In my previous blog entry, I described the “tribalistic mindset” and showed that it is the “anti-conceptual mindset”. I also opined that the possible reason for this uptick in discussion of the concept of “tribalism” was due to the election of Donald Trump. Commentators on the left seem to have seized on the idea to explain his rise, and also seem to be blaming Trump for what they see as more “tribalism” in our society and political system.
However, if we are going point fingers at politicians, then we need to take a look at Trump’s predecessor. The Obama administration fanned the forces of tribalism like no other President, and he severely damaged race-relations in the United States.
The intellectual groundwork of the Obama administration’s facilitation of tribalism lies in key aspects of the leftist ideology.
First, most leftists admire or tend to follow the ideas of Karl Marx. So, his ideas on the nature of the human mind, logic, and reason are important in understanding how leftist thinking tends to encourage the anti-conceptual, tribal mindset.
The Marxist epistemology is “polylogist”. (http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/polylogism.html). He thought your class determines your consciousness. For Marx, what class you are born into determines your logic, which is unique and distinct from other classes. The proletarians have their method of thinking, the bourgeoisie have theirs, the aristocracy theirs, etc. For Marx, there could be no reasoning with those who control the factors of production, because they fundamentally don’t think like proletarians. Only violence could bring about socialism. You couldn’t reason with members of the bourgeoisie any more than you could reason with a species of lower animal. (See my previous blog post for more on this: https://deancook.net/2018/08/16/karl-marx-polylogism-and-utopian-socialism-how-fundamental-philosophy-drives-history/ )
Marxist polylogism is not very different from those who believe that your race determines your method of thinking, and that other races fundamentally cannot understand you. An example of racial polylogism can be seen in an article discussing how the author believes a policy of “colorblindness”, i.e. *not* treating people differently because of their race is morally bad:
“Colorblindness creates a society that denies their negative racial experiences, rejects their cultural heritage, and invalidates their unique perspectives.” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culturally-speaking/201112/colorblind-ideology-is-form-racism)
Note how the author of this article focuses on “cultural heritage” (i.e., tribalism), and how black people have “unique perspectives…”, thereby giving the article a distinct whiff of racial polylogism. (But, that’s apparently okay when the author is black.)
Marxism appears to have either “set the seeds” for racial polylogism, or it has the same philosophic basis as racial polylogism.
According to Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff, the ideas of Marx were an outgrowth of the ideas of the philosophy of Hegel, who was in turn the intellectual progeny of Immanuel Kant. I haven’t studied Marx, Hegel, or Kant enough to know if this assertion is correct. (I take nothing on faith, even when Ayn Rand or Leonard Peikoff said it.) I note it here as a possible “lead” on the “philosophic roots” of the ideas of Marx and how those same ideas also led to racial polylogism:
“There are two different kinds of subjectivism, distinguished by their answers to the question: whose consciousness creates reality? Kant rejected the older of these two, which was the view that each man’s feelings create a private universe for him. Instead, Kant ushered in the era of social subjectivism—the view that it is not the consciousness of individuals, but of groups, that creates reality. In Kant’s system, mankind as a whole is the decisive group; what creates the phenomenal world is not the idiosyncrasies of particular individuals, but the mental structure common to all men.
Later philosophers accepted Kant’s fundamental approach, but carried it a step further. If, many claimed, the mind’s structure is a brute given, which cannot be explained—as Kant had said—then there is no reason why all men should have the same mental structure. There is no reason why mankind should not be splintered into competing groups, each defined by its own distinctive type of consciousness, each vying with the others to capture and control reality.
The first world movement thus to pluralize the Kantian position was Marxism, which propounded a social subjectivism in terms of competing economic classes. On this issue, as on many others, the Nazis follow the Marxists, but substitute race for class.” (_The Ominous Parallels_ Leonard Peikoff, http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/kant,_immanuel.html)
The second aspect of the leftist mindset that tends to foster tribalistic thinking is modern philosophy’s rejection of reason. This modern rejection is summed up in an Encyclopedia Britannica article:
“As indicated in the preceding section, many of the characteristic doctrines of postmodernism constitute or imply some form of metaphysical, epistemological, or ethical relativism. (It should be noted, however, that some postmodernists vehemently reject the relativist label.) Postmodernists deny that there are aspects of reality that are objective; that there are statements about reality that are objectively true or false; that it is possible to have knowledge of such statements (objective knowledge); that it is possible for human beings to know some things with certainty; and that there are objective, or absolute, moral values. Reality, knowledge, and value are constructed by discourses; hence they can vary with them. This means that the discourse of modern science, when considered apart from the evidential standards internal to it, has no greater purchase on the truth than do alternative perspectives, including (for example) astrology and witchcraft. Postmodernists sometimes characterize the evidential standards of science, including the use of reason and logic, as ‘Enlightenment rationality.‘” https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy (Accessed on 12-15-2018)
As a result, post-modern intellectuals tend to believe that reason is nothing more than a “tool of oppression” over the non-white races:
“A philosophy and religion professor at Syracuse University gave an interview to The New York Times Thursday in which he critiqued the notion of pure reason as simply being a ‘white male Euro-Christian construction.’” (https://dailycaller.com/2015/07/03/professor-reason-itself-is-a-white-male-construct/)
I’d note that this attitude about reason serves as great “psychological cover” for a leftist because any time they loose a debate, they can just say your logic, evidence, and reason is nothing more than a “tool of oppression” by the “white, male, heterosexual patriarchy”, and disregard it.
