"It's a good contact." That's what a member of the Six-Degrees tribe in Manhattan yelled into the phone at me. Although I was not an official member of the tribe, I wandered onto its reservation often enough for freelance assignments that its rules were imposed on me.
Mindlessly I complied. I talked to this "good contact," who was a reporter with a financial publication about how it had been writing speeches for Lee Iacocca. Since that experience had occurred 25 years ago and Iacocca had fallen from grace, I was not a happy camper.
"But you did it." That's what my executive coach pointed out to me when, several months later, I ranted about that episode. I knew something about it annoyed me enough to pop for that coaching session.
"Yes, I did." That's what I answered and that's what I wanted to drill down into. Why did I obey the tribal rules, especially when speaking with that particular reporter would hurt my current reputation since a) Iacocca was Nowhere Man and b) I was struggling to position myself as a new-media guru not an old-line speechwriter for old-economy industries.
Coach and I looked at this. The bottom line was that tribal life sucked me in. Such cohesive groups with such certainty about their values, as Joel Kotkin points out in his book "Tribes," satisfy very primitive needs in us. Belonging to a tribe, even by casual association, confers on us a clear sense of identity, entitlement of being special, and the illusion of security.
Okay, I understood how tribal dynamics operate. But why did I get sucked in? After all, I was someone who had left my own working-class ethnic tribe in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1963. I accepted a scholarship to an out-of-state college, then a fellowship to an even farther out graduate school, and then admission to Harvard Law School. It took all that and more to break from the tribe, at least emotionally. Actually, it wasn't until the surrogate matriarch, my older sister died in 2001, that I could declare myself free. And was.
Intuitively, you bet, I knew the high price we pay for being in a tribe. Yet, I had wandered onto the reservation. The work my coach assigned me was to find out why I still longing and looking for a group to become apart of.
Lack of confidence, I realized, was the answer. I wanted/needed that illusion of being enveloped by the magical protection of tribal membership. It took totally breaking away from my original tribe in 2001 to start my lonely journey away from those primitive needs. Confidence came. It had to, I guess. I was the chief in charge of taking care of me.
Now, I see the cracks in the Six Degrees of that Manhattan tribe. Unlike the wisdom articulated by network expert Duncan J. Watts in "Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age," that particular tribe cultivates only contacts that have been declared by The Establishment, such as New York media, as The Influentials. They don't bother with the so-called "weak links," that is the upstarts like Chip Griffin, Toby Bloomberg, and Paul Chaney, who are re-shaping communications in a digital age.
Showing off one day, newly confident me tried to explain to that Manhattan tribe that it's those weak links that usually get you results, not the Anointed Gatekeepers whose mission it is to prevent us from getting results. The tribal leaders laughed. It sounded to me like the cruel demonic laughter John Milton describes in "Paradise Lost."
But, that sound is becoming more muted, isn't it. And probably less certain and frequent. That specific tribe and other ones in Manhattan are struggling to continue to live by their code. As they do that, the upstarts or nomadic wanderers like myself are becoming adept at bypassing those primitive pulls to belong, to feel special, to assume entitlement and to believe in safety and security. We're just out there, not tied to anything which stands between us and opportunity.
Will I laugh when the tribes are forced into the economic desert? By then, it won't matter, will it. The world will already be doing all the laughing, wondering how any group of supposed influentials could have been locked into a losing paradigm. The 21st century is no place for old forms of trialization.
Comments