Random House Books for Young Readers Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations

A must read. Very east to understand language. As per the title I thought this book is about the psychology of why people try to belong in groups or tribes, but it's not about it. Instead it beautifully debate about why American foreign policies failed in countries like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Venezuela. Book try to state that The ignorance of Americans toward the tribal structure of these countries lead to their failure in foreign policies.

An eminently readable book which although written very much from an American perspective, has insights which are far more than just exclusively American. Although the book advances an analysis based on the tribal divisions in society it backs this up with some convincing examples where lack of tribal awareness has led to some disastrous foreign interventions by the USA.In summary the book is based on a number of assertions which run through the storyline of the entire book.1. The human race is psychologically adapted to acting in tribes.“Insanity In individuals is something rare - but in groups it is the rule.” - Friedrich NietzscheThe impulse to form group identities and favour in-group members had a neurological basis. Experiments using fMRI to identify which sections of the brain “light up” when shown photos of rivals and team-mates suggest that our brains are hardwired to identify, value and individualise fellow in-group members. “Outgroup” members who do not belong to our group are processed as interchangeable members of a more general social category, making it easier to negatively stereotype them. Even more striking is that seeing other members of our own group prosper seems to activate our reward centres even if we receive no benefit ourselves. Under certain circumstances our brains’ reward centres will activate when we see members who do not belong to our group failing or suffering misfortune.The psychology of groups has even more far reaching effects. Groups not only shape who we are and what we do. They can also distort our perception of objective facts. The pressure to conform to group beliefs through a cascade of self-reinforcing social pressure results in false realities being accepted as true, while truth tellers are punished.An individual who acts together with others in a group acquires a sense of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would have kept under restraint.In the case of militants, bonding creates a bio-chemical high from a combination of the oxytocin and testosterone hormones. This spurs a greater tendency to demonise and de-humanise the out-group, and physiologically “anaesthetises” the empathy which might otherwise be felt.What is also evident is the tendency to self-delusion among more highly intelligent people. The smarter you are with numbers, the more likely you are to manipulate evidence to conform to your group’s core beliefs. The better informed people are, and the better educated, the more polarised they tend to be on politically controversial factual issues, and the more stubbornly they manipulate new facts to support their tribe’s world view.And so members of a group can publicly enforce a group consensus norm they do not actually agree with at an individual level. They can also lose restraints at an individual level and act as a group in ways that would have been intolerable as individuals.2. The second thread that runs throughout the book concerns the “market-dominant” minority. This is defined as an ethnic minority that tends, under market conditions, to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, the poor “indigenous” majority around them, generating enormous resentment among the majority, who see themselves as the rightful owners of the land under threat from “greedy” exploitative outsiders.Groups can be market dominant for very different reasons, some completely unrelated to economics, including colonial divide-and-conquer policies or a history of apartheid.In the context of a developing country with an impoverished majority and a market-dominant minority, ethnic resentment leads frequently to confiscation of the minority’s assets, looting, violence and often to ethnic cleansing. In these conditions, the pursuit of unfettered free-market policies increases the minority’s wealth, provoking yet more resentment and populist anger at the regime pursuing such policies.The author explores this idea of resentment much further into her analysis of the effect of group inequality, both actual and perceived.In the context of terrorism:Every major terrorist movement of the last decades arose in conditions of group inequality, group disempowerment, group humiliation, and group hatred. Poverty alone does not create terrorism. But when stark inequalities track deep, preexisting racial, ethnic, religious, or sectarian divides, then intense feelings of injustice, resentment, and frustration will be catalysed by the group psychology phenomena described in (1) above.And within Western communities:This idea of group resentment is also present in societies like America where every group (including working-class whites) feels attacked, pitted against other groups not just for jobs and spoils but for the right to define the nation’s identity.3. The third major thread which underpins the failure of America’s foreign interventions is Americans’ assumption of what works in America should work elsewhere. It is as follows:Market capitalism is the most efficient economic system the world has ever known. Democracy is the fairest political system, and the most respectful of individual liberty. Working hand in hand, markets and democracy can transform the world into a community of prosperous, peace-loving nation’s, and individuals into civic-minded citizens and consumers. In the process, ethnic hatred, religious zealotry, and other “backward” aspects of underdevelopment will be swept away.However, American and Western interventions have in the main resulted in proliferation of ethnic conflict, and genocides of magnitudes not seen since the Nazi Holocaust.The fundamental reason for these failures is the failure to see