After leaving “an important part of my brain somewhere, somewhere in a field in Somerset” (sorted for pulp paraphrase) I have returned to the streets of West London…
What unites all these wonderful characters and cultures this week? Nothing other than geography. We live together in the same space. That is it. The sense of community in this neighbourhood is strong and it doesn’t matter where you are from or how long you have been here. If you live here, you are in. You belong. End of.
London has the structure and population of an ant colony but we do not work as a collective. We work as individuals who’s focus is on ourselves rather than the greater good. Ants understand that if they all join forces and share the load they can achieve all that is necessary for a harmonious and productive society . We do not understand this because if we did, we would do it. So we are basically dumber than ants.
At best we work within mini groups, be they neighbourhood communities, religions, football teams or families. These are tribes that exist within the colony but who do not co-operate together. To survive we will need to understand we are one big tribe. Only that will give us the force to fix what is broken and to survive…together we are strong, divided we are pretty useless.
ha, oops, my bad.
Thanks for the reply, let me just digest that.
I was simply referring to a possible future photographic blog illustrating tribalism in London in the same vein as the classic “The Death of Conversation” blog not death to tribalism ;)
Thank you and “The D of T” would be great if posssible. My fear is its not and this original grouping of human society is permantently in conflict within the structure of globilisation. So if we can’t kill tribalism and its incompatible with a harmonious future maybe we should return to it fully and stop trying to pretend we can go beyond it when clearly we can’t…nothing wrong with being in a tribe other than automatically puts you at odds with other tribes. in groups and out groups. its been the same since day 1. it would appear we still can’t evolve beyond our origins…and any attempt is actually sending us backwards. Our relentless pursuit of liberating the human race from the shackles of our ancestral past is ironically creating devolution…eek
Another great blog, what we need now is “The Death of Tribalism”