Our society today is, in its own way, still a game of giants. To understand the world around us, you can’t think only about people as individuals—we need to get to know the tribal mindset. So what are some elements of a tribal mindset?

I’ve always felt hope when writing about our struggles at the individual level, and I feel hope in this series too as we look at what’s going on a few floors up on the elevator. But we have a pretty daunting task in front of us—because innate tribalism is only the beginning of what we’re contending with today. Somewhere down the line of human... See more

The downside was a major loss of individuality but the survival benefits made it worth the sacrifice, and the multi-celled organism thing stuck.

Selective kindness isn’t high-mindedness. The Higher Mind exhibits these traits all the time. He’s high-minded universally, as a general principle, and applies it to everyone equally. Selective kindness is a Primitive Mind trick that appears to be high-mindedness, if you’re not paying close enough attention. Remember, at first glance, ants seemed... See more

Pretty soon after cells started joining together to form animals, some of the animals discovered that they could go up another level of emergence and form even bigger giants made up of multiple animals. If you look around, you’ll see them everywhere—schools of fish, packs of wolves, colonies of ants, waddles of penguins. Groups like these represent... See more

In each case, human dickishness is running at full force—the thing that’s changing is the size of the giants that are being dicks to each other.

But when Higher Minds work together, the effect can be just as powerful: the group as a whole gains superhuman abilities in learning and creativity and discovery.

The Primitive Mind is all about making giants. In fact, one of the Primitive Mind’s central talents is the ability to instinctually merge with other Primitive Minds, combining each of their individual primal flames into a raging survival bonfire, making the group stronger and more powerful than the sum of its parts.

When I look around, I see evidence of this toggle switch everywhere. Notice how easily people who are normally compassionate drop that compassion when thinking and talking about members of a political party they hate—the “Them” political party? How these people are all about forgiveness with people they see as part of “Us” but are fine with... See more