The third intellectual basis of leftism that tends to promote tribalism is its promotion of collectivism. It is a core tenant of leftism that groups are more important than individuals. Quoting from the Encyclopedia Britannica Article on “Collectivism”:
“The earliest modern, influential expression of collectivist ideas in the West is in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du contrat social, of 1762 (see social contract), in which it is argued that the individual finds his true being and freedom only in submission to the “general will” of the community. In the early 19th century the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel argued that the individual realizes his true being and freedom only in unqualified submission to the laws and institutions of the nation-state, which to Hegel was the highest embodiment of social morality. Karl Marx later provided the most succinct statement of the collectivist view of the primacy of social interaction in the preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: ‘It is not men’s consciousness,’ he wrote, ‘which determines their being, but their social being which determines their consciousness.’
Collectivism has found varying degrees of expression in the 20th century in such movements as socialism, communism, and fascism.”(https://www.britannica.com/topic/collectivism , last accessed on 12-16-2018, emphasis added.)
For Marx, the father of modern collectivism, it was not (individual) men’s consciousness which determines their “being”, but their “social being”, which determines their consciousness. In other words, the individual is nothing, and the group, the collective, is all.
These systems of thought held by the Obama administration, the modern rejection of reason and the promotion of collectivism, create the proper “psychological attitude” for tribalistic thinking to flourish. This is because if reason is impotent, and if service to the group is considered as all-important, then an individual will consider his mind incapable of choosing what group he should serve. He’ll simply seek to join a group based on concretes like the fact that they look like him and talk like him:
“Now what are the nature and the causes of modern tribalism? Philosophically, tribalism is the product of irrationalism and collectivism. It is a logical consequence of modern philosophy. If men accept the notion that reason is not valid, what is to guide them and how are they to live? Obviously, they will seek to join some group -any group- which claims the ability to lead them and to provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of unspecified means. If men accept the notion that the individual is helpless, intellectually and morally, that he has no mind and no rights, that he is nothing, but the group is all, and his only moral significance lies in selfless service to the group -they will be pulled obediently to join a group. But which group? Well, if you believe that you have no mind and no moral value, you cannot have the confidence to make choices -so the only thing for you to do is to join an unchosen group, the group into which you were born, the group to which you were predestined to belong by the sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient power of your body chemistry.
This is, of course, racism. But, if your group is small enough, it will not be called “racism”: it will be called ’ethnicity’” (“Global Balkanization”, Ayn Rand, _The Voice of Reason_, https://www.amazon.com/Voice-Reason-Objectivist-Thought-Library-ebook/dp/B002OSXD7I/)
As we have seen, the philosophic roots of the Obama administration’s facilitation of tribalism lie in the ideas of mostly dead, white male philosophers, like Karl Marx. However, many previous leftist presidents have ascribed to similar philosophies. The Obama administration went further and actively promoted tribalism.
This promotion of tribalism started even before Barack Obama was President, although it has only become common knowledge in recent months, because the news media actively suppressed the information. In January of 2018, a photo surfaced showing a then-Senator Obama smiling and posing with Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. (http://www.tampabay.com/news/nation/Decade-old-photo-of-Obama-with-Louis-Farrakhan-surfaces_164857663) (Farrakhan is a tribal mentality through and through. I recommend doing an Internet search and reading some of the things he has written and said if you are unfamiliar.)
This photo was taken during a 2005 Congressional Black Caucus meeting with Farrakhan on Capitol Hill, which demonstrates where the loyalties of the entire Congressional “Black Caucus” lie.
