A rise or fall in the hierarchy of superorganisms has other profound effects on a society’s collective psyche. It transforms the emotions and shared values of the human herd. The nation moving up embraces adventure. The country moving down abandons the strange and buries its head in the familiar. It tries to march backward in time. These shifts in

the original question remains: What does this steadily throbbing shimmer hold for us? How is it revising our ideas about the larger human project? What continuities remain, and how do we contend—collectively and individually—with all the breaks and rifts, all the spots where traditions can no longer carry us over?

However, as most anthropologists will attest, humans are wired to live in curated collectives, as opposed to mass societies. So people formed new tribes within a larger society in order to find a “place” where they belonged. The French sociologist Michel Maffesoli referred to these new tribes as “neotribes.” The behavioral patterns within these neo