Tribe?

What is one's tribe? Wherefore nationality? It's an interesting question, given that we all inhabit an isolated world of one, where all external input, stimulus or effect is mediated through our own, solitary and most definitely, individual perceptual apparatus. We can only experience our own experience - no-one else's perception can be the same: our experience is, de facto, unique to us.

Yet we share commonalities of experience between us: agreed by intellect or base emotion to be shared amongst us in some way. The foundations of societies, religions and politics are based on these assumed social experiences, becoming the tenets by which we collectively associate with each other. Or not.

Given the tenuous grip on 'reality' that our isolated, individual consciousness has, it would seem that assumptions of any shared reality are hopeful at best, and yet, over time, we've managed occasionally in our collective history, to transcend the boundaries of the individual and form bonds which bind groups of us higher apes together in a co-operative and communal way.

The question of tribe or nationality: to what or to whom do you cleave during your evanescent existence? Our experience of what we perceive to be 'Our World' changes second by second, hour by hour, day by day, and year by year, according to our brain chemistry, pathology, age and disease; and with these changes, those allegiances also change. Nothing is certain, nothing is fixed, except entropy: all tends to the void, at the end of it. In the meantime, we can try and be good citizens of this, our only world, and share some of the experience we find common to us all for our mutual benefit.