The Man Who Belongs to No Tribe

We live in the age of alliances. Everybody is part of one group or another, and everyone classifies the others as belonging to some camp. You are seen as either with them or against them — never the neutral. The centrist, the uncommitted one, gets punished brutally, labelled by both sides as wicked. At the broadest level as well as the most intimate, humans are tribal by nature. They find their tribe everywhere. They adopt the same views, hold the same opinions, and despise the same kind of people. You can see this playing out wherever large groups of people gather. Everything eventually collapses into tribalism. They are all waging quiet wars against one another. The one standing in the center is often punished most severely, because the one who belongs to no tribe is resented by all tribes. Each side assumes he belongs to the other — that he is a trojan horse — but in truth he is nobody's anything. People have lost the art of existing without belonging. Some are intellectual…