PRIMITIVE HUMANITY
Most people, at least once in their life, have had a moment where someone leaned over and said, “Don’t tell anyone, but,” and suddenly found themselves drawn in, paying closer attention than they were a second ago. That single sentence causes a ripple. Then that story spreads.
This tendency is deeply human and dates back a millennium. According to Michele Gelfand, an organizational behavior professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, gossip is the core of human interaction. We don’t gossip just to be nosy. We do it to reinforce boundaries. By sharing others’ successes and failures, we learn how to behave without making every mistake ourselves.
While gossip typically carries a negative connotation, it’s not necessarily. The term “gossip” comes from the Old English “godsibb,” meaning a close companion. Prehistorically, “gossip” wasn’t trading rumors. It was about telling each other things such as where to forage and navigating power hierarchies or deciding who could be trusted. Our drive for social connection led to concepts of gossip, tribalism and morality, which still impact how humans interact today.
In his book “Inheritance,” Harvey Whitehouse, the chair of social anthropology at the University of Oxford, attempts to explain general trends in human history and sociability.
Whitehouse dictates that three natural biases have shaped human social connection: “conformism (our predisposition to emulate our peers), religiosity (our propensity to develop certain moral commitments and beliefs about the world) and tribalism.”
These three tendencies have contributed to human cooperation and evolution over time. Science Instructor Allison Ponzio commented on individual versus collective developments psychologically.
“The way I like to think of humankind is that we develop sort of in two pathways. We develop as an internal self, and we have all of these things inside of us that determine who we’re going to be, and that’s a combination of our biology, our psychology and our lived experience,” Ponzio said. “And then there’s the development of ourselves as social beings, and that is highly determined by your environment.”
Social development and evolution, both in the span of a single life and the evolution of the human race over time, are important tools for human survival and connection.
Our tendencies towards gossip and general collaboration have written the story of humanity. They have led to the creation of the modern world.
HUMANITY EVOVLES ALONGSIDE HUMANS
For most of human history, priorities have been aligned with survival. However, even in early nomadic groups, a strict “sharing ethos” existed, a collective mindset that prioritized communal benefit over individual ownership. For example, a hunter who killed large game was obligated to distribute the meat among the group. But as societies became more stable, people gained greater leeway to ask abstract questions: What do individuals deserve? What does it mean to be treated fairly?
This shift from focusing on survival to morality laid the groundwork for what we now call human rights. Enlightenment philosopher John Locke argued that all humans are born with natural rights. Much like a scientist identifying a law of nature, Locke described something he believed had always existed. But he also believed that these rights were best protected by the government, which influenced early politics.
“Human rights are the basic rights and necessities that every human, just by nature of being a human, deserves,” History and Social Sciences Instructor Katherine Pollock said. “It starts with survival, but when we add Enlightenment ideas on top of it, it expands to more abstract things like free speech and representation.”
By virtue of humanity, these rights should be recognized as inalienable and universal. However, they have not always been treated as such.
“John Locke used his philosophies to defend slavery, which automatically makes me think he’s not the ‘father’ of human rights that more traditional curricula suggest he is,” Pollock said. “But I do think he gave language to the role of government, even if that role is problematic.”
As Pollock points out, governments are oftentimes the very institutions that violate these natural rights. While all people have equal rights on paper, the recurring inequalities throughout history reveal a deeper flaw.
Long before written laws and constitutions existed, Homo sapiens depended on living in groups to survive. Since groups that shared similar ideals worked best together, humans began policing in-group loyalty and privileges by excluding those who were different. This idea is known as tribalism, and it is not just historical. It is psychological.
Established by social scientists Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970s, the Social Identity Theory explains how individuals define themselves through group membership. According to psychologist Saul McLeod of Simply Psychology, this psychological process can lead to “group favoritism, prejudice and stereotyping as people favor those who belong to their own group.”
Throughout history, this “us vs. them” mentality has adapted but remained. As time passed, tribalism evolved into national, racial, religious and political identities. Events like civil wars, world wars, genocides and the widespread political conflict of past centuries exemplify how tribalism has caused more destruction than the intended effect of being more inclusive for safety.
This pattern continues to shape the United States. Divisions rooted in identity have influenced events from the Civil War to present political polarization. According to The New Yorker journalist George Packer, American politics depend on the idea of tribal loyalty to achieve partisan support, where identity can matter more than the ideas at hand.
“They’re badges of identity, not of thought,” Packer wrote in a 2018 New Yorker article. “In a way, they make thinking unnecessary, because they do it for you.”
These divisions are further amplified through the widespread use of technology. Debate Coach and Program Head Adam Torson explained how social media companies rely on the same tribal instincts that once ensured survival to draw viewers, contributing to deep political division in our world today.
