Does Tribe Matter?

Cave Paintings, Cueva de las Manos, Argentina

Does Tribe Matter?
Wednesday – September 9, 2026

Tribalism continues to define human conflict, even if certain people claim to be mere "individuals", and tribalism is quite ancient.* Now, let us not confuse what moderns refer to as "tribalism" with the importance of the tribe. Surely any man of decent intellect should see that taking his tribe for granted would be a stupid and sorted thing to do, but such a man should also see that the position that individualism should serve to prevent tribalism is just as stupid and just as wrong. Is it really the case upon further investigation that individualism serves to prevent tribalism? Is it really the case that individualism can prevent conflict? What has the point of the entire postwar period been, if not to prevent the horrors of war and of deceit? It seems to me that individuation serves quite the opposite goal, and besides, no man could survive on his own without the tribe and without being a member of something greater, read "What is the Anthropological Distance?". Now, in the time of Abraham (אַבְרָהָם), roughly 4000 years ago, it was almost completely impossible to survive without the tribe, and if you were perceived, as an outsider, you would quite rightly have been killed or drive into the desert. We may think of this as barbaric and reprehensible, but in order for us to understand this we must consider the tribal reality of the times of Abraham: if you did not belong to a tribe, and if you were unable to claim a certain lineage, usually your fathers though sometimes your mothers, you were essentially a dead man walking, and the reason why you would have been treated harshly is precisely because you would have constituted an immense threat to the community, because you could have been a spy, you could have been someone who introduced diseases and scism into the community. Quite frankly, one could usually not become adopted into the tribe, although certain exceptions did exist. I should also make it clear, that when we consider humanity from a tribal perspective, we must see that there are at least two distinct forms of tribes, read "The Census": the first kind is the nomadic and roaming kind, and examples of groups like this would be the Romani Vagabonds of Europe (Bohemians), Jews at large, the Tata Somba of Benin, and more; the second kind is the settled kind, and since so many people are settled today, it is rather hard to provide an example of the pure settled kind, but the best would perhaps be to point towards many Germanic tribes, although they have been engaging in imperialism and colonisation,† but the main characteristic of these tribes is dependence on time; and although both kinds of tribes depend of time, the latter depend on time as a matter of survival, whereas the former depend on time primarily as a rope extending into the past. Yes, memory and story, these are the cornerstones of many nomadic tribes, and in fact it would be quite accurate to label the Jewish people a people inseparable from history, and from the conscience of the world, for without a deep sense of history, it would be quite difficult to imagine the dimensions of it all, and of basic humanity without a sense of burden, which surely lends itself to a progressive sense of justice, but for more on this another time.

    From the point of view of anthropology and profane science, yes even naturalism at large, it would also make perfect sense that humans tend to find themselves inside tribes, for after all how could one man survive on his own in nature? Indeed, this prospect was and is still grimm, and while it would be quite a stretch to call modern societies a tribe, read "My Views on Society", they are still and essentially derivatives of what a tribe is or used to be, and this is also why hierarchies are important, a note that belongs to another consideration, or rather another post. I suppose that we may borrow the analogy of progressive, to use that word, degeneration or really just decay: if society started out as a community, a tribal community, it has degraded into the cosmopolitan soup, the multicultural cesspool, that we see today. I suppose as well, to connect to the previous point made about Abraham, that while Abraham would be sure to welcome most strangers, there is a difference between being a stranger and an outsider in the context of tribalism: if you are an outsider, then you are not merely a stranger, for an outsider has no pedigree, he has no lineage worth mentioning, and at best he can hope to become a slave, a very low slave; a stranger can still become a member of the tribe, he can become absorbed and he can be made to kneel before the chief. Yes, hierarchies matter, if you have yet to notice this; this obliviousness to facts is actually quite offensive, but I digress.

    They say that the Polar Bears and the Whales are dying out, and here we are left to despair only, without recourse, but again, I digress. The matter was tribalism, and yes, on one hand it would, as I stated above, be a mistake to assume that the ingroup, or in the modern context the perceived ingroup, is always right, read "What is Hatred?", but without that ingroup to begin with, you are essentially lost in the world, and lost to humanity, for this was how the first generations lived. Yes, we live in a world of interconnectedness and individualism, and indeed there have been many attempts made to destroy these sacred bonds, bonds granted and imposed by God, and surely anything so powerful disposed of so easily must create a vacuum? I digress again, for this is not a defense of tribalism; this has been an exhibition on why we must delineate between being a part of the tribe and tribalism, really between being human and between being a dense reactionary in idiocy. Do you really want to be an idiot, out of your mind, a nutcase, a lunatic? This is what they, the revolutionary elite, is asking—nay demanding—of you. Do not do this to yourself! Do not become one of those aimless individuals, one of those bastards, one of those people without a lineage, without a heritage, and truly without a history. Again, do not do this to yourself! Now, you may not belong to a tribe, but this is because your tribe was dispersed a long time ago, and now you must navigate the world on your own. Oh yes, something that belonged to you was stolen, a facility no longer available. Yes, cry. Cry over this, but do not despair.

Reginald Drax (AKA, M. C. Dutt) – September 9, 2026.

Footnote(s)

* For more on this, I direct you to my posts: "Identity Politics", and my series "Collectivism & Individualism". I discuss these matters in greater detail in those posts.

† For more on this, although not explicitly stated, I direct you to my posts: "Hyperborea" and "The Great North".