The past 7 years has permanently cured me of the attachment to the Liberal Tribe as surely as the horror that Israel has visited upon the Palestinians permanently removed me from the Conservative Tribe 30 years ago.

The insanity and self-righteousness of the cancel culture and woke tribes, the unbalanced liberal response to Trump, the shocking abuse of power by the left in suppression of the truths about the covid virus and vaccines, the suppression of so many true things on twitter (along with some false things) in an “end justifies the means” mode (that ugly demonic principle behind all the horrors of the modern age), and the continuing fight against truth tellers like Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Glen Greenwald and Chris Hedges (to name just four) have all convinced me that all the tribes are not only not useful, but actually very harmful if you are interested in the truth, in real health, in a thriving human existence.

And all of this has been done with an attitude of superiority, recalling something I first heard from an undergraduate professor in mathematics. We were talking about some aspect of religion or politics and at some appropriate moment in the conversation he said “Seek those who seek the truth, but flee from those who have found it”. I do not know who first said that, but I am sure that statement, in some form, has been around for a very long time.

Industrial agriculture, industrial medicine, industrial education, industrial media and an industrial (social media) culture have all become deeply corrupt and even fraudulent, often acting in direct opposition to their stated goals. Yet so convinced are they of their righteousness, they will use any means — frequently force, coercion, and deception — to further their ends.

The only real antidote to this violent industrial complex is a firm rejection of the industrial and the global, and an embrace of the local and personal and community and love and wisdom. If we take the pledge to first do no harm, we are forced to change our perspectives rather radically.

Because the woke culture has worsened racism through a deep lack of wisdom and a lack of understanding how sustainable, healing change actually happens, through the mistakes in labeling and identification of the problems, and through its embrace of force and violation of others, I believe that the problems we need to solve when we move to a very local, wisdom-based, love-based approach are harder than they would have been.

The unintended consequences of these social media driven movements are deeply negative, even dark. The dis-integration of human beings and human culture allows the demonic nature of social media to hide in plain sight. Integrated, whole, thriving human beings cannot help but (eventually) recognize that evil nature. But the modern afflictions of materialism and rationalism — by which I mean believing that all there is is what you see with your eyes and that truth is arrived at by a purely mental, intellectual exercise — have resulted in a decay of the traditional regard for wisdom, for spiritual insight and vision. Cleverness is mistaken for wisdom, the spiritual is dismissed as either a fantasy or something cooked up by neurons for some evolutionary purpose. The chance that what we see is an infinitesimal piece of what there is, that truly mystical connections to the large universe exist and that science is not somehow the ultimate tool to solve every problem, is dismissed, usually with ridicule, always with an arrogant confidence.

After the apostle Peter pulled out a sword and cut off the High Priest’s guard’s ear in an effort to defend Jesus, Jesus reached out and healed the ear, saying to Peter, ” … put away thy sword Peter — those that live by the sword, die by the sword …”. In this, Jesus was revealing that the tools we use, dictate the plane we live on. This is the first fundamental mistake that those who indulge in “the end justifies the means” approach solving problem make. Often, they defeat themselves from the beginning through the choice of tools.

I believe this is the clearest rationale for rejecting tribalism, for all the tribes have given into that principle of darkness, that accommodation of devils, that use of what we should abhor in order to obtain that which we adore.

For in the state of imagined righteousness, we delude ourselves that tyranny is actually loving care, that anything we do must by definition be righteous because we are righteous and that if someone gets hurt, it was worth the price.

We have forgotten “first do no harm”, we have forgotten “love thy neighbor” (to say nothing of “love your enemies”!), we have become blind to the tyranny of our righteousness.

But there is hope. Moving to a place alongside others, insisting on real connections to real people in real places and real time, we move back to the local and back to an orientation towards embodied living, integrated lives, and thriving human cultures based on healing and inspiration.

Instead of “righteousness”, we celebrate healing and inspiration. Then we understand that this is what was meant by righteousness all along — that the old wisdom which starts first with “fear not” and “he heals the broken heart and binds up their wounds” and moves on to “love your neighbor” and “love your enemies”, leads to a human thriving which was, in fact, the precise (and only) goal of righteousness.