>Besides being morally wrong, a tribal approach is limiting. If you can't learn from, if you can't make friends and allies with people from all walks of life, i

>Besides being morally wrong, a tribal approach is limiting. If you can't learn from, if you can't make friends and allies with people from all walks of life, if you must sit in your little castle with the few you count as your tribe -- are you not obviously much poorer for it? I think so. Well put. I experienced this when moving abroad - Expatriates formed social groups based on their origin country, and their identities became disproportionately based upon that. For those people, interactions with anyone outside the ex-pat group usually centred around contrasting their home culture with the other party's culture, inevitably favouring the home country culture. The subtle problems this introduced for them were many, but they appeared to entirely lack insight into this or if they had it, admitting so was verboten. Outsider interactions were constantly tainted with an air of negativity that left the other party feeling less-than-good about the interaction, and so less likely to engage in future. The in-group folks frequently became unfairly disillusioned with their new country because of the distorted negativity field introduced by their group's favouritism towards the home country culture. Often members of the group would pack up and head back home, but after a few years would return having apparently remembered the reasons they left in the first place. This behaviour seemed not so bad since the countries in question were culturally not so far apart (same language, significant shared history, similar ethnic demographics). I can only imagine how alienating this behaviour is for migrants in countries with larger cultural differences.