As literary critic Adam Kirsch has observed, goodness is ‘infertile terrain for a writer’.

It’s in these ways that story both exposes and enables the worst traits of our species. We willingly allow highly simplistic narratives to deceive us, gleefully accepting as truth any tale that casts us as the moral hero and the other as the two-dimensional villain.

We’re not harmlessly groupish like starlings or sheep or shoals of mackerel, but violently so.

Our storytelling brains transform reality’s chaos into a simple narrative of cause and effect that reassures us that our biased models, and the instincts and emotions they generate, are virtuous and right. And this means casting the opposing tribe into the role of villain.

We seek out people who have similar mental models to us – who have comparable personalities and interests and perceive the world in ways we recognise.

A unique quality of humans is that we’ve evolved the ability to think our way into many tribes simultaneously. ‘We all belong to multiple in-groups,’ writes Professor Leonard Mlodinow. ‘As a result our self-identification shifts from situation to situation. At different times the same person might think of herself as a woman, an executive, a Disney

The Qur’an and the Torah that Ezra presented to his people in Jerusalem are ready-made theories of control that are internalised by their followers, instructing them how to behave in order to achieve connection and status.

stories transmitted the values of the tribe. They told listeners exactly how they ought to behave if they wanted to get along and get ahead in that particular group. There’s a sense in which these stories would become the tribe. They’d represent what it stood for in ways purer and clearer than could any flawed human.

Psychologists define humiliation as the removal of any ability to claim status. Severe humiliation has been described as ‘an annihilation of the self’. It’s thought to be a uniquely toxic state and is implicated in some of worst behaviours the human animal engages in, from serial murder to honour killings to genocide.