feel they are part of some larger story that they can believe in and dedicate their lives to.
“Man has a horror of aloneness,” Balzac writes. “And of all kinds of aloneness, moral aloneness is the most terrible.”
4. TRIBALISM
These three crises have given rise to a fourth one, which is not a facet of extreme individualism itself, but our reaction to it. Psychologists say the hardest thing to cure is the patient’s attempt to self-cure. People who are left naked and alone by radical individualism do what their genes and the ancient history of their species tell them to do: They revert to tribe. Individualism, taken too far, leads to tribalism.
Hannah Arendt noticed the phenomenon decades ago. When she looked into the lives of people who had become political fanatics, she found two things: loneliness and spiritual emptiness. “Loneliness is the common ground of terror,” she wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
True loneliness, Nabeelah Jaffer writes, is not only solitude; it is also a sort of spiritual emptiness, the loss of faith in oneself to come up with answers, “the loss of one’s own self.” It is a feeling of “uprootedness and superfluousness.” Jaffer posits that many militants join the Islamic State because they have no place where they can experience a sense of belonging, and at least IS gives them that. It gives them a way to be a martyr, a hero.
People who are experiencing existential dread slip into crisis mode: “I’m in danger! I’m threatened; I must strike back!” Their evolutionary response is self-protection, so they fall back on ancient instincts for how to respond to a threat: us versus them. Tribalists seek out easy categories in which some people are good and others are bad. They seek out certainty to conquer their feelings of unbearable doubt. They seek out war—political war or actual war—as a way to give life meaning. They revert to tribe.
Tribalism seems like a way to restore the bonds of community. It certainly does bind people together. But it is actually the dark twin of community. Community is connection based on mutual affection. Tribalism, in the sense I’m using it here, is connection based on mutual hatred. Community is based on common humanity; tribalism on common foe. Tribalism is always erecting boundaries and creating friend/enemy distinctions. The tribal mentality is a warrior mentality based on scarcity: Life is a battle for scarce resources and it’s always us versus them, zero-sum. The ends justify the means. Politics is war. Ideas are combat. It’s kill or be killed. Mistrust is the tribalist worldview. Tribalism is community for lonely narcissists.
These days, partisanship for many people is not about which political party has the better policies. It’s a conflict between the saved and the damned. People often use partisan identity to fill the void left when their other attachments wither away—ethnic, neighborhood, religious, communal, and familial.
This is asking more from politics than politics can deliver. Once politics becomes your ethnic or moral identity, it becomes impossible to compromise, because compromise becomes dishonor. Once politics becomes your identity, then every electoral contest is a struggle for existential survival, and everything is permitted. Tribalism threatens to take the detached individual and turn him into a monster.
SUFFERING
Whether the valley is a personal one or a societal one or both, there’s a lot of suffering. You’re enduring a season of pain, a season of feeling lost. This can be a period of soul-crushing anguish, but it can also be one of the most precious seasons of your life.
John Keats said that we live in a mansion of many apartments. When we’re on the first mountain, we’re living in what Keats called the “thoughtless chamber.” This is the default chamber; we just unthinkingly absorb the values and ways of life that happen to be around us.
We want to stay in this chamber. It’s comfortable, and everybody nods at you with approval. In The Age of Anxiety, W. H. Auden wrote,
We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
Seasons of suffering kick us in the ass. They are the foghorns that blast us out of our complacency and warn us we are heading for the wrong life.
There’s nothing intrinsically noble about suffering. Sometimes grief is just grief, to be gotten through. Many bad things happen in life, and it’s a mistake to try to sentimentalize these moments away by saying that they must be happening to serve some higher