Tribes? What can you say? Quite a lot it turns out.
Some say it’s the natural and ideal state of man. Michael Morris in his book Tribal says it’s our
(humans) secret weapon-we were born to live in tribes. Sebastian Junger says we have a
“strong instinct” to belong to small groups— it is the natural and ideal state of mankind.
Some say it’s at the root of most/all societal problems-Victor Davis Hansen, Grant Williams et al.
There’s crowd psychology, group think and us against them, the “them” or others are evil…
Victor Davis Hanson on tribes, tribalism is the death nell for nations
Big Government or Tribes…. which is really the root of all evil or road to hell, Hobbs, Locke,
Machiavelli, birth of modern non secular political order…The Leviathan vs Social Utopia, Locke
Anyway, we went from “find your tribe” (at the surf shop or the beach) to “better find your tribe”
(Global Macro, big Pharma, etc) very quickly-COVID forced many to see what they didn’t want
to see but could no longer ignore. If you look back over the recent past-COVID, 2008 (we’ve
never really recovered-thanks Jeff Snider, Judy Shelton) you can see the dilemma-It’s all
connected!
So, when all these institutions are working for the betterment of all or at least appear to have
good intentions it’s easy to keep grinding and carry on but when they don’t, and things start to
come apart you better have someone or some group you can count on.
Your tribe can take you to the next mountain to climb or the next break to surf or it can also
sustain you when nothing around you seems to be working or seems to be actively working
against you.
We started this journey or came up with this idea to help people improve their lives by finding
their tribe (in person for the most part, or wherever). We aim to create merch to help people find
each other. Since we’re not professional historians, economists, pro surfers, sociologists or
political scientists’, tribe for us at the start meant groups of people congregating around
personal (mainly kinetic) interests like surfing, board sports, snowboarding, skiing but could be
anything (give us some ideas-cycling, snowboarding, skiing, global repro, swaps, applied
economics, stamp collecting, reading whatever). As the internet seeped into everyone’s lives, it
seemed like a good way for them order their lives around their interests, activities and friends
(Facebook). Worked great for a while. Internet is great but sadly, the social media part morphed
into crazy town. This “social media” thing has grown into a bunch of large, angry, confusing
online crazy town mobs.
As the world got crazier, and the pace picked up we quickly went from Find Your Tribe to Better
Find Your Tribe. We look forward to the day we can drop the word Better from the logo but we’re
not there yet.
All the Best,
Tribal Colth