Tribalism's Nature

Human beings naturally gravitate to tribalism -- racial, ethnic, and national varieties, of course, but the list is endless. And, we tend to believe that almost all types of tribalism have virtue. But, with us being a species endowed with higher thinking and, conversely one in which every single member is prone to error, it follows that almost all tribalism is at odds with the truth.

Naturally. Almost.

The best example of the effects of tribalism is any shooting incident involving Law Enforcement Officers. For those prone to tribal thinking, they’re always good guys when they die; always bad guys when someone else dies. And both opinions depend on other tribal affiliations. The standard examples:

• The race(s) of the LEO(s)
• The race(s) of the civilian(s) in the incident
• The race(s) of the observers and commentators

These earthly tribal groupings tend to stomp objective truth. And, if anyone tries to insert truth into any discussion of this type, the shame-mongers and truth-stompers come out in force. The flag must be defended at all costs!

My friend, Steve Graham, once said that, for Christians, Christ is our race, creed and color. Not only is this confirmed in Galatians 3:28, but in the very essence of God's being, illustrated by one of His names – Jehovah Nissi; God is my Banner. It is the only type of tribalism that is based on unshakable truth. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” And anyone can become a member of this tribe.

When other types of tribalism are the foundation, the only objective truth is that error will be present.

And, the paradox is that, sometimes, error will infect an entire tribe and become that tribe's banner -- like a disease that has only one cure.

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Baltimore's Murders and the Natural Man

Baltimore has broken a record.

Baltimore has set a new per-capita homicide record as gunmen killed for drugs, cash,

Cecil Cavert, the 2nd Baron Baltimore

payback - or no apparent reason at all.

A surge of homicides in the starkly divided city resulted in 343 killings in 2017, bringing the annual homicide rate to its highest ever - roughly 56 killings per 100,000 people. Baltimore, which has shrunk over decades, currently has about 615,000 inhabitants.(…)

Others blame police, accusing them of taking a hands-off approach to fighting crime since six officers were charged in connection with the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, a black man whose fatal spinal cord injury in police custody triggered massive protests that year and the city's worst riots in decades.

"The conventional wisdom, or widely agreed upon speculation, suggests that the great increase in murders is happening partly because the police have withdrawn from aggressively addressing crime in the city's many poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods," said Donald Norris, professor emeritus of public policy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Woven throughout the report is the notion that “generational poverty” is the culprit. That’s false. Like the high murder rate, generational poverty is one of the effects, not the cause. The cause is generational illegitimacy.

And I love how the reporter subtly wields the “generational poverty” wand, but expresses no connection as to how the Baltimore police – and police nationwide – have been deemed to be the enemy in any and all cases nor that the BPD’s withdrawal is a response to this paint job.

Black Americans have a complicated relationship with law enforcement. I’ve told the story about how my American dad would constantly be stopped by the 1960s version of the LAPD as he returned home from his job a Thrifty Drugstore night manager. He was never arrested or brutalized, but he said it angered him greatly. He also said that the harassment reduced as his age advanced.

Why did he not get out and confront these police? Because his father had trained him how to stay alive in such cases – a father who had to bear real and overt oppression from police and fellow citizens alike in his own youth and adulthood. Dad now has a son-in-law and a grandson who are LEOs, along with an uncle and a sister-in-law who are retired from the profession.

I could go on and on about this complicated relationship, but there are two bottom lines I want to get to, one of which – illegitimacy culture – I’ve already touched on here and many other times. The other is tribalism and how it has snaked its way into so much of our thinking that many of us can’t even perceive of it and will scoff if you point it out.

And the mindset has gone way beyond race and ethnicity. It’s an easy pattern to see, however, if you’re actually open to seeing it.

• Blacks are all rioters and looters who burn down their own neighborhoods.
• Whites are all racists, who oppress everyone who is not white, straight or male.
• Mexicans are all illegal alien criminals, who drive drunk.

