One of the most damaging illiberal beliefs is the belief in the supremacy of the tribe. From that meta-belief, other illiberal beliefs flow. Mistakenly believing others are less worthy, it becomes easy to fail to see the humanity in others. From that mistake, it is easy to adopt a zero-sum mindset and believe all that matters is one’s own welfare and the welfare of the group with which one is identified. 

During the winter of 2021, journalist Virginia Heffernan sheltered from COVID in her upstate New York getaway. After a heavy snow, she was astonished when her Trump-supporting neighbor plowed her driveway. One could conclude that her neighbor saw an unprepared individual in need and acted with decency and kindness.
In her opinion essay for the Los Angeles Times, Heffernan revealed her tribal thinking as she weighed whether to offer thanks to her neighbor. After alluding to the Nazi occupation of France and Hezbollah’s policy of giving out free things in Lebanon, Heffernan concluded she could not give her neighbor “absolution.” She wrote, “Free driveway work, as nice as it is, is just not the same currency as justice and truth.”
She tells us nothing of her neighbor other than he is a good snow plower and a “Trumpite.” Her neighbor saw her humanity; she saw him through her labels.
A simple act of kindness from a neighbor became an opportunity for Virginia Heffernan to express her tribal prejudices. The basis of Heffernan’s perception was her tribal mindset and her inability to see the humanity in others.
In his book Open, Johan Norberg writes, “Historically, we have expanded the circle of people we feel empathy for by discovering that we belong to groups that overlap the old divisions.” If she spoke to her neighbor, she might find they share a love for upstate New York, and maybe they have a hobby in common. Without her thinking getting in the way, she might discover they are both human beings striving to have a happy and purposeful life.
This spring, in Wired, Heffernan, without a trace of irony, observed of others: “When a person…grounds their serenity and joy in a false claim about reality, you do little but cause pain if you try to root it out.”
Heffernan’s false claims about the tribal nature of reality can instruct us all. She has assigned other people a terrible purpose. Other people are objects that either share her views or are against her. The character and actions of others don’t matter. What matters is the maligned category Heffernan has assigned to them.
In his book, Less than Human, philosopher David Livingstone Smith explains that “Journalists have always had an important role to play in disseminating falsehoods to mold public opinion, and this often involves dehumanizing military and political opponents.” Smith quotes Aldous Huxley, who explained we lose our “scruples” when a “human being is spoken of as though he were not a human being, but as the representative of some wicked principle.”
Heffernan doesn’t seem ready to examine the cost of her tribal thinking. Why would we see the havoc it creates if we think our mindset works for us? What if the “justice” Heffernan is seeking can emerge only when tribal thinking is relinquished?
One of the most damaging illiberal beliefs is the belief in the supremacy of the tribe. From that meta-belief, other illiberal beliefs flow. Mistakenly believing others are less worthy, it becomes easy to fail to see the humanity in others. From that mistake, it is easy to adopt a zero-sum mindset and believe all that matters is one’s own welfare and the welfare of the group with which one is identified. Freedom for me but not for thee is a zero-sum mindset.
Tribalism is the belief in the supremacy of one’s group identity over individual rights. Tribal identity fosters negative feelings, even hatred, toward those outside the tribe. In the grips of the tribal mindset, we see the world through a lens of us vs. them, victims and victimizers. “They” are out to get me is an oft-heard refrain. We are certain our tribe deserves more than it has.
Tribalism rests on the destructive mental delusion of denying the humanity of others:  I am fundamentally different and separate from those I’m judging.
A second, more destructive delusion can follow from the first: My well-being depends on destroying or marginalizing those from whom I am different. 
Matt Ridley explains in his book The Origins of Virtue, the “tendency of human societies to fragment into competing groups has left us with minds all too ready to adopt prejudices and pursue genocidal feuds.”
Zero-Sum Thinking
Most of us learned long ago to value human cooperation; we recognize that harming others doesn’t foster either our own well-being or the well-being of others.
Many don’t have the same probity when it comes to harming others indirectly through the coercive agents of government. In business, some seek subsidies, tariffs, or demand government force people to buy their products, such as ethanol and vaccines. Some want loans canceled. Others want to live rent-free. Still others want a guaranteed annual income.
The mindset driving all these examples is zero-sum thinking. Zero-sum thinking—the philosophy that someone else must lose so I can win—is a mistaken idea that destroys lives and economies. Is zero-sum thinking, fueled by growing tribalism, threatening human cooperation and progress?
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently observed, “There is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales,” adding that “[N]ew technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) …created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning. Zero-sum conflicts…were better thought of as temporary setbacks…”
Norberg asks, “Why are we so bad at understanding that voluntary relations and an open economy are non-zero?” It is not possible to change the nature of reality, but it is possible to adopt beliefs at odds with reality and experience harsh consequences. Norberg points us toward understanding how our failure to understand reality has polarized politics:
Almost every kind of angst the nationalist Right and the populist Left feels over the economy is based on it [zero-sum thinking] in one form or another. If the rich get richer, it’s because they take it from us. With more immigrants, there are fewer resources left for the natives. If robots become smarter, there will be no jobs left for us. If trading partners like China and Mexico gain, it must be at our expense.
Neither conservatives nor progressives are immune from zero-sum mindsets. Today, with inflation raging, many are sure greedy supermarkets and energy producers are responsible. Not understanding that the Fed and politicians are culpable, it is easy to have strong opinions about which prices and salaries are too “high.”
To be fair, lies propagated by government generate malcontent feelings and zero-sum thinking. If, as President Biden claims, “America has achieved the most robust recovery in modern history,” why are your finances feeling squeezed? Someone or something must be holding you back while others are getting ahead. This is not fair, you might reason. And the President is eager to channel your anger, greedy corporations are part of the problem that he will solve.
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While Neil Postman’s critique of image-based and entertainment- focused culture dates to the middle of the 1980s, his warning about the dominance of the electronically-mediated image (which we watch) over the word (which we read) should still challenge us today, especially since the dangers he exposed are more potent today given the explosion of internet media.

