The Root Cause Of All Violence
Op-Ed by Albert Geokgeuzian, Staff Writer
January 10th, 2021
First we need to understand what tribalism is and why it’s important for humans. Tribalism is the grouping of people based on shared interests, lifestyle, and habits. For early humans, this was extremely important because us humans are terrible at living on our own, we need friends, people around us, a society to survive.
Tribalism is still important to this day, and it is easier than ever to find people similar to us that we can form social groups with due to social networks. Tribalism exists within social media application and with those on the outside; for example, if your favorite social media app is twitter and you spend extensive time on there, you’ll probably see posts saying how twitter is the best app, you’ll see the same on instagram on instagram and so on.
What this tribalism has done is lead us down a path of radicalized opinions and belief, research has shown that discussions among people of similar opinions leads to a radicalization; for example, if two people are anti-vaxxers then they could share ideas into why vaccines are just a way for the deep state to put the devil’s blood in you (that’s not what happens). The ease at which social media allows us to interact with individuals of our own mindsets and, at the same time, the ease at which we can ignore those who disagree with us has made us all more extreme.
That’s not all that social media has done to us, we are angrier than ever before and it has all encouraged us to fall back on our primitive tendencies; Tribalism.
We are at a stage as a society where we are more polarized than ever, the angrier the rhetoric is used in a post, the easier it is to garner attention, and as such gain a following; it might even win you a presidency. Tribalism leads to each group being cut off from the other, causing “tribes” where we ostracize those who disagree with us. These disagreements always existed, within families or neighborhoods or the like but shutting them up was harder because of the difficulty in making someone you’re going to see again shut up when you’re face to face.
We especially turn to tribalism when we are scared, this leads us into a spiral where we only listen to individuals from our group, further radicalizing opinions and beliefs.
And that right there is the root cause of all violence, the dichotomy of “us versus them”, it might seem simple but it’s true, and you’ve probably seen tribal mentality in action before. If you’ve ever witnessed a sporting event, or if you follow a sports team yourself, you are in a group. Most supporters of sports teams aren’t violent, but they can be, as we have seen multiple times throughout history.
As such anything can be violent, it doesn’t matter what it is because we all have this basic mentality, that’s the way we are wired; so is that it? Are we bound to forever live in a world where people are angry towards the “other”?
Like a lot of things, it depends. It depends on how you and me, how everyone acts. When you see someone of a different background, sect, opinion, our initial instinct is to change their stance. How we do it is the most important thing, we can’t hate on the “other”, that won’t get us anywhere. It is better for everyone that we are compassionate, that instead of trying to tear down the “other” we try to make them included in the “us”.
It is unbelievable what we can achieve as a society if we see everyone as an “us”, think of the biggest thing that happened in 2020; COVID-19. Almost the entire world saw the virus as the “other” and as such we tried all that we could to improve our defense against the “other”, and one of the consequences was the fastest developed vaccine in history.
Yes, everything has the potential to be violent; but it is still dependent upon us, how we act. How we act towards others is the most important factor when it comes to a better world. Those who need compassion the most are those who deserve it the least, when they least deserve it, from the people they least deserve it from.