An anthropologist visits Wall Street and - surprise! surprise! - discovers its tribalism

LINK to guardian article - i.e. book review of an ethnographic study of Wall Street by Karen Ho - from which the following quote is taken:

. . . what could be more outlandish than the tribes of Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and . . Goldman Sachs . .

This looks like a very interesting and important book, although I suspect, not having yet read it, that the detail it goes into may obscure, rather than illuminate, the underlying truth contained in the above quote from this review: the fact that these financial institutions really do behave very much as tribes - struggling for survival, advantage (over other tribes) and "success" (for themselves and their members) in their environment, which is the global economy.

We are deceived, and deceive ourselves, into believing that they (like all social, political and economic institutions) exist primarily to SERVE society, when in fact, their primary purpose is to EXPLOIT it, as an (artificial, socioeconomic) ENVIRONMENT.

This, I think, illustrates the validity of my own human-evolutionary, i.e. Darwinian, approach to understanding our civilization, i.e. the power structures of state and economy which underlie it (see my BLOG).