Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind

The ability to manipulate a variety of flexible symbols into simple, inflexible “Us-Them” emotions is uniquely human and a reason we dominate the planet. It allows us to form large organizations like nations, cities, and corporations around a shared culture of music, fashion, art, food, and other preferences. Symbolic indicators inform us strangers share our culture and permit interaction like no other animal, which allows us to build societies. Humans can connect any relevant material to a human-kind feeling: physical appearance in fashion; touch in the sense proprioception, which tells us where in space our body and limbs are; most strongly in taste, which transmits cultural information through food. People justify dietary restrictions for a variety of reasons—health, religion, ethical—but really “they’re an appeal to human-kind emotions […] a web of associations that people learned as children: whatever is part of our way feels good, true, and beautiful. Not because it is, but because it’s ours” (228). Food represents social class, gender, region, generation, religion, ideology, and almost every other human kind. Mental codes for food preference originated to prevent poisoning and illness, but mental circuits altered the meaning to moralize food preference: “[I]nstead of being disgusted by bad food, we can be disgusted by bad actions” (229).