Big Think: Why the algorithm is sorting you into tribes. Quote: “Luke studied business at NYU Stern before doing graduate work in philosophy and earning an S.T.B. in Theology from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.”

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In 1936, a shipyard worker in Hamburg kept his arms folded while hundreds of men around him raised theirs for Hitler. Luke Burgis, author of Wanting and The One in the 99, wants to know what it takes to become that person, and he traces the answer back to the family. Drawing on psychiatrist Murray Bowen’s distinction between the solid self and the pseudo self, Burgis shows how anxiety and opinion pass through groups by contagion, and how our screens have multiplied the crowds we have to stand within.

About the speaker: Luke Burgis is an entrepreneur, author, and the founder and director of the Cluny Institute. He is the author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, which popularized the work of cultural anthropologist René Girard, and The One in the 99: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Luke studied business at NYU Stern before doing graduate work in philosophy and earning an S.T.B. in Theology from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.

Timestamps

00:01:25 Chapter 1: Distinguishing a solid self and a pseudo-self
00:04:52 What makes a tribe unhealthy
00:08:55 How anxiety spreads through families
00:22:41 The man who refused to salute Hitler
00:34:49 Chapter 2: The three temptations of the screen
00:39:46 Dunbar’s number and the limits of connection
00:43:02 Thin rites of passage, curiositas, and acedia
01:00:05 Why social contagion feels demonic
01:02:44 Chapter 3: The importance of courage
01:04:43 Paul Tillich and the courage to be
01:14:01 How Alexei Navalny embodied four forms of courage

Prefer to listen to our interviews on Spotify? Explore our episodes here:https://open.spotify.com/embed/show/7KRYoRD1NdF2aoQcBMyPlb

Transcript

Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.

I’m Luke Burgis. I’m the founder and director of the Cluny Institute and the author of Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life and The One in the 99, Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. Today on Big Think, we’re going to be looking at the two levels of the self, the solid self and the pseudo self, the three temptations of the screen, and then courage, and specifically the four forms of courage that allow us to live well in the modern world.

Chapter 1: Distinguishing a solid self and a pseudo-self

So it seems like every year, 10 books get written on how to find your tribe. So it seems to be something that people want to understand how to do, how to find your people, how to find people that you can be comfortable with. But it seems to me that we live in a world where finding tribes is easier than it’s ever been, especially with the internet. We’re immersed in tribes all of the time. And the big question is, what do you do once you’ve actually found your tribe? Then what? How do you exist within the tribe in a healthy way so that you don’t lose yourself within it?

And that to me is the most important question of our time in an age of social contagion. Where we’re finding our tribes, sometimes we’re finding tribes on a daily basis. Different tribes to validate what we think and what we feel. We pick and choose tribes as we need them. And the far more important skill I think is Not just how to leave a tribe, that is and can very much be an important skill. The harder skill is how to be part of any strong community or any tribe without losing yourself.

Nobody likes it when we’re treated as a number in a crowd. You know, we want to be known by name. We want to be recognized for our uniqueness and who we are. And at the same time, we have a fundamental drive for communion, to be in community. We don’t want to be alone. And these two drives exist in a kind of tension, but I would call it a healthy tension. And when we run from the tension, we typically fall as people and as a society into either individualism or collectivism.

And it’s when a person can learn to sit in that tension that healthy community emerges. And tension is a good thing. Tension is a sign of life. And when we lose it, things can start to go haywire.

But the process through which an individual Belongs to a community in a healthy way is a process of differentiation. And that doesn’t mean necessarily leaving it or becoming alienated. It means becoming differentiated within it so that we can maintain or find Our own distinctiveness while being in communion and being in community. And when people are able to do that, it leads to healthier communities and healthier groups.

And one of the things that I worry about in our world today is that we’re losing the ability. We’re fleeing any form of tension. We’re fleeing the rites of passage that allow people to differentiate themselves. And by definition, a rite of passage involves three stages. It involves a separation stage, a liminal stage where a person’s identity is a little a bit in flux, and then a reintegration phase where a person comes back into relationship with those people that they left in a new and more mature way. So the tension is really the key between the individuality and the belonging and holding those two things without letting either one of them go is the work of maturing as an adult.

According to Joe Forgas, who is one of the world’s leading researchers on tribes and tribalism, There are a few defining characteristics. When we’re part of a tribe, we have in-group loyalty. We default to favoring anybody who’s in our group. There’s shared narrative or a story that everybody who’s part of the tribe accepts. And then there’s some expectation of conformity. You want to be part of this tribe continually. There are certain things that you need to do or conform your life around.

All of these things can be taken to extremes and become unhealthy. And usually when we hear the word tribalism, we’re referring to something that is unhealthy. One of the simplest ways to determine that is whether the tribe helps people actually mature and grow and become themselves, or whether they have to dissolve themselves into the tribe. They lose their own will, And they give it over to something bigger than them.

One of the alarming things about tribes is How easy it is for humans to form tribal associations without even thinking about it. There was a very famous study in the 1970s by Henri Tajfel who was trying to understand like what’s the minimum that it takes to get people to engage in tribal behavior and he went in a classroom and he had some kind of meaningless thing that he asked students to do and then he quickly divided the students into two groups. He said this: All of you, you’re overestimators, and all of you are underestimators. And this was totally random. It wasn’t even true. He just assigned the label to the two groups, and then he gave them some money to be able to reward different members of these groups.

And he found that even with this nonsensical sort of made-up association that they had with half of the people in the room, they would begin to immediately reward their own group, either the underestimators or the overestimators. And they became so tribal about it that they would actually do things that an economist would say harmed their own ability to maximize their revenue or their own gain, as long as it increased the distance between them and the other side.

So that’s all it really takes. So it seems like there’s something really, really ingrained in us. Even if labels are randomly assigned to us and we’re told, hey, you’re like this. You’re part of that group. We somehow internalize that and begin behaving in tribal ways that might not even be in our own interest or in the interest of the group.

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Discussion about this video

Peter Goulet

Peter Goulet 17 Oct

Now that was nice. My mother hated tribes and groups but still participated to obtain some sense of community. I also grew up not liking tribalism because I had two differentiating traits deemed to be weak. I was always the smallest person in the room and I was often perceived to be the smartest one. I soon discovered that these two traits trapped me in a small group. My group was the one containing people who could operate with in a small tribe with confidence while moving comfortably in a larger setting. Today, I am 82 and mostly alone. I am increasingly comfortable with that idea. One of my favorite artists is a singer/songwriter named Gordon Bok. He once wrote and sang an extended ballad about this subject, which came out on a double-sided LP on Folkways Records called “Another Land Made of Water” devoted to the topic of being alone and comfortable with that.

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