Sometimes tribalism leads to the loss of gains from trade, so reality will down-regulate it. At other times it leads to gains through coalitionally resource capture. When the latter is occurring, greater ‘mental health’, in a biological sense, will lead to increased tribalism. We can use ‘mental health’ as a euphemism for ‘being autistic’ but doing so won’t change fitness gradients. If tribalism was actually unhealthy, it would be lost by evolution like any other complex adaptation.
If we want less tribalism, or simply more gains from trade, the thing to do is almost certainly to empower less tribal people to understand it better so as to better defend themselves from it via non-tribal patterns of affiliation, which is impossible by definition if you use tribalism as a synonym for coalitional politics. Can we do better?
Sometimes tribalism leads to the loss of gains from trade, so reality will down-regulate it. At other times it leads to gains through coalitionally resource capture. When the latter is occurring, greater ‘mental health’, in a biological sense, will lead to increased tribalism. We can use ‘mental health’ as a euphemism for ‘being autistic’ but doing so won’t change fitness gradients. If tribalism was actually unhealthy, it would be lost by evolution like any other complex adaptation.
If we want less tribalism, or simply more gains from trade, the thing to do is almost certainly to empower less tribal people to understand it better so as to better defend themselves from it via non-tribal patterns of affiliation, which is impossible by definition if you use tribalism as a synonym for coalitional politics. Can we do better?