Respect, Shame and the Death of Humour

It is almost impossible to achieve the kind of respect our parents enjoyed because in the Tribe of One no one has enough of a sense of belonging. A sense of belonging to a group implied observance of a code of conduct and deviation from that code results in shame - god examples of course receive respect for the person.

Shame and Respect are essential conterparts; there can be no respect wothout shame and no shame without respect but more importantly there vcan be nothing of either unless their is a sense of belonging. So where does this sense of belonging come from - there is a misguided belief that belonging is a gift from a group - awarded or witheld by some aggregate will. The reality is a sense of belonging stems from the desire to belong - rejection can only be a consequence of a failed application - the key is the desire to belong.

As I write this the BBC is missing a golden opportunity to sack its most outrageously overpaid comedian and renegotiate his salary to a more palatable level for an entertainer. Why has outrageous behaviour become the new 'funny'? Because we have substituted actual comedy for the giggly titter resulting from witnessing something we might not be caught for - but this time someone has. Ever since Tiswas, we have watched anarchic behaviour portrayed as comedy - but its not its just anarchic behaviour, and as it becomes popular so it escalates to be more and outrageous until some senior gentleman has obscene messages left on his answer machine.

Why have we let this happen? Because in the Tribe of One there is no belonging and therefore no respect and no shame.

No More Heroes

It's easy for baby boomers to identify with heroes; Shackleton, Bader, Scott, Churchill, Monty. These were ordinary people doing extraordinary things and they were celebrated in the papers and in the pub and became part of our popular culture – a culture of service, not self; dedication to a cause which was not expressed as a bank balance.

These people felt they belonged to something bigger than themselves and they worked some until they dropped in their tracks to serve.When we look for heroes today we get pop singers and sports stars. You say there are no wars to test our metal but there is only one calendar year since the Second World War when the British Army has not had fatalities in action. OK so not every family has someone at the front as in WWII but there are real heroes being made in Afghanistan and Iraq – and some of them are dying for the honour too.

No, we prefer to follow the fortunes of footballers and pop stars. Footballers and pop stars provide a role model for us to break into the world of glamour and celebrity that fills their eyes and ears from every information channel. These modern day heroes are characterised by people who have done well for themselves, not people who have done well for others. Self sacrifice has been replaced by self-aggrandisement.

Modern Heroes reflect the isolation of The Tribe of One.

I am invisible - Interest versus Influence

We have at our finger tips access to a new world of information, but more than this - we are involuntarily bombarded with information as new channels of information emerge. The internet, broadband, mobile phones, texts, advertising all come gushing information at us and the axiom of being told is that we should listen. Do you know anyone who will watch the ‘least bad’ programme on television rather than turn it off? Who gets hooked on soaps? It is human nature to gather information – we are hard wired to do it – but when this capacity to retrieve information is satisfied by showbiz gossip or details of the lives of ‘celebrities’ we just don’t know when to stop, like kids in a sweet shop.

We are running 21^st century way-of-life ‘software’ on way-we-are ‘hardware’ that hasn’t evolved in thousands of years – the human instinct to seek knowledge is now perverted by receiving a plethora of useless half truths from a myriad of sources. As our information environment has grown exponentially, what has happened to our ability to influence the worlds around us? Of course there has been no shift at all in the way-we-are; we live at the same pace, for roughly the same period of time and so can achieve pretty much the same in our lives as our parents and theirs before them.

This disparity between our growing sphere of interest and our stable sphere of influence creates a powerful illusion; we seem to live ever more hectic lives, but we feel increasingly impotent, somehow smaller, somehow isolated. This illusion of hectic lives encourages us to seek ways of relaxing so we watch more TV, eat ready meals, and enjoy more leisure than at any time in history - so we achieve less than our full potential.

We feel smaller and smaller, am I invisible?

In the Beginning

In the beginning, I was only surprised by my own inner ‘grumpy old man’ but as I discussed my observations with a wide range of friends and colleagues it seemed evident that we experience the same phenomenon; the increasing isolation of the individual and dislocation from society – the creation of The Tribe of One.

The Tribe of One explores the phenomenon driving changes to traditional social behaviour in the Western world and seek out links between them in order to identify a root cause. The Tribe of One is not about religion – although we can recognise that organised religion has had a large part to play in establishing our traditional values well beyond our relationship with the Almighty. The Tribe of One is about understanding what may be driving these changes and how we should embrace or resist them.

If you know all the characters in Neighbours but don’t know your own neighbours then the Tribe of One is for you. If you spend your weekends as a stranger in one community and then spend the week as a stranger in another then the Tribe of One is for you.

Were are together alone in this Tribe of One.