Quotes About Tribalism

Moriori survivor recalled, "[The Maori] commenced to kill us like sheep….

Tribalism, after all, is part of our evolutionary DNA. The need to identify with a group, to belong and commune with like-minded people is not only biological, it's what has helped motivate our desire for and devotion to all kinds of important cultural institutions, from organized religion to sports fandom.

I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.

It always bothers me when I hear Rwanda's genocide described as a product of ancient tribal hatreds. I think this is an easy way for Westerners to dismiss the whole thing as a regrettable but pointless bloodbath that happens to primitive brown people.

The moral system of a college fraternity turns out to be classically tribal, i.e., characterized by a deeply felt sense of honor, discretion, and loyalty to one's so-called 'brothers,' coupled with a complete, sociopathic lack of regard for the interests or even humanity of anyone outside that fraternal set.

Of course, in men's sports no one ever talks about beauty, or grace, or the body. Men may profess their "love" of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive stats and technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc.

Fanaticism is not a cause of war. It is the means which helps savage peoples to fight. It is the spirit which enables them to combine—the great common object before which all personal or tribal disputes become insignificant.

Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.

Where you can see tribal behavior now is in this business about teaching evolution in a science class and intelligent design. It's the scientists themselves are behaving tribally.

I say suffer, because I believe that if you are a prejudiced; you are committing an act of self robbery, which will severely diminish your chance of joy or happiness. Tribalism is not just a curse for those who are victims of its cruel nonsense, but also for the stubborn evolutionary throwbacks who believe that it has validity as a value judgment .

My first meeting as a senator, my first day, they were already talking about the next election. Part of that's the permanent campaign, part of that's a word I've been using more frequently, 'tribal.' Our politics has become tribal: It's us versus them.

The capacity for humans to come up with ever-increasingly granular in-group versus out-group demarcations is truly breathtaking.

But sometimes I fear that the people of my country can unite only beside victims' bodies, over coffins and in cemeteries. Like tribesmen who dance around old totems, we ignore the living and can only appreciate the dead.

Everyone has his or her Frrance, his or her Paris, just as everyone has his or her London or New York. This stubborn habit strikes me as self-protection, an old tribal instinct for never showing one's back. Not knowing, not having gotten there first (and pocketing the goods), seem to implicate us as fools or rubes.

Ants and savages put strangers to death.

My identity in Christ is more important than my identity as an American or as a Coloradan or as a white male or as a Protestant. Church is the place where I celebrate that new identity and work it out in the midst of people who have many differences but share this one thing in common. We are charged to live out a kind of alternative society before the eyes of the watching world, a world that is increasingly moving toward tribalism and division.

Much has been written about how tribal we are getting. We see it in our social media feeds, and it is reflected in the increased polarization of our political parties along geographic and social divisions.

You ask, can changing your inner life make a difference in the troubles of the world? Nothing else can! No amount of technology, computers, internet, artificial intelligence, biotech, nanotechnology, or space technology is going to stop continuing racism, warfare, environmental destruction, and tribalism. These all have their source in the human heart.

It will require the renunciation or sublimation or transformation of our traditional appetites: to outbreed, outconsume, and conquer our rivals, especially our rivals in other tribes. These impulses may once have been adaptive. Indeed, they may even be hard-wired into our brains. But we no longer have the luxury of tolerating them. And

humanity is gravely threatened by superstition and myth, the stubborn refusal to recognize the urgent planetary problems, and generalized tribalism in all its forms.

Yale was founded before the advent of the fraternity system, so the white men of generations past had to make up their own structures for sub-erotic bonding and pointless tribalism.

The true cause of hatred and violence is faith versus faith, an outward expression of the ancient instinct of tribalism.

You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.

You can't fight tribalism with a tribe. All you can do is read and think and listen. And if you're lucky, eventually will come that rousing, fleeting moment when you hear someone say the thing that makes you feel less alone.