From the racial delineations, we get these:

• Police are all racist murderers.
• Military members are all psychotic.
• Conservatives are all heartless.
• Liberals are all stupid.
• Politicians are all corrupt. (Wait … I think that one might be true.)

It’s easy to put all members of a given group into a category because 1) discernment takes the type of mental effort of which many are unwilling and/or unable to make, and 2) to be honest, categorization often keeps the categorizer in physical safety.

Because some blacks are thieves and vandals, some whites are racists, and some Mexicans are illegal alien criminals. Cross categorize, blah, blah. You know the drill.

But what happens when the categorization is wrong? Small things like hurt feelings and large things, like when the categorized turns back around and makes categories of his own. Or even larger things like a municipal police force standing down from its duty after being demonized by Baltimore’s state attorney, even after that attorney was forced to drop the charges in the Freddie Gray case.

We all remember what happened after that.

But now, the violence in Baltimore has turned inward – where it was well before Freddie Gray was arrested for the final time -- and has ramped up. This points us right back to my assertion that generational illegitimacy is the foundation for the various forms of degeneracy we’ve seen in inner cities for decades.

Tribalism is natural for all humanity, but natural is not a good quality.

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

-- 1 Corinthians 2:14 (KJV)

I looked up the verse in Strong’s Concordance and found these other translations from the Greek word psuchikos (ψυχικὸς) : animal, sensuous. It’s seems to me that third English word, one often used in Christian circles, can be used as a reasonable translation: carnal.

The results of natural, animal, sensuous, carnal thinking is what we see all around us; decades of planting, cultivation and cross pollination.

It so prevalent that it seems normal and correct.

There has to be a way - more than one - to step back from this brink and pull others along. I'm trying to do my small part right here.
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Black Americans: The Organized Left's Expendable Shock Troops

Baltimore in 2015

Black Americans are, for the most part, a tribe. Some will take offense to that opinion, but if we consider the specifics of our existence as Americans since the practice of enslaving imported Africans became widespread in this hemisphere, we see that there is nothing else that we can be called.

Remember, our ancestors, of various West African tribes, were brought here, sold, and forcibly stripped of their various names, languages, cultures, and religions. That conditioning created a new tribe: The Negro. And even after the abolition of slavery and the extension of legal citizenship to former slaves, Americans of African descent were confined under a societal barrier. A few managed to break through the barrier, but the clear majority remained in the legal, economic, educational social and tribal space into which the US Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson  allowed state and local governments to pen them.

But along came the Civil Rights Era, really beginning in the 1940s and reaching its apex in the 1970s. The Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts heralded the end of our status as an insulated tribe within a nation and they harkened back to the objective ideals on which this nation was founded.

These landmarks of legislation stated that we belonged to the American “tribe” all along. But, concurrently, another idea—an opposing ideology--was on the ascent as well: Black Pride.

Pride. When we hear the word, we interpret it in two ways.

So-called benign pride is represented in the following example: we are proud of ourselves when we achieve hard-fought goals -- educational, professional, etc.; we are proud of cherished relatives and friends who do the same.

The not-so-good type of pride is that which the Bible warns against--"the high look," “the up-tilt of the chin.” (But are they any different, really?)

Recall that in the days before the Civil Rights Era, being a black American was a matter of shame and degradation, but Black Pride served to counter that. The concept of Black Pride, while initially beneficial, has, however, brought black Americans from one extreme mindset and deposited us into another. It took us away from the shame of being black and brought us to a place in which no one may criticize a black person who is deemed to be in good standing with the “tribe.”

As a result, many (most?) black Americans have come to believe that blackness is a Leftist way of thinking and a left-leaning political position and, stemming from these ideas, that any black person who deviates from the “black” mindset and political position—a black conservative--isn't “really” black.ⁱ

This idea stems from the Organized Left co-opting Black Pride and using it to keep anger and grievance alive long past their dates of pertinence. The purpose of this tactic is to keep the wedge open between black and white Americans, drive it wider, and produce violence. The ultimate purpose, taken together with many other tactics, is to destroy America.

