Tribalism
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This article is part of the Basic Course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics-> Module 1: Required foundational topics
Last updated: 2026-07-24
Definition
Tribalism is the tendency of human beings to identify strongly with a group (the “tribe”) and to prioritize its interests, norms, and loyalties above other considerations, such as truth, individual justice, or the broader common interest. It is a concrete and archaic manifestation of collectivism.
Evolutionary and anthropological origin
It comes from our history as a species. During most of human existence (hunter-gatherers), we lived in small groups of tens or hundreds of people where everyone knew each other.
In that context, survival depended on internal unity, loyalty to the group, and distrust of strangers. This generated deep psychological instincts:
- Favoritism toward members of one’s own group (“in-group”).
- Suspicion or hostility toward those outside (“out-group”).
- Tendency to adopt the group’s beliefs and norms even when they contradict the evidence.
These patterns are well documented in social psychology (Tajfel’s social identity theory) and in evolutionary psychology.
Our psychology is adapted to that: we easily detect “us vs them,” we respond with tribal loyalty, and we have biases of in-group favoritism (“toward the inside of the group”). This is basic evolutionary biology (kin selection + reciprocity).
The problem is that civilization requires overcoming those limits through institutions that generate abstract trust (defensible private property, enforceable contracts, neutral money, impersonal rules). Tribalism does not allow us to improve as a species.
During 99% of the evolutionary history of human beings (the Paleolithic), human beings lived in small nomadic tribes of hunter-gatherers. In that ancestral environment, survival was governed by very specific biological conditions:
Zero-sum economy:
- Montaigne’s Theorem or Fallacy assumes that trade is a latent conflict where an actor can only enrich themselves at the cost of impoverishing their neighbor. There are no transactions in which both gain; what one gains the other loses. (This is zero-sum.)
- If a tribe consumed the fruit of a tree or hunted a mammoth, those resources immediately became unavailable to a rival tribe.
- One group’s gain literally meant the other’s loss.
Primitive cognitive mechanism:
- The human brain evolved shaped by pressures of absolute natural scarcity and violent conflict.
- This fixed a tribal cognitive “software” characterized by hyperlocal and obligatory altruism toward the in-group (the tribe), combined with radical and defensive hostility toward the out-group (strangers).
The emergence of the Extended Order:
- As Friedrich Hayek explained, the passage from primitive barbarism to advanced civilization (what he called the Extended Order) consisted precisely in neutralizing and transcending these collectivist tribal instincts through the spontaneous development of abstract norms: unrestricted respect for private property and contractual freedom.
Tribalism in modern society
Although we no longer live in small tribes, those instincts persist and are easily activated in larger contexts:
- Politics: Almost religious loyalty to a party, ideology, or leader, where one’s own side is defended even when it commits evident errors and the opponent is demonized.
- Identitarianism: When race, gender, nation, religion, or class identity becomes more important than the individual or than universal principles.
- Social networks and media: Algorithms that reinforce bubbles where everyone thinks alike, amplifying the sense of “us against them.”
- Sports, firms, or subcultures: Phenomena of fan culture or “corporate culture” that generate the same type of irrational loyalty.
Hayek’s perspective and the extended order
From the liberal tradition and especially from Friedrich Hayek (in The Fatal Conceit), tribalism has a deeper and more dangerous explanation.
Hayek distinguishes between two types of social order:
The tribal order (or small-group order):
Concrete, personal rules, based on loyalty, obligatory solidarity, and sharing according to merit as perceived by the group. It works in face-to-face communities.
The extended order (or market-society order):
Abstract and impersonal rules (private property, contracts, rule of law, prices) that allow peaceful cooperation among millions of people who will never know each other.
The problem, according to Hayek, is that tribal instincts are atavistic (remnants of our evolution). When we try to apply tribal morality (demanding “social justice” within large groups, treating the State as a great tribe that must distribute according to the group’s moral criteria, etc.) to the extended order, we destroy the mechanisms that allow complex societies to function and prosper.
Modern tribalism is one of the main forces that push toward collectivism, because it prioritizes group loyalty above the impersonal rules that protect individual liberty.
Main consequences
- Polarization: It hinders rational dialogue and compromise.
- Collective irrationality: People defend the group’s positions even when they are false or counterproductive.
- Reduction of cooperation: When tribal identity dominates, it becomes harder to collaborate with those who do not belong to the group.
- Authoritarian risk: The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century very efficiently exploited these tribal instincts (nation, class, race).
Mises’s Law of Association
The tribal dynamic, by basing itself on mutual suspicion and rigid collective identities, reactivates Montaigne’s fallacy, which assumes that trade is a latent conflict where an actor can only enrich themselves at the cost of impoverishing their neighbor.
This justifies measures such as customs protectionism, expropriations, or price controls, which destroy market signals.
The individualist dynamic (Mises’s Law of Association):
- The market economy, grounded in individual liberty, operates through a revolutionary evolutionary cultural leap.
- Building on the law of comparative advantage, Mises scientifically demonstrated that the interindividual division of labor allows two complete strangers (who in the Paleolithic would have killed each other in Darwinian fashion) to cooperate peacefully.
- Voluntary exchange transmutes Paleolithic conflict into a positive-sum game where both parties increase their marginal utility voluntarily, turning diversity and inequality of individual capacities into the greatest engine of civilizational peace and prosperity.
This article is part of the Basic Course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics-> Module 1: Required foundational topics
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Last updated: 2026-07-24
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