If this photo had come out prior to the Presidential election of 2008, it is opined that Obama would not have been elected. The photo is the moral equivalent to a white Presidential candidate posing and smiling with the leader of Aryan Nations. (http://insider.foxnews.com/2018/01/27/obama-farrakhan-photo-dershowitz-says-he-would-not-support-him-if-he-knew-about-picture)
Obama managed to hide his promotion of tribalism pretty well until a later event in 2012. This was the shooting of a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, by George Zimmerman, a homeowner living in Florida. (Zimmerman was subsequently acquitted at trial.)
Obama chose to inject himself into a purely local matter of criminal law. (http://whitehouse.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/23/president-obama-statement-on-trayvon-martin-case/) He aided and abetted the news media in doing its best to ensure that George Zimmerman wouldn’t get a fair trial.
But, more than that, Obama made a statement that I think did more damage to race relations than possibly anything else he said before or since. When commenting on the shooting, Obama noted:
“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” (https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-had-son-hed-look-trayvon-171805699.html)
This was like saying: “I am with black people because you look like me. I’m not the President of the United States, who serves abstract, and important, concepts like justice, rights, and the rule of law. I am the mouthpiece of a racial pressure group, and I will do everything I can to promote that racial group’s ‘collective good’, at the expense of the individual rights of people who don’t belong to that racial group.”
Why did Obama do this? Probably because:
“The case resonates with many black Americans, a key voting group during Obama’s 2008 election, who see it as an example of bias toward blacks.” (https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-had-son-hed-look-trayvon-171805699.html)
I suspect so many black Americans were convinced George Zimmerman was guilty because many of them hold the tribal premise to some greater or lesser degree, although I obviously don’t have statistics to back that up. I’m not sure how one would even measure “tribalistic impulse” of a particular group of people, but I would like to see such a study. I suspect the results on the level of “tribalistic impulse” of American blacks, compared to American whites or Asians, would be stunningly high.
I believe Obama thought he had to say “If I have a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” to appease black Americans, but it was more than appeasement. It was active endorsement and promotion of the tribalistic impulse. It was encouragement to unleash some of the worst tendencies amongst some black Americans.
This pandering by Obama gave aid and comfort to the group known as “Black Lives Matter”, a group that always assumes if a white cop shoots a black man, then the shooting was unjust. For instance, when Michael Brown was shot by Officer Darren Wilson in Missouri, it was determined by the United States Department of Justice that Officer Wilson did nothing wrong:
“Based on this investigation, the Department has concluded that Darren Wilson’s actions do not constitute prosecutable violations under the applicable federal criminal civil rights statute, 18 U.S.C. § 242, which prohibits uses of deadly force that are “objectively unreasonable,” as defined by the United States Supreme Court. The evidence, when viewed as a whole, does not support the conclusion that Wilson’s uses of deadly force were “objectively unreasonable” under the Supreme Court’s definition. Accordingly, under the governing federal law and relevant standards set forth in the USAM, it is not appropriate to present this matter to a federal grand jury for indictment, and it should therefore be closed without prosecution.” (https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/doj_report_on_shooting_of_michael_brown_1.pdf)
Despite that, there was a rush to judgment by what the media portrays as the “black leadership”. Jessie Jackson called it a “Crime of Injustice”. Al Sharpton, another tribalist, also shilled for Michael Brown in the face of the facts. (https://www.businessinsider.com/al-sharpton-denounces-darren-wilsons-excuse-michael-brown)
Always taking the side of a black person over a white person, without knowing any of the facts, demonstrates that the slogan “Black Lives Matters” is nothing but a statement of tribalism by the “black leadership”. (The notion of a “black leadership” is tribalism too, but the news media seems to believe Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton speak for black people, so that is how I refer to them.)
Despite the tendency of “Black Lives Matter” to always take the side of a black man, even when the facts didn’t support it, Obama expressed solidarity with the “Black Lives Matter” movement, and even went so far as to accuse police of widespread racial discrimination himself:
“’As a young man, there were times when I was driving and I got stopped and I didn’t know why,’ he [Obama] said.” (https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/257811-obama-defends-black-lives-matter)
I don’t think Barack Obama is, himself a tribalist, but I think his philosophy, ideology, and method of thinking drives him to pander to those who *are* tribalists. Another example of that pandering could be seen when it came to Obama’s policies on immigration.
