3.1 Heartbroken rebels
The purpose of Chapter Two is…
To break the tribal spell.
To be able to see it for what it is. To see how it values allegiance to the group over person-to-person love.
And when we see tribalism for what it is, then we can oppose it in a conscious and strategic way.
Why do this? First, so we can take better care of ourselves in our daily lives. And second, so…
We as a species can make the changes we need to make if we are to have any chance at a future.
The purpose of Chapter Four is…
To show what it will take to transform human togetherness.
What it will take to create a way of life based on…
Mutual and mutual advocacy.
Where we become masterful at transcending our innate, compulsive, brutal divisiveness.
How do we get from breaking the spell to creating a new way of life?
We can’t just leap into this transformation. It’s too big and too challenging. We have to grow into it.
And that’s the focus of Chapter Three.
Tribes aren’t going to tear up tribalism and remake it into something better. Which leaves us with…
Us.
Individuals who have a deep desire to upgrade love. A desire that comes from the deepest place in our hearts.
Let me explain.
I grew up in a church that put allegiance first. Which meant my first job as a kid was to fit in. And my parents and the people at church made sure I did that. They roped me in and shut me down. They made it clear I was not to become my own person. They insisted I become their tamed version of me.
I was a very good boy, and submitted. They taught me I was unlovable and so shouldn’t ask for love, and I believed them and didn’t ask. I lived as lightly as a ghost and made their lives easy.
But there was something in me, something that was unhappy about this…
Something that hated this.
Really hated it.
This hate, this refusal, wasn’t conscious. I didn’t get to know it till my twenties, but it was there all along.
I had to pay a price to belong to my church, the tribe I was born into. It was a big price…
Too big a price.
But…
I had to pay it.
I didn’t have a choice. I had to fit in because I was utterly dependent on family for survival.
But this sacrifice of self I had to suffer generated in me an impulse to fight…
And this meant from early childhood on I was…
A rebel.
A silent rebel for a long time, but as I got older I grew into open rebellion.
As kid, I had a puppy heart. I wanted to love the people in my life, I really wanted that. But even while they took very good care of me, they were hurting me in a deeply personal way. and this….
Broke my heart.
Which meant I was…
A heartbroken rebel.
Not only did I love personal nurturance a thousand more times than tribal allegiance…
I believed in it.
It was my core value. Which meant it was my moral core. And as I became my own person over the years, nurturance more and more guided my people-decisions.
So if you were to ask me what’s the source of the desire to replace the tribal past with a trans-tribal future, I’d say it’s the longing deep in our human hearts for nurturance to win out over allegiance.
And I sometimes wonder how many of our ancestors back through the millennia had trouble with paying the cost of fitting in? How many had trouble with the demands of tribal fundamentalism? How many questioned the status quo? At least silently to themselves. How many longed for things to be different?
How many, like me, were heartbroken rebels?
Even if they never said anything about this out loud.
How many rankled at the price they had to pay for survival, even while understanding that they had to pay that price?
Of course, they weren’t about to overturn their tribal way of life. That would have been foolish and self-defeating, because their lives depended on sticking with the tribal discipline.
Tribal fundamentalism insists that tribemates be first and foremost…
Survival partners.
That was the foundational social contract.
But I wonder how often people came…
To love some of their tribemates, not only for their usefulness as survival partners, but for themselves.
I wonder how often people wished they could…
Put personal love ahead of tribal demands.
And I wonder how many of them wished they didn’t have to diminish themselves in any way at all in order to fit in. How many wished they could be more self-expressive? And how many had moments when …
They wished their lives could be self-determined instead of socially-determined?
Evolution gave our ancestors social cooperation as a tool to enhance competition in the life-and-death struggle of tribe against tribe. But as people developed their skill with this tool, as they got to know it intimately, while they depended on the survival advantage it gave them, I wonder how many of them…
Fell in love with cooperation just for itself.
And wanted to make it their home, without the tribalism.
I wonder how many…
Wished they could dissolve tribal boundaries?
How many wished they didn’t have to live in a constant state of self-protective vigilance, and in constant fear of what their neighbors might try to do to them?
I saw an interview on YouTube with an old tribesman from New Guinea. He talked about his early adult years when hyper-tribalism was rampant throughout the island.
In those days, you lived your life in a relatively few square miles, because the tribal conflicts were so severe that if you wandered out of your tribal territory, you’d be killed. Meanwhile, other tribes might come into your territory and attack you at any time. So you lived in constant fear.
As this man told this story, you could see his face tense and his body become rigid.
Then he was asked about how things are now, and you could see relief sweep over him as he told the interviewer how happy he was to be free of the old ways.
In our hunter-gatherer days, sometimes one tribe would make an alliance with another tribe. I wonder if the pleasure of such an alliance ever provoked…
A longing for universal alliance to replace tribal divisiveness.
I wonder how many of our tribal ancestors asked themselves…
Why can’t we all just get along?
In our modern mass societies, we’re able to make spaces of our own where we can choose our friends from a very large number of possibilities. And where we can make families not by biological determination or social prescription but according to the design of our own personal desires.
We live in a time when it’s possible for us in our own lives to put personal love ahead of tribal allegiance. And in doing this we get to enjoy a kind of life that was not available to our ancestors.
We can choose to say to our children…
You matter more to me than my church or political party or circle of friends or anybody.
It’s not that we have total freedom. But certainly spaces have opened up that were not here before, spaces where tribalism is diluted.
Yet in the big picture, human society still runs on tribal fundamentalism. Look at our politics. It’s become fiercely tribal and vicious and crazy and dangerous.
We’re living in a time when tribal fundamentalism, so deeply rooted in our genome, is going to be the death of us.
So…
We don’t owe tribal allegiance our loyalty anymore.
And that being the case…
Why not go all-in for personal love?
Evolution is not taking care of us anymore, so why not do everything we can to create deeply loving relationships? Why not become activists for love? Why not upgrade it? Why not reach out from the close relationships we cherish, to gather more and more people into…
Larger networks of inclusive nurturance.
If you’re someone who wants us humans to be so much better than we are, and you decide to join in the mission to upgrade love, and you really fight for that, then you get to call yourself a rebel.
And if you see how we as a species, despite our potential, are failing, and failing badly, and you see how we’re marching ourselves helplessly down the road to extinction, and your heart is breaking because of that, then you get to call yourself…
A heartbroken rebel.
And you get to claim your place in the long lineage of the rebels who have gone before.
Chapter Three is about self-development. But not the mild-mannered kind the easy-step gurus promote. It’s about a radical, gutsy, demanding, invigorating, rewarding kind of self-development.
If we’re going to oppose the tribal fundamentalism that’s the core of our human operating system, this ancient force…
We’re going to need to become as personally powerful as we possibly can.
If we’re going to hold our own, we need the strongest inner resources we can put together.
So there’s a lot to Chapter Three. Which is why it’s the longest chapter on the site.
As you can imagine there’s serious work involved here. But it’s a fact that play is the superpower of human development, so I’m giving you some pages, too, that show you…
How you can play your way into serious personal power.
I’m going to explain deep self-development by talking about my experiences with it, and the experiences of people I know. And there are some common principles that all of us share. But there’s remarkable diversity in how each of us grows and develops.
So please use what I’m saying in this chapter…
To provoke your own thinking and discoveries.
And just one more thing. At this point in my life, I experience this deep self-development as an indulgence, a treat that’s more pleasure than effort. And I’m hoping that if you’re not already in this frame of mind, you’ll soon get to where this is true for you, too.
