The Best Tribe: Civilizing Mission World Tour 2025
It is one of the peculiarities of our time that we call ourselves enlightened while carrying the torch of righteousness like missionaries of old.
I observe, from the comfort of my bathtub—which I have found to be as good a place for philosophy as any monastery—that the modern West, dressed in the robes of progress, often resembles the ancient empires it claims to have transcended. We no longer conquer with steel, germs and gunpowder. We conquer with psychology, ethics, and PowerPoint slides.
When Freud wrote Totem and Taboo, he claimed to uncover the primal myth of mankind: the slaying of the father, the birth of guilt, the founding of morality. Yet I suspect that what he truly uncovered was a mirror—not of universal man, but of his own late-Victorian, European self. A man whose deepest crime was not against his father, but against the very idea of plurality.
Freud imagined that all peoples, in all lands, shared the same psychic drama. He took his particular discomfort—the guilt of the educated European male—and offered it as the script for the species. That, I dare say, is no small act of vanity. It is one thing to confess one's soul to the world; it is quite another to demand that the world share in one's confession.
Thus was born the idea of the repressed universal. And from it grew a curious new empire—not of territory, but of interiority. The West became the arbiter of what it means to be human. We diagnose the dreams of tribes we have never lived among, explain the trauma of those we have never loved, and call it help.
Today, the left and right of our political pantheon each carry forward this mantle in their own way.
The right, in its bluntness, declares the West superior, full stop. It speaks in the language of fortresses and flags.
But the left—ah, the left—carries the same torch with gentler hands. It speaks not of supremacy but of salvation.
It says to the so-called Third World: become like us, that you may be free. Accept our categories, our sensitivities, our latest definitions of justice and gender. We will fund your workshops, translate your sacred texts, and correct your moral missteps—patiently, lovingly, as one does with children.
Is this not the old missionary instinct, reborn in secular garb? Are we not still standing in the village square, offering the modern equivalent of eternal life—"human rights," "mental health," "liberation"—in exchange for the soul of difference?
And yet we do not see it. For we believe we are past all that. We believe we are the last tribe—the one that has no tribe, only truth. And we are deeply troubled by the fact that the rest of the world does not immediately fall to its knees before our enlightened totems.
But perhaps the fault lies not in their refusal, but in our presumption. Perhaps Freud's great error was not in imagining a myth, but in imagining that myths end. They do not. They merely change names.
We are, I think, still very tribal. We chant in digital plazas. We exile with hashtags. We draw moral lines in pixels and proclaim heresy from the pulpit of the algorithm. We are no less ritualistic than those we claim to save.
If the West is a totem now, then dissent is the new taboo. One must not question the tribe—not from the outside, certainly, but even less from within. For to do so is to be called backward, regressive, dangerous.
I offer no solution, for philosophy is not a trade of fixes. It is a mirror we dare to polish. And in that mirror, I see a people still hungry for meaning, still afraid of the wild, still huddled around the fire of their own convictions, calling it civilization.