My political claim is there are only two tribes splitting the vote so it's a non sequitur to suggest that tactical voting is useful in a multi-party democracy - party's are a sort of unconscious smoke screen for what is happening underneath. The two tribes are as follows:
1) the tribe which loves its traditional nation(it's heritage and legacy)
2) the other which does not
The vote is being split between the two tribes rather many political party's. It's a mistake to believe the split is between party's. You don't want to make this mistake in critical understanding if you're planning a political strategy to win. This is why I now support Restore Britain, not so much for their policy, much of which is sound especially on taxation. But because they are deadly serious about winning and already recognise this at depth. You might not like them. They might not win. But they are setup to win from the start unlike the rest.
I work with AI using conversations from my initial propositions. Not perfect, sure. But you do eliminate a lot of bias, notwithstanding its own bias of course. On this occasion it was Grok which disagreed with my initial proposition of two tribes, citing many other derivative factors such as wages, capital, schools and so on. But once corrected we made some progress as follows:
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The article(on there being just 2 tribes) is making a stronger claim than “people like slogans”, such as racism. It says the slogan is only the surface. Underneath it is a status system: pick a tribe, obey its story, signal that obedience more cleanly than rivals, and the tribe confers rank. Material issues—prices, crime, schools, energy—are treated as secondary costumes worn by that same loyalty test.
That maps onto some real psychology. Humans do sort into coalitions. Dualistic frames (“us/them,” left/right, patriot/traitor) are easy to remember and easy to police. Public loyalty often outruns private doubt. Status inside a group frequently comes from being a louder, earlier, or more uncompromising signaller, not from being the most accurate. Cancel culture, purity spirals, and “if you even ask that question…” all look like enforcement of an obedience partition. The author is also right that two camps is a stable, low-cost setup: one enemy is enough to define who you are.
Where the theory gets thinner is the “always” and the “everything else is derivative.”
People do switch sides when lived conditions get bad enough. Inflation, housing, conscription, a lost war, or a collapse in order can punch through narrative. That is why the same voters can look tribal in one cycle and transactional in the next. If pocketbook issues were only costumes, those swings would be rarer.
Inside a tribe, competence still matters. A party that cannot deliver power, money, or safety eventually loses even loyalists. Signaling gets you promoted *among believers*; it does not automatically keep the lights on.
The “heritage versus not” test is a powerful sorting slogan, not a complete map of motives. Plenty of voters who fail that test still think they are defending the country—just a different version of it. Plenty who pass it are also voting their rent, their kids’ school, or their job. Depth psychology can describe the first layer without erasing the second.
You said you are not calling this good or bad, only describing how voting works from that view. Fair enough as a lens. It explains why campaigns talk like moral dramas and why heretics get punished harder than opponents. It does not prove that autonomy is impossible, only that it is expensive. People who want a world where that test is unnecessary are asking for institutions that reward accurate disagreement more than loyal performance. Those institutions exist in patches. They are not the default of mass politics.
RS: I ask about this 'issue bundling' and it's trying to flatter me:
You also fail to observe that most of these derivative factors tend to coalesce into the same one of the 2 tribes anyway reinforcing my political point.
Issue bundling is real. That part of your point is stronger than the slogan-only version.
In a two-party, high-polarization system, attitudes that could stay separate start traveling together. Views on borders, crime, schools, speech, energy, universities, and “what the country is for” become correlated. Once that happens, a voter does not need a separate theory for each issue. Picking the tribe picks the package. The package then looks like proof that the tribe was the real cause all along.
That is why the two-camp story feels airtight: the derivatives line up. They often do, *after* the sorting has already happened.
The limit is that the bundle is not eternal or natural. It is a coalition product. What sits inside “loves the heritage” versus “does not” changes by decade and by country. Trade used to cut differently. Crime and welfare used to cut differently. Immigration realigned working-class voters who had not previously lived in that camp. Inflation and lockdowns briefly scrambled the package again. If the derivatives were only masks for one master loyalty, those rearrangements would be harder to see.
So the coalescence reinforces your political observation about *this* moment: mass politics is efficient when it reduces many questions to one membership test. It does not prove the membership test is the only thing underneath. It proves that once two coalitions harden, most public issues get drafted into their war.
That is compatible with Obedience Theory as a description of how signaling works after the camps exist. It is weaker as a claim that the camps are the deep structure of every preference. The camps manufacture consistency as much as they express it.
RS: I like the proposition that observed consistency is manufactured. Because it suggests the 2 obedient tribes model is homeostatic - it reinforces itself like a living organism to survive.
Yes. Once two camps exist, they start acting like a thermostat.
Each side needs the other as a visible enemy. Media, activists, consultants, and ordinary signallers all get paid—in status if not in cash—for keeping the contrast sharp. Cross-pressured people get pressured until they pick a lane. New issues get translated into the old war. Heretics are more threatening than outsiders because they prove the package is optional. The system then looks “alive”: it repairs tears, expels anomalies, and returns to two.
That is homeostasis in the loose systems sense. It does not require a mastermind. It only requires incentives that punish ambiguity and reward clean membership.
