Tribalism is the identification and labeling of a phenomenon of human behavior, and is not itself an explanation of
why that human behavior occurs. You did nothing more than put a name to what we are discussing. You have posited that it is itself a primal, instinctual drive, but that's not said on that page. The closest is: "People have postulated that the human brain is hard-wired towards tribalism due to its evolutionary advantages." I'm not saying it isn't. Saying that the brain is naturally inclined to a behavior is not the same as saying the behavior itself is instinctual drive.
Spotting differences isn't arbitrary; we do it constantly. We couldn't operate without it. It's an essential part of life. It is natural that we apply it to each other. What causes things like tribalism is we are inclined to like people who are similar to ourselves. The more someone reflects ourselves back to us, the more we like them. We like people who think what we do because we like what we think;
we wouldn't think it if we didn't.
Difference is a fact, a reality. If someone couldn't identify differences, they lack awareness and are cognitively inferior to someone that can. The issue is
why people are motivated to make such a big deal about differences between each other.
Let me quote a piece of that Wiki article to illustrate what I'm saying:
Quote:
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According to a study by Robin Dunbar at the University of Liverpool, primate brain size is determined by social group size. Dunbar's conclusion was that the human brain can only really understand a maximum of 150 individuals as fully developed, complex people (see Dunbar's number). Malcolm Gladwell expanded on this conclusion sociologically in his book, The Tipping Point. According to these studies, then, "tribalism" is in some sense an inescapable fact of human neurology, simply because the human brain is not adapted to working with large populations. Beyond 150, the human brain must resort to some combination of hierarchical schemes, stereotypes, and other simplified models in order to understand so many people.
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According to that paragraph, tribalism is the result of
insufficient ability to recognize combinations of variations. While that discards the notion that identification of difference
in itself is not the problem, it still has nothing to with providing the real answer for why ethnocentrism is so prevalent. I have provided a substantive reason.
I don't know why the distinction I'm making here is hard to grasp.