My plan is to add the material on this web page to a future edition of my book Genetic Enslavement: A Call to Arms for Individual Liberation (2004). It belongs in Chapter 16, "The Pull of Tribalism as a Global Civilization Crash Scenario." I will briefly review this chapter here, then present my new idea to explain why present-day people are naturally attracted differently to the Democratic and Republican political parties.

In Chapter 16 I argued that in the tribal setting artisans, communists and fascists are genetically predisposed to play specific roles. The artisan was the full-time tool maker, emphasizing tools in peace time and weapons in wartime. The present-day communists are descendants of tribemen who organized tribal activities during the peaceful interludes when it was safe to ignore the dangersof inter-tribal conflict. And present-day fascists are descendants of warrior tribesmen who took control of tribal activities during inter-tribal conflicts. Each of these three types of people have their role to play in tribal life, and the recurring existence of their niches allowed slight genetic mutations to produce some people predisposed for each role.

Underlying the past 4 million year historyof tibal conflict is the notion that there are two kinds of people: good people and bad people. Good people are fellow tribesmen, and bad people are everyone else. As Herbert Spencer describes it, fellow tribesmen should be treated with amity while neighboring tribesmen should be treated with enmity. This is the so-called "tribal mentality" that Sir Arthur Keith popularized.

As tribes coalesced into supertribes in order to better defend themselves, and to better attack neighboring tribes, there were many more faces to become familiar with. With several hundred tribal members instead of 50 to 100, it became more difficult to discern fellow tribesmen from the enemy. Just as people were trying to adjust to this challenge, supertribes started conquering neighboring supertribes, and something we call "nations" began to exist. How was an individual to deal with thousands of members of his "nation tribe" when many of them looked as different from him as the enemy was?

I suspect that in response to this challenge of categorizing people within an ever-growing tribal size it became common for people to unconsciously create a "circle of inclusion" from within the tribe, and that those within the circle would continue to be automatically treated using the old amity rules. Family members and known relatives were automatically included in this circle. Close neighbors and other people with whom there were regular associations were also included. Beyond this automatic circle there were differences in how people extended inclusion. There were also differences in how those not included in the "amity circle of inclusion" should be treated, even though they were technically members of the same tribe.

I shall now argue that people have inherited differences in their willingness to extend the benefits of "amity circles of inclusion" to strangers within their tribe. Those who were willing to extend inclusion liberally are now called "liberals." Those with more restrictive attitudes for inclusion are now called "conservatives." Many behaviors of Democrats and Republicans can be understood using this paradigm.

Let's begin with welfare. Liberals want to extend a helping hand to all members of the tribe (i.e., nation), whereas conservatives say that the individual and his family are respnsible for the person in need. I anticipate the objection that conservatives promote "faith-based" methods for helping the needy, as this appears to contradict my argument. However, a person's church is merely a formal embodiment of an "amity circle of inclusion." (Indeed, an argument could be made for the origin of religion being rooted in the struggle to form "amity circles of inclusion" after the creation of large supertribes. I'll do this on another web page.) Anyone supporting "universal healthcare" is by definition a liberal. Extending unemployent benefits is liberal. The ideas embodied in the U.S Social Security system are liberal. All of these programs are liberal because they extend the amity circle to include all supertribesmen.

Family values is another issue that divides liberals and conservatives. A liberal is more likely to "leave" his family, to relocate and break-off contact, than is a conservative. The liberal who does this is more likely to be a "free thinker" who abhors the oppressive restrictions that some families impose on their members in the form of family traditions, religious rituals, and other more subtle forms of public pressure. The secret free thinker who stays within his family cirlce, who dutifully socializes with relatives regardless of their merit, is a victim of this 10,000 year old struggle to create amity circles within too-large supertribes. This person's dilemma is that whereas leaving the family circle may bring intellectual freedom, it also cuts him off from any future benefits of the family's narrow form of welfare and renders him dependent upon the welfare provided by society at large. I think conservatives unconsciously know this, and their work to prevent society at large from creating a functioning welfare system is one way they believe the family can be preserved. For them, free thinking is subversive, and this makes welfare a tool for subverting family values. Knowing this, only the strong and self-confident are inclined to leave their family roots in order to think freely.

Until the 1970s the mentally ill were "institutionalized" and were treated for their illness at public expense. California led the way in changing this, thanks in part to Ronald Regan's governorship. Today's downtown streets are homes to the wandering homeless, pushng their shopping carts and panhandling traffic at intersections. The most depressing of these people are schizophrenics, who are notorious for not wanting to take the magic medicine that usually controls the worst of their delusional condition. When a homeless person is found to be abusing drugs, society now responds with a more punitive than problem-solving approach by incarcerating instead of treating the person. The burgeoning prison population in America is the least effective and most costly response to the mentally ill. Today's Republicans are small circle people, noted for their zero-tolerance, punitive attitude, and the mentally ill are outside their circle. Is it not ironic that Reagan was shot and wounded in 1982 by a schizophrenic?

There are many other examples, which I will add to this web page eventually. But I want to treat another interesting macro-behavior of this micro-motive dynamic.

Peaceniks and warmongers tend to come from liberal and conservative backgrounds, respectively. It is my conjecture that liberals tend to be the descendants of tribesmen who energized the tribe during peaceful interludes whereas conservatives are descendants of the warriors who took control of the tribe during intertribal conflict. This is why we call Democrats the "Mommy party" and Republicans the "Daddy party." Mommy keeps the family functioning harmoniously when the family is not under external threat, whereas Daddy takes charge when the family is under external threat. When Americans are not threatened by external conflict, when domestic prosperity is most important, they tend to vote for Democrats; but when Americans feel threatened by war they tend to vote Republican. It is not surprising that America acts like a tribe in which the peace-loving type of person is empowered during peacetime and the warrior type of person is empowered during wartime.

This site opened:  June 27, 2004 .  Last Update:  June 29, 2004