Tribalism Is Not the Problem: The Real Root of Disconnection

We say the word tribalism now with contempt in our voices.

We use it to describe polarization, dogma, fanaticism, groupthink.

We weaponize it as an explanation for why humans can’t get along.

We are told it’s primitive. Dangerous. Regressive.

But this is not a neutral misunderstanding.

This is a strategic misidentification.

A deliberate distortion.

Because the truth is: tribe was never the problem.

Tribe was the medicine.

What Has Been Forgotten

In its original essence, tribe meant:

• interdependence

• → shared memory

• → co-created meaning

• → ancestral stewardship

• → collective healing

• → belonging that was not conditional, but inherent

Tribe was the structure through which we raised children,

mourned the dead, listened to the Earth, shared our dreams,

made decisions, resolved conflict, and told stories.

We belonged to one another, not as an idea,

but as a lived, daily, relational truth.

Tribe held you through initiations.

It reflected you back to yourself.

It gave you a name, a role, and a place in the cosmos.

What has been forgotten is that tribe is not a threat to peace.

Tribe is peace, when rightly remembered.

What Has Been Erased

Colonial powers understood something:

To dominate a people, you must sever their roots.

So they erased tribal systems:

→ Indigenous governance replaced with bureaucracies

→ Oral traditions dismissed as superstition

→ Communal land held sacred for generations divided and sold

→ Kinship networks broken up by boarding schools and borders

→ Ancestral knowledge labeled “primitive”

→ Collective identity fractured by forced assimilation

And then, once tribe was severed,

we were told it was our tribalism that made us ungovernable.

That our very way of being was the problem.

We were taught to internalize that shame.

To distrust our elders.

To forget the drum, the circle, the fire, the dance.

To become “individuals”—disconnected, floating, productive.

What Has Been Twisted

Now “tribalism” is blamed for the very disconnection we were engineered into.

But what they call tribalism is not tribe.

It is what emerges in the absence of real tribe.

It is a trauma response.

A grasping for certainty, safety, identity.

A survival mechanism of the isolated, the exiled, the uninitiated.

When we do not belong anywhere,

we will fight for something—anything—to belong to.

Extremism is not tribe.

It is what festers when tribe is lost.

Who Benefits From This Lie?

Those who profit from our disconnection.

Those who rule a fragmented people more easily than a united one.

Those who sell us belonging in the form of brands, algorithms, and nation-states.

Those who gain from endless productivity, competition, and consumption.

A tribal people are hard to colonize.

They remember who they are.

They answer to ancestors, not shareholders.

They gather in councils, not boardrooms.

They care for the land—not because it is profitable,

but because it is sacred.

So the lie must be protected.

We must be told tribe is dangerous.

We must be told to fear what we long for.

The Truth Beneath the Lie

We are not suffering from too much tribe.

We are suffering from the absence of true tribe.

The loneliness.

The disorientation.

The forgetting.

But underneath the forgetting is the ember.

Still warm.

Still waiting.

Still whispering,

Come home.