Pride is what is always has been: inordinate high opinion of one's superiority and goodness; the preening to appear better than on-lookers. (My great-aunt called it “floor-showing.") That we had to use pride, a sin, to “rid” ourselves of the mindset of shame and degradation is the problem. We went too far in the other direction, so far in that direction that the things which are destroying us -- the things which we should be ashamed of -- we have deemed inherent to blackness. We call evil good and good evil. We call the chains of the New Slavery – widespread bastardy, illiteracy, miseducation, self-genocide, etc. -- our due, our rights. And we believe that any of our number who breaks free ideologically and tries to tell their brethren how to be free is a traitor to the tribe. Shame is no longer an option, except as a cudgel for those who point this out.ⁱⁱ

In addition, we deem the New Slavers -- the modern-day Democrat Party and the Organized Left -- to be our friends even though their ideological forebears were always the perpetrators of overt black American slavery and oppression. This sort of tribal pride blocks the ability to see what's right in front of one’s face and the ability to accurately map out the future. It blocks reality.

This has been a decades-long process, concurrent with the Left's agenda to hollow out the institutions of this country.

Through this mindset, black Americans have become the Organized Left's shock troops in latter’s war against America and all too many of us have become the Left's overseers, tasked to force the "deserters" back into formation using the tools of ridicule and shame.

I almost said that the Left was at war with black people, but the Left doesn't esteem blacks enough to deem us as their enemies. We are merely tools to be used for the task at hand -- to foment violent racial discord which will have to be put down using infinitely stronger government violence -- and to be discarded when the task is completed, assuming that there will be any of us left after the New Civil War.

And we let ourselves be used for one reason: tribal vengeance; for slavery and for oppression.

For pragmatism’s sake, let’s leave aside morality and conscience for a bit and look at this phenomenon strictly from a strategic point of view. Leaderless families and the resultant black-on-black killings are prevalent among black Americans and directly attributable to the lure of LBJ’s New Slavery Great Society programs. (I contend that prevalence of both leaderless families among black Americans and black-on-black killings are merely the aforementioned shame and degradation of being black re-packaged and internalized. If the leaders of a people—men—don’t love their progeny enough to marry the women who bear their children and/or remain in the lives of those children long enough to bring them into functioning adulthood, why would those children love themselves or those who look like them? And abortion is merely the black female method of black-on-black killing.)

These methods of self-genocide have greatly thinned the “troops.” Taking this into account, one logically concludes that starting a war with a “tribe” that outnumbers us 12-1 and outguns us is pure folly.
It will bring the tribal suicide which we’ve been slowly committing already, to a quick and devastating conclusion.

Turning back to conscience and morality, Jehovah reserves vengeance to Himself, and instructs Jewish and Christian believers to forego it. But even if one does not believe in Him, it’s easy to see the chaos which is nearly always brought about by the unending cycle of human vengeance.

You murder/enslave/oppress mine, then I take vengeance and murder/enslave/oppress yours. Then you take vengeance and murder/enslave/oppress more of mine. Then I …

Is this what you want, Americans? I do not.

We all tend to forget that all human beings are only a few steps away from reverting to the Law of the Jungle. Twentieth-century Europe demonstrated the truth of this and the Muslim world still demonstrates it. Will we Americans—all of us--continue in the way of most of humanity?

Every day, I pray not.
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[i] It’s interesting that Liberals think that black people have a certain way of thinking embedded in the DNA. White supremacists think this as well.

[ii] Until recently, I found it puzzling that some black Liberals hurl all manner of racial epithets at black Conservatives; but now I realize that it’s the pride/shame mindset. Those who use this tactic, however, don’t realize that it’s ineffectual on persons who recognize it for what it is.

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