From Village To Tribes: What Happened to Our Shared Community?

Episode 18 of the Building Bridges Series
A 4-minute read

There’s an old but famous story about Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan. As Speaker of the House and President, they were fierce political opponents who were known to battle all day over policy. But in the evening, they’d share drinks and Irish jokes together. “After 6 PM, we’re friends,” O’Neill reportedly said.

They understood something we seem to have forgotten: you can fight hard for your beliefs without treating your opponents as enemies to be destroyed.

Villages vs. Tribes: A Critical Distinction

We’ve been witnessing the decline of village behavior and the rise of tribal behavior in America. What’s the difference?

As writer and educator Russell Willis explains on The Natural Curiosity Project podcast: “A village is defined by the state of well-being of the villagers—a village is surviving or thriving; everything about it is helping each other to survive, or providing the context to thrive.” In a village, elders gain authority based on experience and wisdom. The focus is on solving problems together.

A tribe, by contrast, is defined by some common trait or belief—blood, skin color, ideology, geography. Tribes create hierarchies based on those shared characteristics. Authority comes from having the “right” traits, not from wisdom or experience.

For most of human history, village and tribe were the same thing. Your geographic community shared your culture, beliefs, and ancestry. But starting with the Industrial Revolution and increasing mobility, technology drove us out of our villages. We gained the ability to connect with others beyond our immediate geography—creating new, far more expansive “villages”, each made up of multiple tribes.

The result? We’re now interwoven but haven’t figured out what to do with our tribalism, which includes differing norms, values, and worldviews.

When We Choose Tribe Over Village

The worst manifestation of this shift is when we choose tribe over village. When our firm loyalty to people who share our beliefs overpowers our commitment to the larger community we actually live in.

Remember our discussion about moral foundations and how different groups weight them differently? When tribal identity becomes primary, we stop seeing neighbors as fellow villagers working toward shared well-being. Instead, we see them as members of opposing tribes—threats to be defeated rather than partners in problem-solving.

This shows up as single-issue voting, increasing isolation from people who think differently, and rigid certainty on both sides—no curiosity, no patience for ambiguity.

On the left, you get public shaming, rigid orthodoxy, and dividing the village into oppressor and oppressed. On the right, you get cultural panic, performative fury, and grievance as justification. The shared trait? Absolute certainty that “we” are right and “they” are wrong.

The Cost: Losing the Common Good

The dominant conversation has become: who’s going to win and who’s going to lose? We’ve moved farther away from the goal of the common good—which requires cooperation and compromise.

As I discussed in the American Nations post, our different cultural “nations” have never been fully united. But we used to share enough common ground to function as a federation. Now, neither the red nor the blue tribe holds overriding power, which leads to gridlock. That gridlock destroys trust in our government. Declining trust leads to more fear, which triggers more tribal “safety” energy—it’s a vicious cycle.

The problem with trying to get your side to win is that the other side has to lose. And losers don’t just go away—they regroup, resent, and retaliate. The politically homeless—those who don’t fit neatly into either tribe—understand this. They’re often most interested in actually getting things done, not just getting their ideology to “win.”

Acting Like a Village Again

The solution isn’t going back in time. We can’t un-ring the bell of technology and reverse a modern, mobile society. But we can recover something we’ve lost: the ability to act like a village instead of a tribe.

What does that look like? Focus on solving problems rather than defending tribal positions. Get with your neighbors and figure things out together.

Here’s an example: It doesn’t matter whether climate change is caused by humans or not. Focus on reducing the damage and responding to the changes. That’s village thinking—pragmatic and collaborative, focused on the common good.

When things get complicated, we humans naturally try to uncomplicate them. We reduce complex issues to two poles—black and white, friend or foe. That’s our lizard brain seeking safety through simplicity. But politics, like life, is actually about compromise–unless you’re more committed to getting your own way than to the welfare of the entire country.

What We Need to Recover

We don’t need to agree on everything. Most likely we can’t. But we do need to recover:

The ability to argue without demonizing
The capacity to disagree without disengaging
The skill to differ without disappearing from each other’s world

Remember those old Looney Tunes cartoons with Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog? They’d show up for work every morning, clock in, fight all day in their “professional” roles–and then clock out, say “See you tomorrow,” and walk home as friends.

Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan knew how to do that. Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog knew how to do that. We all used to know how. And we could again—if we decide that we want to.