Author Note: I wrote this late at night. It is a rough, honest look at why we pledge unconditional loyalty to abstract concepts, using my own obsession with Liverpool FC as the baseline.
When you sit and think about loyalty, it usually seems like a pretty straightforward thing. You are loyal to your family. You are loyal to your friends. You are loyal to your dog. But all of those examples involve actual living breathing things. You can look your friend in the eye and know exactly who they are. If they do something terrible, you can have a real conversation with them and decide if you want to stay friends. Your moral compass stays intact because the relationship is a two way street. But us human beings have this weird psychological glitch where we also pledge unconditional loyalty to abstract concepts. Many times we pledge our dying loyalty to a logo, a color, or a brand name. And the craziest part is that we defend those abstract things just as hard as we defend our actual human family.
To understand how weird and strange this is objectively, we should look at professional sports, especially the soccer teams in Europe, where a team’s identity comes from the city it represents. For me, that means looking at my absolute obsession with Liverpool Football Club. I started supporting them in 2007 just because their jerseys were red, and I liked that color. I live in the United States. I am thousands of miles away from the actual city in North West England, and I have never been there. I have zero geographical reason to care about what happens over there. Yet my entire weekend gets completely ruined if they lose a match. I track the match times, watch the games early in the morning, and I buy the new jerseys every year, even though they are very expensive. I feel a deep, emotional connection to the team. But if you break down what the team actually is from a philosophical standpoint, things get really weird and interesting.
The players on the field change every few seasons. The cult favorite and really passionate manager just left and got replaced by a guy from the inferior Dutch league. The American billionaires who own the club will probably sell it eventually. The actual human beings that I am cheering for right now are completely different people from the ones I cheered for five years ago. So what exactly am I being loyal to? It is basically that old philosophy puzzle about the wooden ship. If you replace every single piece of a wooden ship over time, is it still the same ship? If you replace every single player, manager, and owner of a sports team, why do I still feel the exact same moral loyalty to it?
This is where the actual ethics come into play. When you are loyal to a person, you hold them accountable. If your friend starts stealing or cheating, you call them out because you know right from wrong. But when you are loyal to a tribe or a soccer team in this case, that moral accountability just completely vanishes. We inherit this tribalism and we absolutely refuse to let it go. We start excusing behavior that we would normally hate just because it benefits our specific group/team. If a player on my team dives and fakes an injury to get a penalty kick, I will sit on my couch and defend him to the death. I will say it was a smart tactical move and he was just playing the game. But if a player on the other team does the same exact thing, I will angrily scream at the television and call him a total cheater. My moral compass completely flips based entirely on what color shirt the person is wearing. That is a weird and terrifying concept if we zoom out and apply it to the rest of the world. It shows how easily human beings can ignore their own core ethics just to protect their tribe. I keep calling Liverpool Football Club as my tribe because, as fans, we feel like we are the twelfth man on the field and it’s something we truly belong to.
We love the comfort of a tribe. It makes us feel safe in a world that is completely chaotic and lonely. Being a fan gives you an instant community of people who agree with you. But the danger of this kind of inherited tribalism is that, it requires complete blind faith. We are essentially giving our moral proxy to a team that is a massive corporate entity thousands of miles away. We just sit back and hope the owners and the players do the right thing, but we have absolutely zero control over them. And because we have already pledged our loyalty to the logo, we are in many ways totally trapped.
If the owners try to do something incredibly greedy, like forming a breakaway super league just to make more television money or increasing the ticket prices, the fans like us are put in a terrible ethical position. Do we boycott the thing we love and lose our entire community, or do we just swallow our morals and keep buying the expensive merchandise and tickets? Most people just swallow their morals as the tribe is too important to lose. We will bend our own rules just to keep feeling like we belong to something bigger than ourselves.
This kind of thinking does tend to spill over into everything else we do. Once we train our brains to have blind loyalty to a sports team (tribe), it becomes a lot easier to have a blind loyalty to a political party or a massive corporation. We stop looking at the actual actions of the people in charge, and we just start looking at labels or the logo on their shirts. If they are wearing our colors, we defend them. If they are wearing the other colors, we disagree or don’t like them. We completely remove critical thinking from the equation because critical thinking takes effort, and tribalism is just so much easier. At the end of the day, loyalty is supposed to be a virtue. It is supposed to mean you stand by the people you care about when things get hard. But when we apply that same virtue to massive, faceless systems that do not actually care about us as much as we care about them, it becomes a massive ethical blind spot. It makes us very easy to manipulate.
