Christopher Donovan: The Secret to Long Life: "Right Tribe"

Christopher Donovan:  In this video, speaker Dan Buettner reviews three world spots — Sardinia, Okinawa, and Loma Linda, California (home of a community of 7th-day Adventists) — where people regularly live to be 100.

He throws in some political correctness (like claiming that the Adventists are racially mixed, which I question the extent of), but the biggest conclusion is:  You live long by having a connectedness with your fellow humans, as well as a sense of both daily and ultimate purpose.  More than drink, drugs and fried foods, it’s isolation and nihilism that kill.  Never mind the Stairmaster — get some friends.

How is “tribe life” best achieved?  Well, racial homogeniety is an unstated but obvious factor.  Neither Sardinia nor Okinawa are even remotely multiracial or multicultural.

On the basis of studies, demographic movements and a thousand personal anecdotes, I surmise that the most corrosive environments for humans are multiracial societies where everyone’s got their guard up about everyone else — including members of their own race.  Rather than cooperate and blend, they scrap and fight.  In effect, life in a multiracial society — especially for Whites denied any sense of an explicit White community — is de facto isolation.  We know that human racial groups are programmed by evolution to trust in-group members more than outsiders — not because they’re “racist” or morally deficient, but because from primitive to modern times, the outsiders were rightly seen as competitors for resources and power.

It’s not much of a stretch, then, to imagine that a lot of stress reduction comes from living in a racially homogenous setting.  Who knew that we “scary racists” were really just health gurus underneath it all?

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.