Olivia: Okay, Jackson. Review this book in exactly five words. Jackson: We're all traders... wearing tribal jerseys. Olivia: Ooh, I like that. Mine is: 'Openness is awesome, but we're idiots.' Jackson: Also accurate. And that pretty much sums it up. Olivia: It really does. And 'it' is Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg. What's fascinating about Norberg is his background. He's a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, so he's coming from a classical liberal perspective, but he actually started out as an anarchist in his youth. Jackson: Whoa, that's a journey. From tearing it all down to arguing for open markets. That context is key, because this book is a passionate, and some critics say maybe a little too neat, defense of openness in a world that seems to be slamming its doors shut. Olivia: Exactly. He’s writing this in 2020, with populism and nationalism on the rise globally. The book received a lot of praise for its optimistic and engaging style—The Economist even called it "fun and illuminating." But it's definitely making a strong case from a specific viewpoint. Jackson: Right, and it's built around this core tension you just mentioned. This idea that we have two competing instincts. So where does Norberg start this story? Does he argue we're naturally born traders?

Olivia: He starts 5,300 years ago, with a murder mystery. In 1991, hikers in the Alps stumble upon a body frozen in the ice. They think it's a modern mountaineer who had an accident. But it turns out to be a man from the Copper Age. We know him as Ötzi the Iceman. Jackson: Oh, I know Ötzi! The prehistoric mummy with all the tattoos. I always pictured him as this rugged, self-sufficient survivalist, living off the land. Olivia: That’s what everyone thought. But when scientists analyzed his gear, they got a massive shock. This wasn't a lone wolf. This man was the 3300 BCE equivalent of someone walking around with an iPhone. His copper axe? The copper was mined and smelted in Tuscany, hundreds of kilometers to the south. Jackson: No way. In the Copper Age? Olivia: Yes. His flint dagger came from an area around Lake Garda, also far away. His shoes were a masterpiece of engineering—a combination of bearskin, deerskin, and tree bark, constructed by a specialized cobbler. He had a quiver with arrows made from two different types of wood to optimize their flight. He was carrying the products of miners, smelters, lumberjacks, tanners, and expert craftsmen from all over the region. Jackson: So he wasn't a survivalist. He was a consumer. He was basically walking out of a prehistoric shopping mall. Olivia: He was a node in a network. A vast, ancient, and incredibly sophisticated network of trade and specialization. Norberg's point is that our 'trader' instinct—our ability to cooperate, trust strangers, and exchange goods and ideas—is ancient. It's what allowed us to progress. We've been globalizing for millennia. Jackson: That's incredible. But hold on, let's not forget the most important part of Ötzi's story. He was murdered. He had an arrowhead lodged in his shoulder and a blow to the head. Doesn't that prove the 'tribalist' side—the violence, the 'us vs. them'—was just as strong, if not stronger? Olivia: That is the absolute heart of the book. Ötzi is the perfect symbol for Norberg's entire argument. He represents the two sides of humanity in one frozen body. He lived by the hand of the trader but died by the hand of the tribalist. Jackson: So cooperation gives us the cool copper axe, but tribalism gives us an arrow in the back. It’s a constant battle. Olivia: A constant, precarious battle. And Norberg, channeling the economist Friedrich Hayek, argues that the modern open world we live in, the one that has lifted billions out of poverty, wasn't some grand design. It was an accident. It emerged in the gaps, in the places where authority wasn't strong enough to crush it. Hayek has this amazing quote: "Civilization is dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen." Jackson: That’s a terrifying thought. That this whole system of progress is fragile and accidental. It feels like we're walking on a frozen lake that could crack at any moment. Olivia: And that's why Norberg spends the whole second half of the book exploring why that tribal instinct is so powerful and so easy to trigger. He wants to understand the cracks in the ice.

