pairs, but in super–cooperative groups.
The more bonded we were to each other and the more effectively we worked together, the better chance all of us had to survive and thrive. So in our relationships with each other, we were first of all…
Survival partners.
Which meant, our first loyalty was to our tribe, not to other individuals. We might care about individuals, we might care about some of them a lot, but if the choice came down to being loyal to the tribe versus being loyal to a friend or family member…
The tribe had to come first.
It had to.
It’s just a fact that…
Personal love was never necessary to our survival.
So evolution never made it our top priority. Instead…
Allegiance to our tribe became the currency of our togetherness.
And as a consequence, there are people who find…
Merging with their tribe gives them a higher high than falling in love with another person.
But allegiance is not easy. We humans are naturally self–centered. Our DNA demands that of us. Its definition of success is that we survive and reproduce and send our genes into the next generation.
We discovered we could do a better job of that if we did it collectively. We learned how to be super–cooperative in small bands and relatively small tribes. Some evolutionists call us “ultra–social.”
But this kind of cooperation conflicted with our basic self–centeredness. So to keep it going…
Everyone had to follow a rigorous discipline.
Because…
Everyone had to contribute to the welfare of the group all day every day.
No exceptions. No freeloaders allowed.
Your identity was first as a member of the group, then only secondarily as an individual.
You could develop your individual personality and talents, but…
Only as long as they supported the life of the tribe.
You could become a stand–out hunter or a skilled toolmaker or a riveting storyteller. What you could not do was wig out on a tangent. You couldn’t break tribal mores in order to do your own thing…
You could be an individual, but you couldn’t be individualistic.
It wasn’t like today in our mass societies where people get attention for acting out. In our time, you can win fame and fortune by being bizarre. Being on the take. Sucking off society instead of contributing. In fact, the big suckers too often have the big advantage.
So did this mean that humans had transcended selfishness? Not really. Because…
You were taking care of yourself by taking care of your community so it would in turn take care of you.
A synergy of mutuality.
But you’d contribute only to your group not to humankind in general. So even though this was an ultra–social way of life, it was still very much a self–centered way of life. It’s just that…
You were self-centered at the tribal level rather than the personal level.
We humans developed a survival strategy that worked for us. It worked in terms of keeping us alive in a hostile world. It worked in terms of building our numbers.
But the togetherness of our hunter–gatherer tribes demanded unfailing allegiance. And allegiance demanded that we suppress and sacrifice whatever parts of ourselves would block us from fitting in.
So for all the benefits of tribal life, our ancestors had to pay a price…
They had to put personal love second.
A distant second to tribal loyalty. They had no choice.
And even though today we have much more freedom to pursue personal love, allegiance still dominates us as a species. So like it or not we have to reckon with it.
