What Tribe Do You Want To Belong To – and Why?

There’s a widespread understanding of – and sympathy for – people’s desire to change their social class. What is less well understood is that, to the side of this, there are often very powerful instincts in us to gain access to specific and more localised ‘tribes’.

Beneath the three large, familiar economic classes, we can speak of multiple groupings bound together by interests, proclivities and values, to which we can lend the term tribes. For example, in any given society, we might identify some of the following: the tribe of sporty people who go fell-walking and weightlifting and are interested in vitamin supplements and lycra; the tribe of the posh country set, who might be called Rupert and Serena, and who enjoy horse racing and skiing; the tribe of the intellectuals, who read Nietzsche and Lacan and discuss articles in The New York Review of Books and N+1; the tribe of the communists and the vegans, the allotment growers and the environmentalists; the arty crowd and the music crowd; the fashion crowd and the video games tribe. And so on.

One of the relative mysteries in all this is what drives people’s aspirations to join a specific tribe. It’s simple enough to see why one might want more money, but why do some people, in addition, want so deeply to belong to one tribe rather than another? And, in particular, what drives a longing to shift away from the tribe of one’s origins?

One interpretation is that we seek to change tribes as a defence against the deprivations and sufferings we experienced in the tribes of our childhoods. People often seek to move tribes when their early years denied them the attuned that care every child longs for – when mother (who might have been a tribal aristocrat or a socialist, a mountain climber or scientist) lacked warmth, and father (who might have belonged to the liberal politics tribe or the deep-sea diving tribe) was oppressive or violent, always busy or keener on a sibling. To try to shift tribes is a response to a lack of love – and an expression of a longing finally to belong. In such cases, people don’t only want to move away from their parents, they’re also trying to move away from their parents’ worlds and values. They interpret a shift in tribe as a way of compensating for the emotional care they were denied and of seeking revenge on a brutal, chaotic or neglectful past. There can be real redemption – and quite a bit of fun – to be had in upsetting a parent by one day being able to wave around the signs of membership of a new tribe they would be appalled by. 

We can imagine no end of moves across tribes that obey such a pattern. Let’s picture – for example – a woman, let’s call her Arabella, who grows up in a Catholic aristocratic tribe in rural England, and who then – after university – decides to go to Varanasi in India, throws away her demure clothes and faith and studies under Swami Ananda Giri, seeking in her new tribe a corrective to the snobbery and coldness of her early years. Her parents, Lord and Lady R., might be gratifyingly horrified.

Or imagine Peter, who grows up with highly intellectual parents (both might have PhD’s) from an academic tribe. But they might seem lost, unable to take care of themselves, and lacking practical ability and groundedness. So when he grows up, Peter might want to join the tribe of the manual workers: the carpenters and boat builders, people who stay close to elementally nourishing and essential things, and who might go sailing on the weekend and camping on holiday.

Contrast this with another young person, Roisin, who grows up on a hard housing estate as the child of highly ideological left-wing parents. There are gangs and knifings outside the home, and inside, the atmosphere is brittle and joyless; one is meant to take pride in deprivation and see virtue in having no space and no money. When she finishes her studies, what Roisin yearns for more than anything is to join a so-called respectable middle class right-wing tribe, in which people are lawyers and bankers who throw dinner parties at which the talk is of share prices and private schools.

In all these very different scenarios, the tribe emerges as a fantasised solution to the emotional deprivations of childhood. The tribe of origin might not have been a problem if there had been love; but as there wasn’t, the dream is that a new tribe – the high church tribe or the techno ravers, the anarchists or the houseboat dwellers – will appease the yearning, isolation and sadness. 

Often, the tribal shift doesn’t quite work. The Indian guru doesn’t solve the pain; nor do the raves or the dinner parties. The parents don’t care, or their hurt doesn’t offer much long-term recompense. In time (it may swallow a decade or more), one realises that the new tribe can’t fix things – because it was never really the tribe of origin that wounded one: it was only really the particular attitudes and behaviours of the parents where the problem lay, and where the mourning and focus need to take place.

Understanding the dynamics of one’s tribal yearnings in this more psychological way may save us valuable time. It can spare us the need to waste years chasing a tribe that wouldn’t properly solve our distress even if we gained access to it. It can leave us free to choose romantic partners without reference to tribal restrictions. It can allow us to mourn the parental love that was not given to us – and then go on to forge a more independent and more original, less hidebound and less provincial, way of living.