The Power of the Group

There is a good reason for the existence of human groups of all kinds, and for the human propensity to join, support, and be intensely loyal to them. It is called survival.

For nearly all of our species’ existence, humans lived as hunter-gatherers, roaming the earth in small groups limited in size by what their ability to get food and other resources would allow, so they were necessarily small. 

This is key: Everyone in those groups knew each other intimately and were bonded by ties of love and blood. And they depended utterly on each other for their existence. Women needed men for protection and as providers of needed protein, and for procreation. Men needed women to bear and raise children, and as patient gatherers of fruit and edible vegetation and tenders of children in camps while the men were hunting or fighting other groups for survival, or exploring. Children needed the adults, and adults needed the children to be there for them later, when age or injury imposed disabilities on the adults. And the old were needed to help with the children and to keep and pass on the wisdom they had acquired over a lifetime and the group memory and traditions and customs of the group that helped it define itself and survive.

Of course, human nature being what it is, there were surely struggles for dominance within groups, a fact of life among nearly all social mammals that carries down among humans to this day. Groups that resolved them without disruption and found a leader they could follow were the ones that survived, hence the tendency to rally around a leader today.

Humans lived like this for, it is now believed, as long as 400,000 years, and predecessor species even longer. Society, and the ability to form bonds of affinity, loyalty and even devotion, sometimes to the extreme of giving up one’s own life for one’s fellows, is ingrained in us, deeply. It is in our DNA.