“A large portion of our social engagement or political engagement is mediated by digital media,” Torson said. “They accomplish that objective in part by engaging our tribalistic instincts. The more extreme, violent or ostracizing content tends to do better in terms of engagement, so the algorithms promote that content.”
The tribalism that once brought people together can pull them apart and create divisions. These affect larger inequalities, such as who has access to resources, opportunities and power.
TRIBALISM THROUGH THE BIGGER WORLD
Tribalism may have originated as a way for humans to survive. Today, it dictates who thrives. The idea of “us vs. them” doesn’t work without a “them,” and this “them” is made up of millions of suffering people.
Even in Los Angeles, inequality is entrenched in communities and infrastructure. Yes, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, and yes, redlining was outlawed in 1968, but the effects of inequality did not disappear overnight. Their legacy remains today.
According to data from the Los Angeles County Chief Executive Office, 16% of the Black population in Los Angeles is unhoused, and their poverty rate rose to 36.2% in 2025, a sharper increase than any other racial group. These disparities are not random but a result of long-standing systems shaped by exclusion.
Deep LA Honors Humanities Seminar student Genevieve Lee ’26 has studied how these systems continue to affect the city decades later.
“Racially restrictive covenants are no longer legal, but redlining continually has an impact on the LA community and reinforces urban apartheid and modern examples of less obvious but still forms of segregation,” Lee said.
Inequality in LA is seen in countless forms, from an unhoused population of more than 72,000 individuals to disparities in education, income and access to resources. These disparities tie back to the tribalistic “us vs. them” mentality. Community Partnerships Program Head Javier Esperanza explains how structures like white supremacy and patriarchy persist because of power and group loyalty. People in power want to stay in power and work, whether consciously or not, to keep access to resources among themselves while pushing others out.
“There’s a lot of reform that happens, but it doesn’t get to the root of the system of inequality that elevates people based on certain identities that they have,” Esperanza said. “If you’re a man, if you’re a white person, if you’re a straight person, you are less likely to be held accountable for the suffering that you inflict on people. Because we live in a society that needs to constantly justify the status quo, we’re told these lies about who is considered dangerous, who is a criminal, who is a foreigner and who is an outsider.”
While these patterns are visible in LA, they extend far beyond one city accounting for only 3% of the U.S. population. Inequality is nationwide. According to Oxfam, a global confederation of 21 independent non-government-affiliated organizations, the U.S. is among the most impacted by economic inequality. While a small, privileged group holds large percentages of wealth, the majority are left in need.
The same tribalistic instincts come into effect. Wealthy humans want to fend for themselves and their families by collecting as much capital as they can instead of helping more marginalized communities.
Zooming out to a global level, the Human Development Index (HDI) created by the United Nations exemplifies the mass inequalities through major gaps in life expectancy, education and income across countries. Niger, the lowest-ranked country, has a life expectancy of 50 years, with an average of 1.2 years of schooling and a low income level. In contrast, countries like Norway rank among the highest, with a significantly longer life expectancy of 78.4 years, an average of 12 years of schooling and income levels almost 50 times greater than Niger’s.
These inequalities are rooted in history. As countries like the U.S. and England expanded through colonization, they grew richer and more powerful at the expense of others. Inequality, however, is not inevitable. Our early survival was based on group cooperation as much as it was exclusion.
“I would say that a lot of people think things are inevitable, or that it’s human nature to be selfish,” Esperanza said. “But there are plenty of societies where people were more ethical, where people were kinder and treated women and people of color less violently. The guide, the playbook, is there. It’s just a matter of looking it up yourself.”
IMPACTS OF HUMANITY AND TRIBALISM TODAY
In the global world we live in, a human’s tribe is no longer just the group of people they travel with. Social media has extended connections. However, it also strains human nature. Our connections are no longer as genuine. Lara Desai ’29 commented on the difficulty of communicating with her friends.
“In the world of social media and the internet, I struggle to find real human connection with my friends,” Desai said. “Often when we are hanging out with each other, everyone is on their phones, and I feel like we don’t even interact a lot of the time.”
This new-wave connection via social media is questionably inauthentic.
Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, developed a theory that one should have 100 acquaintances and 50 friends. However, in this new age, humans are gathering more connections than they can sustain. Dunbar commented in The New Yorker about the logistical complications of this extension.
“The amount of social capital you have is pretty fixed,” Dunbar said. “It involves time investment. If you garner connections with more people, you end up distributing your fixed amount of social capital more thinly, so the average capital per person is lower.”
The stretching of social capital creates shallower connections and friendships in the new age. Collaboration, tribalism and human emotion are strained by a lack of depth in relationships.
“Human connection is the most important part of human experience and friendships are what make life worth living,” Ruby Fox ’26 said. “It’s important to have people you can confide in and talk to, as well as a network of people who will broaden your perspective and increase your quality of life. I’m concerned humanity is losing that.”
