You do not live as an individual and a…

Page 206 You do not live as an individual and a desert. Do you live in tribes. And that tribal allegiance, that tribal impulse, leads on the one hand to great consolation, but also to the kind of havoc we are seeing now.

— from Takeoff Into Chaos · Becoming wise by Krista Tippett

In the book

Accept, too, that there is no clean escape, only trades: as Thomas Sowell said, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Even our belonging cuts both ways — the tribal allegiance that gives us our deepest consolation in the storm is the very same impulse that, turned outward, produces havoc. A clear-eyed pilot holds all of that at once: the world is not ending, and also it is genuinely dangerous, and both facts are reasons to fly with steady hands rather than clenched ones. — Takeoff Into Chaos

And often the root of it is not the other person at all but our own self-contempt; as one honest soul asked, how could I expect anyone else to bear my company, when I could hardly stand my own? You cannot give from an empty well, and you cannot truly connect with others while you are at war with yourself. There is a wider turbulence, too, the one that scales up from friendship to society: the tribal impulse. We do not live as lone individuals in a desert; we live in tribes, and that belonging is a deep human good — but the very same impulse curls, all too easily, into us-against-them. Worse, simply getting to know one member of an out-group can backfire, marking them in our minds as the exception rather than softening the whole. — Friends, Community & Society (Relationships/Community/Society)

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