Jackson: Okay, so what’s the best evidence for this? How does he show that we're so easily pushed into this tribal mindset? Olivia: He uses one of the most famous and unsettling experiments in the history of psychology: the Robbers Cave experiment from 1954. A social psychologist named Muzafer Sherif took twenty-two 11-year-old boys—all white, Protestant, middle-class, from stable homes, all well-adjusted—and sent them to a summer camp at Robbers Cave State Park. Jackson: This already sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. Olivia: It kind of is. He secretly split them into two groups and let them bond separately for a week. They gave themselves names: the Rattlers and the Eagles. They developed their own inside jokes, norms, and flags. They were happy. Then, on day six, Sherif revealed the existence of the other group. Jackson: And I'm guessing they didn't decide to form a book club. Olivia: Instantly, hostility. They started calling each other names. Sherif then introduced competitive games—baseball, tug-of-war—for a prize. And things descended into chaos. The Eagles lost a game and, as a response, burned the Rattlers' flag. The Rattlers retaliated by raiding the Eagles' cabin, flipping beds, and stealing their things. It escalated to fistfights. The camp counselors, who were secretly researchers, had to physically separate them to prevent serious injuries. Jackson: These were identical kids just a week earlier! That's insane. They created two warring tribes out of thin air. Olivia: Exactly. Sherif's conclusion was chilling. He wrote that conflict doesn't require any real, deep-seated differences. It can be provoked between any set of groups if you just put them in a context of rivalry over what they perceive as limited resources. Even if the resource is just a trophy and bragging rights. Jackson: That's terrifying. So all it takes is putting us in different colored t-shirts? It’s like that Jerry Seinfeld bit about sports fans. The players change, the team might move to another city, but we stay loyal. We're not rooting for the players, we're just 'rooting for the clothes'! Olivia: Norberg uses that exact quote! He says we are, in fact, just like Seinfeld’s fans, rooting for the clothes. Another study he cites showed that our brains register more pleasure seeing a rival fan get an electric shock than they do empathy. Jackson: Wow. Okay, that's dark. This brings up the big question, then. Does this mean we're doomed? Is this tribal programming so deep that we're always going to be fighting over flags and jerseys, real or metaphorical?

Olivia: That’s the million-dollar question, and Norberg ends on a surprisingly hopeful note. He says our tribal wiring is a default setting, but it's not our destiny. The key is that our definition of 'us' is incredibly fluid. Jackson: What do you mean by fluid? A Rattler is a Rattler. Olivia: He tells a harrowing story from the Rwandan genocide to illustrate this. At a convent, a Hutu mother superior named Sister Gertrude was sheltering Tutsi refugees. When the Hutu militias came, she handed over the Tutsi women and children to be murdered. A truly horrific act of tribalism. Jackson: That's awful. Olivia: But here's the twist. She refused to hand over the Tutsi nuns in the convent. For her, in that moment, their shared identity as Catholic nuns—their religious 'jersey'—was more important than their ethnic one. A young Tutsi woman who wasn't yet a nun begged Sister Gertrude for a veil, a piece of cloth, to save her life. She was refused, and she was killed. Jackson: Oh man. So a piece of clothing, a different 'jersey,' was literally the difference between life and death. Olivia: It shows that we're constantly choosing which tribe we belong to. As the writer Amartya Sen says, a person is not just a Hutu, but also a Rwandan, an African, a laborer, a father, a human being. The danger comes when we're pressured to see ourselves through only one of those identities. Jackson: So the trick is to make our 'in-group' as big as possible—to see ourselves as part of 'Team Humanity' instead of just our little corner. To choose the biggest, most inclusive jersey we can find. Olivia: That's the core of it. The solution to the problems caused by openness isn't to close ourselves off. It's to become more open. It's to use what Norberg calls 'contact theory'—genuinely interacting with other groups, finding common goals, and realizing their humanity. It’s what eventually happened at Robbers Cave, by the way. The only way Sherif could get the boys to stop fighting was to manufacture crises—a broken water pipe, a truck stuck in the mud—that both groups had to work together to solve. Jackson: They had to become one big team to fix a common problem. That’s a powerful lesson for today. Olivia: It really is. And it makes you think, what 'jerseys' are you wearing every day without even realizing it? The jersey of your political party, your nationality, your profession, even your favorite sports team? Jackson: That’s a question we should all be asking ourselves. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Find us on our socials and tell us about a time you saw these 'trader' vs. 'tribalist' instincts play out in your own life. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.