Hi there. I'm Jason Gots, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

I don't know about you, but for me, middle school was horrible. I arrived at an all-male school

in a very homophobic era as a small, nervous Michael Jackson fanatic. Don't worry. I'm going

somewhere with this. For three

years, life was hell. Then I found my tribe, the drama nerds. Maybe we couldn't beat you up,

but you had to respect the artistry. In high school, tribalism was power. My guest today is Yale

law professor Amy Chua, who shook the internet up a few years back with her book Battle Him

of the Tiger

Mother. What upset some progressive American parents most, it seems, was the suggestion

that they were members of a parenting tribe, a cultural bubble with its own fallible set of assumptions.

In her powerful new book, Political Tribes, Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, Amy points out that long past high school,

group instinct is much stronger than Americans generally like to admit, and that this cognitive

blind spot has led to our repeatedly shooting ourselves in the foot at home and abroad. Welcome to

think again, Amy. Thanks so much for having me. So I think let's start with the cultural bubble that I and maybe many members of this audience

occupy, which is the progressive liberal American or Western cultural bubble.

It's not comfortable for us to think of ourselves as a tribe, but you're very clear about the ways in which tribal instinct is alive and well there.

Yeah, you know, if you think about it, the entire Enlightenment Project, the American

experiment was, in a sense, a way to overcome tribalism.

You know, these beautiful concepts that I love, democracy, individualism, rule of law,

even free markets, right?

This is a way that we are going to get away from sectarian, religious warfare, ethnic,

all these old-fashioned things that people killed each other for.

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