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Thinking Outside the Tribe: How the Mind frees us from the fear of standing alone
What camp do you reside in? Republican? Democrat? Lindsay Clancy sympathizer? Luigi Mangione apologist? You see, the world is vast, and it can feel lonely and even dangerous.
There is a reason why, throughout history, humans have gravitated toward groups, into tribes. Tribalism has been a security blanket for the individual. Our basic danger-detection system is essentially the same one our prehistoric ancestors relied upon. Their world was smaller, but the danger of being dominated by potential predators, human or animal, was real and acute. A group could find food, raise children, and fight or flee more effectively than an individual ever could, which is why homo sapiens insulated themselves from danger by forming groups. We see versions of this throughout the animal kingdom.
Groups today look different than they did eons ago, yet the goal is essentially the same: safety. A stray is far more vulnerable to attack than a member of the herd.
In ancient times, tribes were physical groups that shared food and shelter and worked together to provide life’s essentials. Today, security groups come in all shapes and sizes. Social media makes it easy to attach yourself to a group through political affiliation, religious belief, cultural allegiance, race, gender, or even patterns of thought.
In my framework, what’s been created are masses of individual Automatic Brains, what I call the AB, morphing into one giant one. For those unfamiliar with the term, the AB is the most primitive part of our human nature: our animal nature, our threat-detection system. Anything it processes as dangerous triggers fight or flight. And danger comes in all forms.
What we call ego is, in large part, a product of the AB. Our sense of self too often becomes wrapped up in everything we’ve processed as dangerous, and that becomes our identity. Starting in childhood, the AB sorts perceived threats into three familiar categories. First is One-Up, the danger of feeling insignificant, unheard, or beneath someone else. Second is the Unknown, anything unfamiliar or unpredictable. Third is Loss of Love, the risk of losing the acceptance and belonging that make us feel secure. Together, they form the anatomy of fear, and a group can silence all three at once. It gives us stature, makes the unfamiliar familiar, and makes us feel secure.
So when we identify ourselves and confirm our allegiances, it feels safe—question them, and the armor cracks. We risk our standing, we step into uncertainty, and we risk the belonging that made us feel safe in the first place. These allegiances can lock us into particular thought patterns without critical thinking. We take on the entirety of the group’s thinking or risk being cast out, left alone like a lone sheep to be picked off. Individual thought, weighing both sides, can become a threat to the group’s structure. This isn’t a tradeoff or a cure. It’s a trap. Fear never actually goes away. It stubbornly digs its heels in.
I learned this long before I had the science to explain it. In high school, cliques formed early, and I spent most of those years standing just outside them. In med school, it happened again, disguised as something friendlier: a co-ed softball league. A handful of the better-known players secretly built their team before the idea was even pitched to the rest of us. When someone floated the idea of a league, I suggested we assign teams randomly. That didn't fly, so I put together my own team from whoever was left. We made it to the final and lost to the group that had planned it all in advance. We'd only wanted to play for fun and blow off some steam from the stress of school, so reaching the final was icing on the cake, and we were more than satisfied. I can't say the same was true for the team that won.
Nobody got hurt by a softball loss. But the instinct underneath it to protect the group, guard the hierarchy, keep the outsider out is the same instinct now playing out at a much higher volume and with far higher stakes.
Take Lindsay Clancy and Luigi Mangione. Neither disputes what happened. Clancy does not deny killing her three young children in 2023; her defense rested on a claim of legal insanity, and on September 4, after seven days of deliberations, the judge declared a mistrial when the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict. Mangione pleaded guilty last month, admitting in court that he shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan and that Thompson died. In both cases, the public argument is no longer primarily over who committed the acts. It’s over how those acts should be understood and, in some cases, even excused. With Clancy, the argument centers on postpartum psychosis and failures in maternal mental health care; with Mangione, on what supporters view as a predatory healthcare system. People aren’t really arguing about what happened anymore. They’re arguing about what it means, and increasingly, whose side you’re on, and the teams are on full display across social media and outside the courthouses.
I’m not interested in relitigating either case here. What interests me is the mechanism. Once a person attaches their identity to a cause, the accused can stop being an individual and become a symbol of that cause. Defending the symbol becomes the same as defending the cause, and defending the cause becomes the same as defending yourself. That’s not always a reasoned position—once the AB takes over, it isn’t interested in evaluating facts. It wants us to hold the line, protecting the tribe rather than weighing the evidence. Any information that threatens the group’s narrative, however credible, gets processed through one of those same three folders: it risks our standing, forces us into uncertainty, or threatens the belonging the AB has come to equate with safety. Either way, it gets dismissed before it’s even considered.
None of this makes us bad people. It makes us exactly what we’ve always been, equipped for a world of predators and scarcity, now aiming that same equipment at cable news and comment sections. But the AB isn’t the only thing we have. We also have what I call the Mind, our capacity to pause, question, and weigh evidence even when doing so is uncomfortable or puts us at odds with the group. Naming what’s happening, recognizing the AB’s alarm for what it is, is the first step toward not being run by it.
The next time you catch yourself defending a position simply because your group defends it, stop. Ask what you actually think, without an audience. Ask whether you’ve genuinely considered the other side or just rejected it on arrival. The AB will push back hard. It will tell you that questioning your tribe is dangerous, that you're one step from becoming the stray the herd leaves behind. It's lying. The Mind lets you hear that warning without obeying it. Trusting in that, rather than in groupthink, unleashes true freedom and humanity. Thinking for yourself may cost you the false sense of group security. But it preserves something more vital. Your integrity.