The organism metaphor is useful and also a bit too flattering. A living thing has metabolism and death. A political duality has neither. It can persist for decades while the content of each tribe changes completely. The *form* survives: two obedience partitions, one usable enemy, manufactured consistency. The *substance*—who counts as the nation, which sins are unforgivable—gets rewritten and then treated as ancient.
So the two-tribe model does not just describe voting. It describes a maintenance routine. The routine is efficient. Efficiency is not the same as truth, and it is not the same as inevitability. Homeostatic systems last until a shock is larger than their repair capacity: a realignment issue that will not map, an institutional change that stops punishing the middle, or enough people who would rather be inconsistent than obedient. Until then, the organism keeps breathing by turning almost everything into tribe.
RS: I would say the model is an organism with a life, a growth and a death. Followed by reincarnation. Civilisations always die in the end.
The life-cycle version is tighter than the thermostat version.
A political duality is born when a society needs a cheap way to coordinate loyalty. It grows while that frame still organizes energy: war, settlement, industry, reform. It hardens when signaling becomes more valuable than building. It dies when the story can no longer pay for itself—when the camps consume the surplus that once made membership worth the cost. Then something else inherits the ground and, soon enough, grows a new pair of tribes. That is the reincarnation part: the personnel and banners change; the need for an obedience partition usually returns.
Civilizations do end. Not on a timetable, and not always as fire and rubble. More often they thin out: institutions stop compounding competence, elites harvest rather than maintain, the public language becomes mostly accusation, and people stop believing the future is a joint project. A successor order then claims the ruins and writes a founding myth that hides how much it copied.
Two cautions keep this from becoming fate-talk.
First, “always die” is true of particular forms, not of every human settlement on the same land. Rome ended; Italy did not vanish. The British imperial order ended; a British state remained. Death of a civilizational package is not the same as extinction of a people.
Second, reincarnation is not proof that the two-tribe machine is metaphysical. It is proof that large groups keep rediscovering the same cheap technology: define a people, name an enemy, reward those who signal hardest. That technology works until it eats the host.
If the model has a life and a death, the interesting question is not whether collapse is guaranteed. It is which phase you are in: growth, where the story still builds; homeostasis, where the story mostly polices; or late stage, where the story is expensive and the repair work is mostly theatrical. Those are empirical questions. The organism metaphor is only useful if it makes you look at surplus, competence, and whether the tribes are still producing a country or only consuming one.
RS: I think the life cycle and the thermostat work together. Once there are more autonomous people than obedient people.
They fit if you treat the thermostat as the middle of the life cycle.
Growth: obedience is cheap and productive. The tribe-story still coordinates work, war, family, and surplus. Autonomy exists, but it is not yet the majority strategy.
Homeostasis: the thermostat. Signaling outruns building. The two partitions repair themselves. Autonomous people are tolerated only if they stay quiet or get drafted into one camp.
Death / reincarnation: the point you are naming. When enough people would rather be inconsistent, unaligned, or simply competent than obedient, the repair routine fails. The camps still shout, but they cannot convert the surplus into loyalty. Institutions keep running the old script after the audience has left. Then a new order—or a mess—has to recruit obedience all over again.
“More autonomous than obedient” is the clean threshold in the theory. In practice it is rarely a headcount. It is whether the autonomous can withhold status, money, attention, and manpower without being isolated. A minority that can exit, build, or refuse the membership test can break the thermostat. A majority that only *feels* autonomous while still performing the ritual cannot.
So the two metaphors stack:
- thermostat = how the organism stays alive
- life cycle = what happens when the thermostat can no longer buy compliance
The open question is not whether that tipping point exists. It is how you would know it from inside the story, when both tribes will insist that the other side’s growth in “autonomy” is just disguised treason.
RS: We see regular intra civilisation collapses known as great recessions. Or global conflict. Or a new hegemony.
Those are the usual reset valves inside a civilization that has not yet fully died.
A great recession is a surplus shock. The story still exists, but it cannot pay the promised returns. People discover that loyalty does not protect their job, house, or pension. The thermostat tries to translate the pain back into tribe—“the other camp did this”—and sometimes that works. When it does not, obedience looks expensive and autonomy looks rational.
Global conflict is a bloodier version of the same audit. War can restock solidarity for a generation if one side can still organize competence. It can also burn the remaining surplus and force a new partition of the world. That is why some wars look like civilizational midlife crises and others like funerals.
A new hegemony is the reincarnation step without requiring the old society to vanish. The banners, reserve currency, security umbrella, and prestige hierarchy change hands. The old camps keep arguing in the old language while the actual center of gravity moves. Obedience does not disappear; it re-homes.
So the sequence in your model is:
1. two tribes keep the system homeostatic
2. shocks (slump, war, hegemonic shift) test whether the story still buys compliance
3. if autonomous refusal crosses a threshold, the old partitions lose their monopoly
4. a successor order recruits a new pair of tribes and calls it a beginning
Recessions, wars, and hegemonic change are not proof that the organism is finished. They are how you tell whether it is still metabolizing or already being replaced. The diagnostic is the same one as before: after the shock, do people return to signaling, or do they start withholding obedience because the tribe can no longer protect them?