that democracy has ethnic, sectarian, and other group-dynamic ramifications. In many parts of the world, far from neutralising tribal hatred, democracy catalysed it. In countries with long pent up ethnic and religious divisions, especially where national identity is weak, rapid democratisation often galvanises group hatred. Poor majorities use their new political power to take revenge against resented minorities, while minorities, fearful of being targeted by the newly empowered majority, resort to violence of their own.4. The final thread explains why America has been blind to the significance of tribal politics in its foreign interventions.The author asserts that America’s distinctive history - its ethnicity-transcending national identity and its unusual success in assimilating people from diverse origins - has created the only country which is a super-group. This a group in which membership is open to individuals of any background but that at the same time bonds its members together with a strong, overarching, group-transcending collective identity. The author claims that, for instance, China, France and Great Britain for different reasons are not super-groups.This, according to the author, has shaped how the US sees the rest of the world and has deeply influenced its foreign policy. It’s not just ignorance, racism or arrogance that predisposes the US to ignore ethnic, sectarian, and tribal divisions in the countries where it intervenes. If immigrant communities from all sorts of background have become”Americans”, why shouldn’t Sunnis and Shias, Arabs and Kurds, all similarly become “Iraqis”?The book then describes why American interventions failed because of blindness to tribal divisions, and that even in America itself society is suffering from group identity crises.In Vietnam the major factor was the dominance of a Chinese minority not about Communism.In Afghanistan it is about Pashtuns versus the Tajiks and Uzbeks rather than just about radical Islam. And closely allied to this is the fact that Pashtuns in Pakistan still Identify themselves as Afghan and are viewed as a threat by Pakistan.In Iraq the US failed to understand the Sunni Shia divide and made the situation worse through de-Baathification.In Venezuela wealth was overwhelmingly concentrated in white hands while the country’s impoverished underclass consisted primarily of darker-skinned Venezuelans with more indigenous and African ancestry.In America itself there is a chasm between the tribal identities of the haves and the have-nots. Great swaths of the US have come to regard the “establishment” as foreign and threatening. Even though America’s poor are far less politically engaged, they are nevertheless intensely tribal, with deep feelings of patriotism, even if they feel they’re losing their country to distant elites who know nothing about them.And so we find there are a plethora of groups, some seemingly outrageous, within which America’s alienated poor find a sense of belonging and dignified self-image.Tribalism propelled Donald Trump to the White House. Inequality has driven a wedge between America’s whites. “Coastal elites” have become a kind of market-dominant minority from the point of view of America’s heartland, and this situation has produced a democratic backlash.Having asserted that America is a super-group, the author also asserts that the destructive, fracturing tribalism that is seizing American politics is putting America’s national identity in jeopardy. Many whites feel anxiety in today’s America, but blacks feel an existential threat that seems never to end. Muslim Americans also feel threatened in today’s US. Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant.And so Identity politics is gaining momentum, leading inevitably to ever-proliferating group identities demanding recognition. And in this maelstrom there is a war on “cultural appropriation” which is rooted in the belief that groups have exclusive rights to their own histories, symbols and traditions.This has ramifications for white Americans. For while black Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jewish Americans are allowed to feel solidarity and to take pride in their racial or ethnic identity, white Americans have been told they cannot.Many Americans just want to celebrate their country’s history and greatness without having to dredge up its racist past every single time. They are beginning to fear that when minorities become a majority in America, history books will be rewritten to depict America as a land of oppression, racism and imperialism.And so author ends on a pessimist note: we’re in a vicious circle. Is there any way out?To try and redress the balance by ending on a note of hope the author includes an epilogue.Although it is not apparent from the news there are signs of people trying to cross divides and break out of their political tribes. Face-to-face contact between members of different groups can dismantle prejudices and build common ground. But merely putting members of different groups in the same space is not enough and indeed can aggravate political tribalism. It is when people from different tribes see one another as human beings who at the end of the day want the same things - kindness, dignity, security - that hearts can change.The author ends the book with this exhortation: “What holds the United States together is the American Dream. But it must be a version of the dream that recognises past failure instead of denying it. Failures are part and parcel of the story line of a country founded on hope, a country where there’s always more to be done.Dreams are not real, but they can be made so.”

It's a very readable book, but sometimes a bit lightweight. I felt there was something missing and it never really left me feeling it concluded fully. She also makes unnecessary throwaway comments, pushing her liberal progressive beliefs, which I just found irritating.

A gift

Extremely well writtenVery logical and compelling conclusionsManages to very succinctly explain complex issues in an interesting and extremely readable wayA must read to dwell on how societies wor and to learn from past mistakesCan be applied outside of foreign policy