I have been living in the United States for about eight years, and it has let me watch this exact sports tribalism basically take over politics here. It is honestly kind of scary, watching the political division in this country feels exactly like watching two rival soccer fan bases screaming at each other. People rarely sit down and read the actual policies anymore. They do not think deeply about the ethics of what a politician does, they just look at the color of the tie the person is wearing: red for Republicans and Blue for Democrats. If a politician from their party gets caught doing something terrible, the voters try to rationalize and very much defend them. They say the other side does much worse things. But if a politician from the rival party does the exact same thing, it is suddenly a massive ethical scandal.
Just like me every weekend sitting on my couch defending a Liverpool player for faking an injury, voters defend their political leaders because they view an attack on the party as a personal attack on themselves. We are so desperate to belong to a group that we will literally compromise our own personal sense of right and wrong just to stay in the club. We stop seeing our neighbors as regular people and start seeing them as rival fans who need to be defeated. You cannot have a real ethical society with good morals and values if everyone is just blindly cheering for their own team to win at all costs.
The crazy part is how modern technology weaponizes this loyalty against us. The algorithms on our phones know we love the comfort of our tribes. Social media apps like TikTok and Instrgram feed us constant information that makes our group look perfect and the other groups look evil. It creates this massive echo chamber. If I only follow Liverpool fan pages, I am only going to see videos that make our players look like heroes and vice versa for the opponents. We get trapped in these digital bubbles where our blind loyalty is constantly rewarded with likes and comments from other people in our same tribe. It feels really good in the moment, but it slowly destroys our ability to have empathy for anyone outside of our tribe. We lose the ability to have a normal conversation with someone who wears a different color shirt because the internet convinced us they are the enemy.
We even see this weird glitch in everyday hobbies. I play in a fantasy football league every fall. My team is called the Reverse Cowboys (please don’t judge the name of my team). It is completely made up and just a fun digital game based on real events. But the second I draft a player like Aaron Rodgers or Tyreek Hill to my roster, my brain flips a switch. Suddenly I am deeply and emotionally invested in those specific players. I will defend their bad games and argue with my friends about how great they are. I do all of this simply because they are on my digital fantasy team. I literally manufactured a fake tribe on my phone, and within a week my brain started applying real world loyalty to the players I drafted.
There is a massive difference between natural loyalty and this fake tribal loyalty. Natural loyalty actually makes sense. I have a six year old Goldendoodle, and he has really bad social anxiety. Whenever we go on walks and he sees another dog, he completely freaks out and barks because he is scared. I am incredibly loyal to him, I defend him and protect him because he is a real living creature that relies on me and is loyal to me. This is what actual ethical care looks like. The problem with us human beings is that we take that exact same protective instinct we use for our pets, and we apply it to massive faceless entities that do not even know we exist. A billion dollar soccer club does not need me to protect it. A massive political party does not need my emotional defense. When we project our deepest moral loyalty onto these giant systems, we are just giving away our power. We take our personal integrity and hand it over to people who just want to sell us expensive merchandise or get our votes. We think we are part of the team, but we are at the end of the day, really just the customers.
So how do we actually fix this without becoming totally miserable? Because honestly, I am not going to stop watching soccer. I love it way too much, and people are not going to stop caring about politics or playing fantasy sports. The goal of exploring these ideas is not to say that having a tribe is wrong. The goal is to learn how to be in a tribe while keeping your own individual moral compass completely separate.
We have to practice the highly uncomfortable skill of holding the things we love accountable. It is a really hard thing to do, it means you have to sit with the friction of admitting that your favorite team is doing something greedy, or your chosen political party is doing something unethical. You have to be willing to criticize the jersey you are wearing. True loyalty does not mean blind obedience. If you just nod your head and agree with everything they do, you are not a fan or a citizen, you are just a blind follower. This entire concept totally changes how I look at my own actions. I have to realize that my identity is not tied to the outcome of a game by a billion dollar soccer team in North West England. ‘I am my own person.’ By understanding this weird psychological thing that makes us want to blindly follow a logo, we can start to catch ourselves before we fall into the trap. We can enjoy the community of being a fan without selling our souls to the tribe. Honestly, learning how to be a part of a tribe while still thinking for yourself is probably the most important ethical skill any of us can ever develop.