Membership: The Membership Instinct

Where does our need for membership come from? There’s a lot of research about this: from Freud to Edmond to Bowlby. They have all looked at why people become members and the need for attachment.

There are two basic reasons we become members: the first is survival, and the second is to meet basic psychological and biological needs. I want to talk about both because it might help you understand why you need to be a member.

1. Survival needs: We know that babies that are deprived of close human contact actually have higher mortality rates. You just have to read Bowlby and see that humans are predisposed to form close, strong attachments. Partly that's evolutionary. Before 75% of the wild animals were extinct, humans were in the minority in a world of animals and nature. Surviving on your own is much more difficult than surviving in a group. So, membership is based on evolution, we needed groups to be able to survive. That makes sense. Part of that is still in our reptile brain, that we survive more in a group than we do on our own.