When it comes to issues of immigration policy, Obama supported open borders, which I, more or less, also support. I believe that policy is consistent with freedom and free markets. (https://ari.aynrand.org/blog/2017/02/07/ayn-rand-on-immigration) But, Obama didn’t support the policy because he’s committed to Capitalism. He supported it because of the need to appeal to Hispanic voters, who, to the extent they are concerned about open borders, are likely concerned out of feelings of tribalism, rather than concepts of justice, freedom of movement, and the free market. This tribalism is why you will see people flying Mexican flags at pro-immigration rallies in the United States:
“‘Native-born Americans suspect that it is they, and not the immigrant, who are being forced to adapt’ to social changes caused by migration, he [Obama] said….’When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment…’ (https://dailycaller.com/2014/11/16/shock-flashback-obama-says-illegal-immigration-hurts-blue-collar-americans-strains-welfare-video/
Flying Mexican flags at pro-immigration rallies shows that, rather than being primarily about the abstract concepts of freedom and free markets, most of the “pro-immigration” sentiment of the Democratic Party is an expression of “Latin-American nationalism”, i.e., tribalism. They care less about the abstract concept of freedom of immigration than they do about ensuring that members of their racial and ethnic group can come and go as they please, into and out of, the United States. Would the “Hispanic leadership” in the Democratic Party care so much about immigration if most of the immigrants were German, or Chinese? (I doubt it.) Obama’s policies on immigration were another appeal to a tribalistic pressure group, just like his support of “Black Lives Matter”.
The tribal mentality discards reason because he is, fundamentally, the anti-conceptual mentality. (https://deancook.net/2018/12/15/what-is-tribalism-it-is-the-anti-conceptual-mentality/) This means tribalists will be strongly tempted to use force and violence when dealing with others outside their own ethnic group because they have no other recourse:
“Warfare -permanent warfare- is the hallmark of tribal existence. A tribe -with its rules, dogmas, traditions, and arrested mental development- is not a productive organization. Tribes subsist on the edge of starvation, at the mercy of natural disasters, less successfully than herds of animals. War amongst other, momentarily luckier tribes, in the hope of looting some meager hoard, is their chronic emergency means of survival. The inculcation of hatred for other tribes is a necessary tool of tribal rulers, who need scapegoats to blame for the misery of their own subjects.
There is no tyranny worse than ethnic rule -since it is an unchosen serfdom one is asked to accept as a value, and since it applies primarily to one’s mind.” (“Global Balkanization, Ayn Rand, _The Voice of Reason_ https://www.amazon.com/Voice-Reason-Objectivist-Thought-Library-ebook/dp/B002OSXD7I/)
So, the consequences of Barack Obama’s pandering to the tribal mentalities in our country was predictable. Here are a few examples:
(1) Riots in Ferguson Missouri and elsewhere. (“Ferguson riots: Ruling sparks night of violence” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30190224)
(2) “Occupations” of College Campuses by leftist thugs.
A couple of these “occupations” have been memorable for their totalitarian tendencies. A journalism professor at the University of Missouri was so enamored with the little totalitarian “no go zone” she and other campus minority groups had created on campus, that she, and the brutes following her, sought to exclude journalists from the area. When one journalist defied her, she famously yelled out: “Who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here!”( https://www.yahoo.com/news/mizzou-professor-some-muscle-protests-resigns-143632236.html)
Deep down in this professor’s soul, and in the soul of every leftist academic, “muscle”, i.e., naked force, is what matters. This is because reason is an illusion to them, thanks to “post-modern thinking” and Marxism.
At Evergreen College in the Pacific Northwest, a college professor was forced to resign after he questioned the wisdom of asking white students to “voluntarily” leave the college campus for a day. ( https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/evergreen-professor-plans-to-sue-college-for-385-million/ )
Given the violent nature of the “anti-conceptual, tribalist mindset”, it won’t be long before the “voluntary” aspect of Evergreen’s “ethnic cleansing dry-run” is dropped in favor of the use of force.
But, the riots and the “college occupations” at least had the virtue of not leading to the loss of human life. The bloody climax of the Obama administration’s race policy was seen in my hometown of Dallas, Texas. In July of 2016, a sniper shot twelve white police officers, specifically because they were white, in what was described as the deadliest day for law enforcement officers since the September 11 attacks in 2001. (https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2016/07/07/shots-fired-during-downtown-dallas-protests/ )
Ultimately, I believe that much of our recent history has been driven by mostly dead, white, male philosophers, like Karl Marx. However, if we are going to start looking at political and social “conduits” for the philosophy driving tribalism, then our 44th President was one such conduit. If we’re going to point fingers at politicians for the uptick in tribalism in America, then we need to start with the villainous Presidency of Barack H. Obama.
