In the Why Smart People Have Dumb Ideas post, I made the case that people can reason clearly in situations where there is no cultural component activating their tribal survival instinct. To be as clear as I can be, this is a genetic-level phenomenon which individuals cannot change. If one has a strong tribal survival instinct, they will never be able to reason their way out the ideas and opinions of those they perceive (either directly or indirectly) as their tribal elites. In fact, I suspect that they will not be capable of detecting their own tribalism. They may recognize it in others, but not in themselves.
I’ve also made the argument in Talent Theory, that human capability, or what I’ve been calling “talent”, is limited to what is coded into our genetics. If these assertions are true, then any human being will only ever be able to achieve those things which are not inhibited by the lack of talent and the level of tribal survival instinct. This is important to understand because it helps us to better understand each other and to set our expectations of other’s behavior. I feel compelled to acknowledge that this may apply only to certain people, who have the talents required to understand it and a sufficiently low level of tribal survival instinct, since these ideas run counter to the popular idea of “you can do whatever you set your mind to!”. No, you can’t.
Tribalism and Talent Theory are intimately linked with real outcomes in the real world, both good and bad. In politics, where talented people with strong tribal survival instincts can destroy a society, to entrepreneurship, where talented people with weak tribal survival instincts can discover new ways to advance society. For example, in business, talented people who have a strong tribal survival instinct may be less competitive than equally talented people with a weak tribal survival instinct because they will be compelled to adopt widely-accepted (implying a cultural component) business practices, even though those practices are suboptimal. Those with a weak tribal survival instinct will be better able to explore potentially superior practices.
Tangentially, it’s interesting to think about the implication that those of us who have a strong ability to reason and a low level of tribal survival instinct are the ones who are able to facilitate human civilization the best, being able to employ less inhibited reasoning, therefore discovering truth more easily, while also being the most likely, in a state of nature, to die because they don’t have a strong enough tribal survival instinct. It’s surprising people like that would have survived at all. Maybe their ability to reason pointed out that they need to be in good standing with the tribe and they were able to do so through alternative means, or maybe the tribe recognized their value in uncovering truth and that value kept them in good standing.
