Reading one book helped me decide to apply for a residency training program in psychiatry. That book was Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates by the brilliant sociologist, Erving Goffman. Employing the sociological method of participant observer, Goffman witnessed and described the psychiatric hospital as a total institution where patients and staff divided into separate tribal groups. Though they spent most of their waking hours together, each social group developed identities wholly separate from the other, despite continuous engagement. Patients were socialized into models of mental illness chronicity: compliant, quiet,  dependent, incapable of self-activation, totally reliant on directives from hospital staff.Asylums to me, and many others in the field of mental health care, signaled the need to break through the total institution model, to revolt against the institutionalization of the mentally ill and restore to them a capacity for surviving socially in the world outside the institute. These were heady times, a truly revolutionary period in psychiatry that produced inciteful leaders like R.D. Laing and his anti-psychiatry cohorts who experimented with unbounded care of seriously ill patients, many diagnosed with schizophrenia, in the famed Kingsley Hall in London. Thomas Szasz, an American-based psychiatrist, formed the American Association for the Abolition of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization. He advocated that schizophrenia and the psychiatric concept of psychosis were socio-political myths.Breaking the tribal dimensions of mental patients, who swelled the populations of psychiatric hospitals, and freeing them from the invisible but unyielding chains of their  institutionalized identity inspired me to join ranks with this new kind of psychiatry. Witnessed from inside, I saw the personal damage that prolonged hospitalization can wreak. And I saw the tribal forms of two social groups, staff and patients, sharing the same space, though totally differently.  I came to understand how mutual distrust and dislike and a panoply of different values, attitudes, styles of relating, and even linguistic expression would develop within a shared, almost intimate dominion.Then I understood first-hand how every city, state, nation is internally subdivided, over and over again. How social entities form—must form apparently—in order to achieve a durable, predictable identity of belonging and attachment.Political parties reap power and persuasiveness by deliberately formulating tribal identities that do not depend on shared facetime, unlike the social groups in which we all participate, often profusely..

"Propaganda pushes the reformation of a tribe so that it will adhere to a proposed agenda."

.And the instrument that binds adherents of political—and also religious—entities is propaganda; that is, the creation of formulas for expressing opinions and beliefs and styles of what Goffman called self-presentation. Propaganda is now a soiled concept, though its use has proliferated since first formally developed by Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew, who immigrated to the U.S. as a child in the 1890s. He was a public relations mastermind, working with major corporations, government agencies, politicians, and non-profit organizations. Developing theories, now deeply embedded, Bernays described people as essentially irrational and bent toward herd instinct; he explained how practical manipulation using crowd psychology and psychoanalysis—appealing to indirect, subconscious desires— could control the "masses." HIs theory and methods were detailed in his book, Propaganda, which is said to have been Nazi propaganda minister Goebells' personal bible.The deliberate use of propaganda has by now become a permanent fixture in advertising, political slogans, social movements, op-ed statements, and that most ancient and socially consolidating use of language: gossip.Tribalism has been a prominent feature of human societies since the dawn of our time. But over the many eons the tribe has become layered and permeated by more than the bonds of local connectedness. Contemporary tribes are layered—often with considerable overlaps—into kinships, religious affiliations, racial identities, political positions, sexual orientations, sexually-defined roles, technological connections, nationalist beliefsand so on . And all such tribes use and are subject to Bernays' methods of amoral social directives.The advent of "fake news,"  the creation and public repetition of distorted ideas, even the promulgation of naked lies adhere to that proven, terrifyingly effective public relations methodology.Tribes always consider that the messages they promote are for the good. Nazis believed that the core of humanity, so-called Aryans, was endangered by the infective powers of people they defined as inferior and destructive to humanity. Propaganda can push the reformation of a tribe so that it will adhere to any proposed agenda, however good or evil.In 1920 Bernays, working for the makers of Lucky Strike, created an advertising campaign to increase cigarette use by women by promoting the idea that the beauty of women would benefit from the use of cigarettes to substitute for sweets. Women began smoking more but still mostly at home. To increase smoking in public Bernays arranged for young women of the Women's Party to march in the heavily reported 1929 Easter Day parade, all smoking their "Torches of Freedom." The campaign was a huge success.Every fool has his day. More fool us.