My book on postmodernism, Truth Decay, assessed both the philosophy of postmodernism (nonrealism) and how cultural factors contributed to the postmodern view of truth as relative, negotiable, and constructed. Although we now hear less about postmodernism as a philosophy, it has taken root in the common mind and mood. I have found no better social critic to explain “truth decay” than social critic and media theorist, Neil Postman (1931–2003). By the term “truth decay,” I mean “a cultural condition in which the very idea of absolute, objective, and universal truth is considered implausible, held in open contempt, or not even seriously considered.”[1] I wrote that in 2000, but the situation has gotten far worse in the age of social media, influencers without knowledge or credibility, fake news, AI simulations (especially “deep fakes”), and more.
Nevertheless, one antidote to truth decay is an awareness of the potentially deceptive power of images and the need for spoken and written discourse to discern truth and find knowledge (justified true belief) through the evaluation of evidence and through reason. To that end, I will excerpt from and expand on sections from Truth Decay that address this issue of addressing reality aright, with frequent reference to Neil Postman’s, seminal book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, as well as his work Technopoly.
Information, Reading, and Watching
Postman describes the general problem of information overload, which is, paradoxically, tied to ignorance of reality.
The tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.[2]
We often do not know how to assess information for reliability, how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Thus, most Americans are well-informed, hyperactive ignoramuses. They are information-rich, information-ravenous, and knowledge-deprived. To use biblical language, they are “tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming” (Eph. 4:14).
Moreover, most of this information is presented as entertainment or in entertainment-oriented form, usually dominated by alluring moving images. Hence the title of Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Amuse literally means not to think (or muse). While Postman’s work was written pre-internet and focused on the rise and dominance of television, his essential insight is that the production and distribution of images made possible by television—and now overwhelmingly more so by the internet—debases our public discourse about religion, politics, education, and everything else.
Sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912–94) observes that the “visionary reality of connected images cannot tolerate critical discourse, explanation, duplication, or reflection”—all rational activities required for separating truth from error. Cognitive pursuits “presuppose a certain distance and withdrawal from the action, whereas images require that I continually be involved in the action.” The images must keep the word in check, keep it humiliated, since “the word produces disenchantment with the image; the word strips it of its hypnotic and magical power.”[3] Words can expose an image age as false or misleading, as when we read in a magazine that a television program “re-created” an event that never occurred.
When the image overwhelms and subjugates the word, the ability to think, write, and communicate in a linear and logical fashion is undermined. Television’s images have their immediate effect on us, but that effect is seldom to cause us to pursue their truth or falsity. Television’s images are usually shorn of their overall context and meaning and are reduced to factoids (at best). Ideas located within a historical and logical setting are replaced by impressions, emotions, and stimulations. While images communicate narrative stories and quantitative information well (such as graphs and charts), words are required for more linear and logical communication.
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As you consider the ways you search for peace in your life, remember that true peace is greater, deeper, and better than merely a quiet moment or two. Peace is the gift of God given to his children when they are brought back into right relationship with him and can, once again, live in his presence.

What brings you peace? A quick scroll through social media reveals multiple attempts at answering that question. Some indicate that peace is a commodity we gain while sitting by a quiet lake, strolling on a wooded path, or gazing at the night sky. Others imply that a sparkling clean kitchen, a freshly made bed, a basket of folded laundry, or an inbox clear of unanswered emails will garner peace in your life. And most of us have probably said (or at least thought), “All I want is a little peace and quiet.” What we mean is, we want a quiet afternoon. And to be honest, who wouldn’t love a quiet day? Most of us would be happy with a few quiet moments! But is peace merely the absence of noise, the result of completed tasks, or something only to be found when our environment is beautiful?
No. The Bible presents the idea of peace as something much greater, much more holistic, and much more beneficial than merely a quiet afternoon. The Hebrew word for peace is shalom. And shalom is something that is meant to permeate every aspect of a person’s life with wholeness, goodness, and well-being. It’s the true peace we all long for because it’s the peace God designed us for.
We see this perfect peace in the first two chapters of the Bible— in Eden.
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