I flew home today from Vegas, and a friend was on the same flight. We walked through the concourse to our terminal, after a standard bout of frustration with some especially barky security screening personnel. As we walked alongside and past people of varying speeds, he made a comment about hating people. There is so much dissonance between us. So much grappling for resources with perceived limitations. So many opportunities for human connection that instead become rife with miscommunication and misplaced anger.

Not wanting him to stew in hatred, I tried to argue most people were interesting and good. That society was still capable of getting along and maybe even liking each other. Then we asked a lone female in headphones, sitting in the center of a row of seats, whether or not we could join her. She sneered without even trying to hide it, moved over, and never said a word when we thanked her.

I didn’t know people actually sneered at nice, normal strangers.

This whole interaction was foreshadowed by a brunch conversation from earlier that morning. He argued that society was ruining men by discouraging them from the masculine drive to pursue challenges and conquests. In so doing, they lost their biological predisposition of defending against foes. Whether that took the form of men protecting their resources, women, or even just their pride, men who no longer cared to enter into battle over something, no longer really cared about life.

Men now find their outlet for this inclination in first player video games and overt violence over skewed principles. In the most extreme examples, these are red pill incels whose hero figures slay the women and hot “Chads” who impeded their ability to get laid. As part of a lighter fare, they are the dudes who fail to launch from their parents’ basement and are eventually featured in a documentary about guys in relationships with sex dolls. In either case, these are not one offs. In fact, I would guess they are becoming the rule more than the exception.

Men who don’t care about life don’t care about the mates, resources, and goals they would naturally desire and protect. As a result, a vacuum occurs and societal balance is shaken. Men–and women–begin to behave in ways that seem to defy logical norms.

Seth Godin made a name for himself when he wrote the book, Tribes, a 2008 tome about social and professional leadership. Godin was certainly onto something, but he chose to focus on the whipped cream and rainbows version of this concept. The dark side of his theory is how easily one can use it to appeal to darker minds. Even the Klu Klux Klan has a leader.

Tribes are everywhere. They are Taylor Swift’s stans, Starbucks devotees, and even the part of society who crowds around the luggage carousel before the belt turns on. Tribes bond around a perceived truth, whether or not it can be objectively substantiated. They create ideals around virtues, goals, and enemies.

But from an evolutionary perspective, tribes were meant as sort of a macro-scale Darwinian marker. The tribes that bested one another were able to expand and spread their social seeds. Today’s good-hearted tribes are more concerned with Instagram likes than biological fitness and world domination. They essentially retard the social, physical, and psychological progress of mankind by dumping it into the virtual, and neglectful, Bio-Dome of the internet.

What this means is that technological and ideological progress actually have the potential to destroy its makers if they lose site of why they made it in the first place. When we create advantageous systems and then use them to escape our responsibilities, rather than further our progress, we make ourselves vulnerable to the influences of tribes—good or evil—that know how to put them to work.

In short, everything can be weaponized, whether through intent or neglect.

So be nice to strangers.