Every tribe that has ever existed was built on top of something it did not build.
Think about the tribes you belong to. You may be American or Nigerian or Brazilian or Chinese. You may be Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or secular. You may be conservative or progressive, urban or rural, working class or professional. You may belong to a nation, a religion, a political movement, an ethnic community, a regional culture — or several of these at once.
Each of those identities is real. Each was built — through history, through shared experience, through stories told and retold across generations. Each matters to the people who carry it. None of that is in question.
What is in question is this: what is the source that all of those identities grew out of?
The answer is the same in every case. They were all built upon a shared biological core—a foundation that none of them created and none of them own. It is a reality that was present before any tribe existed and will remain long after they have all changed beyond recognition.
This core is the human genome—the 99.9% identical genetic code that all 8 billion of us carry deep within every cell.
The foundation was never absent
This is the thing that most needs to be understood.
The foundation was not created by the science that discovered it. It was not constructed by any movement, any philosophy, any religion, or any political system. It was there before all of them. It is older than every tribe, every nation, every civilization that has ever existed.
When Linnaeus was classifying humans into racial categories in the 18th century, the foundation was there. When empires were being built on the fiction of biological hierarchy, the foundation was there. When wars were being fought over religious, national, and ethnic differences, the foundation was there — in the bodies of every soldier on every side, identical at the cellular core that actually determines what kind of creature a human being is.
What tribes are — and what they are not
A tribe is a community of belonging. It is a group of people who share something — a history, a faith, a language, a set of values, a piece of ground — and who recognize each other as part of the same story.
Tribes are not errors. They are not failures of evolution or signs of moral weakness. They are the natural expression of a social species finding community and meaning at the scale at which community and meaning can actually be felt.
The problem is not that tribes exist. The problem is what happens when a tribe mistakes itself for the foundation — when it treats its particular story as the entirety of human reality, rather than as one of billions of expressions of the 99.9% shared core that all people carry.
That mistake has consequences. When a tribe believes its members are a fundamentally different kind of human from the members of other tribes, it has made a claim that biology directly contradicts. And acting on that false claim produces the predictable results of building on a false foundation: instability, injustice, and the constant expenditure of energy defending a fiction.
What recognition changes
Recognizing the foundation does not dissolve the tribes. It relocates them.
A person who looks inward and recognizes the biological core beneath their tribal identity does not stop being who they are. They stop being only who they are in the narrow sense. They add a layer of understanding that was always true but previously invisible: that the community they belong to is, at its deepest level, the human community — and that every other tribe they have ever encountered was built on the same ground.
This changes things. Not overnight. Not without difficulty. But it changes the nature of disagreement, because it becomes disagreement between people who share a foundation rather than disagreement between people who believe themselves to be different kinds of beings.
It changes the nature of conflict, because conflict between members of the same family — however fierce — carries within it the possibility of resolution in a way that conflict between imagined strangers does not.