Find A Tribe?

This has been making the InterWeb Rounds.

On the one hand, I find a great deal of truth in it.  If you have not been out in any kind of social milieu in, say, the last ten years, you would be quite surprised to find how to true this is.  At least in my own experience, most place where people gather - be they career, religious, professional, or even just enjoyable - are exactly like this.   People keep to "safe", non-controversial topics (although this are dwindling more and more as we speak) or topics with very limited boundaries:  what you did this weekend, how is your family doing, what about the weather.  In this sense the InterWeb has been a great tool in helping folks to find their "tribe", be it intellectual, social, or even activity based.

On the other hand, this is an alarming trend.

To read the conquest of any territory, especially in the ancient world, is to read the story of how a united people were victorious against "tribes", whether you call them families or clans or petty kingdoms.  The great empires of old - Persia, Rome, Charlemagne, even Great Britain - succeeded because they fought as one while the tribes fought individually - and as individual units, they had their own interests which could be managed, purchased, or exploited.  Sometimes a major leader might bring together several tribes, whether successfully (Arminus at the Teutoberger Wald in 9 A.D, where German tribes destroyed a Roman task force and stopped Roman expansion north of the Rhine) or unsuccessfully (the Jacobite Rebellion, 1688-1746, where the entire Scottish structure was completely undone) - but these ultimately represented only temporary victories at best or, even worse, the leader becoming the Empire which he had overthrown (Alexander the Great, for example).

If I were an enemy, this is precisely what I would want.  Spread dissension, spread discord, spread a weakening of shared ties instead of a strengthening of them, and suddenly your opponent is either ripe for the taking or will dissolve into a series of internal conflicts - maybe civil war if you are lucky - leaving you as the victor having expended no effort at all.

Perhaps I am overthinking this issue a bit, because I definitely find myself in the position of having to be small, be quiet, and be gray.  But surely it is not without noting that no social construct can ultimately survive its own atomization?