Are We Ready for Space?

Why overcoming our tribal instincts matters in politics, business, and beyond.

When Captain Archer first pushed Enterprise NX-01 into warp five, not everyone was convinced humanity was ready. Ambassador Soval of Vulcan voiced what many feared: “Humans are too volatile, too violent, too emotional.”

It wasn’t only about technology. It was about whether humanity could overcome its tribal reflexes, the deep biological instinct to fear outsiders and scapegoat the “other” when under pressure.

From Primates to Populism

Biologists and psychologists have long observed that stress triggers ancient group-defense mechanisms.

• In chimpanzees, intergroup encounters are marked by hostility and sometimes lethal violence toward outsiders, accompanied by elevated cortisol, the stress hormone. These “border patrols” strengthen ingroup cohesion but at a heavy cost to outsiders (Samuni et al., 2016, Wittig et al., 2014).
• In humans, stress and uncertainty activate the “behavioral immune system”, a psychological mechanism evolved to avoid disease, but which also increases suspicion toward anyone perceived as different (Schaller, 2011, Ackerman et al., 2018).
• Neuroscience shows the amygdala, our brain’s threat detector, reacts strongly to out-group faces, especially under stressful or uncertain conditions (Phelps et al., 2000, Hart et al., 2000).

These biological reflexes once helped small groups survive. But in modern societies, they can be exploited.

How Populism Feeds on Stress

Populist politics often works like this:

1. Create or amplify stress, economic uncertainty, crime fears, cultural anxiety.
2. Trigger primal reflexes, people under stress become more suspicious of outsiders.
3. Offer a scapegoat, minorities, migrants, or other vulnerable groups.
4. Consolidate ingroup identity, “we” are strong because “they” are the problem.”

As Pan, Wolf and Merz (2021) show, stress isn’t just a backdrop, it changes how people think about outgroups, shifting memory, perception, and judgment in more negative directions.

In other words, poor governance and social disorder don’t just “happen”, they can be engineered to activate xenophobia and redirect anger away from those in power.

The Star Trek Question

Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets represents the opposite vision, a future where humanity transcends its biological reflexes and learns to cooperate across species.

Ambassador Soval’s doubt still echoes today: “Are we ready for space?” If we cannot overcome the temptation to turn suffering into scapegoats, how can we ever hope to thrive in a truly interdependent, diverse universe, let alone a globalized world?

OK, but… what does this have to do with LinkedIn?

You may be thinking: “Interesting theory, but I don’t work in politics. I work in business.”

Here’s the connection: the same biological and psychological mechanisms are at play inside organizations.

Stress in Organizations

Crises, economic downturns, tight deadlines, restructuring, act like the political “bad governance” described earlier. They generate stress. And stress primes our brains for ingroup vs. outgroup thinking:

• Colleagues start splitting into “us vs. them.”
• Blame gets shifted instead of solutions being found.
• Information gets manipulated or withheld to gain short-term advantage.

Toxic Leadership and the Populist Playbook

Toxic individuals often exploit these moments of stress to build influence:

• Creating disorder, exaggerating problems or spreading uncertainty.
• Scapegoating, pointing to a minority group, a department, or a colleague as “the reason things aren’t working.”
• Gaining followers, positioning themselves as the defender of the “real team.”

It’s the corporate equivalent of populism. And just like in politics, the long-term cost is enormous: loss of trust, fractured teams, and stalled innovation.

The Leadership Lesson

Good leaders understand that stress is contagious, and so is trust. Instead of letting primal instincts drive behavior, they actively:

• Foster psychological safety so that mistakes are discussed, not hidden.
• Ensure transparent communication so misinformation can’t spread.
• Reinforce a sense of shared mission, redirecting stress into purpose rather than scapegoating.

This is the “Federation approach”: unity in diversity, cooperation across difference, and resilience under pressure.

Final Thought

In space, survival depends on unity. In business, growth depends on trust.

Ambassador Soval once doubted humanity’s readiness for space. The question for us today, whether in politics or in the workplace, is the same:

Are we ready?

Sources

• Samuni, L., Preis, A., Mundry, R., Deschner, T., Crockford, C. and Wittig, R.M. (2016). Oxytocin reactivity during intergroup conflict in wild chimpanzees. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(2), pp.268–273. doi:https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1616812114.
• Wittig, R.M., Crockford, C., Deschner, T., Langergraber, K.E., Ziegler, T.E. and Zuberbühler, K. (2014). Food sharing is linked to urinary oxytocin levels and bonding in related and unrelated wild chimpanzees. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281(1778), p.20133096. doi:https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.3096.
• Schaller, M. and Park, J.H. (2011). The Behavioral Immune System (and Why It Matters). Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(2), pp.99–103. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721411402596.
• Ackerman, J.M., Hill, S.E. and Murray, D.R. (2018). The behavioral immune system: Current concerns and future directions. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, [online] 12(2), p.e12371. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12371.
• Phelps, E.A., O’Connor, K.J., Cunningham, W.A., Funayama, E.S., Gatenby, J.C., Gore, J.C. and Banaji, M.R. (2000). Performance on Indirect Measures of Race Evaluation Predicts Amygdala Activation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, [online] 12(5), pp.729–738. doi:https://doi.org/10.1162/089892900562552.
• Hart, A.J., Whalen, P.J., Shin, L.M., McInerney, S.C., Fischer, H. and Rauch, S.L. (2000). Differential response in the human amygdala to racial outgroup vs ingroup face stimuli. NeuroReport, 11(11), pp.2351–2354. doi:https://doi.org/10.1097/00001756-200008030-00004.
• Pan, D., Wolf, O.T. and Merz, C.J. (2021). Exposure to acute stress affects the retrieval of out-group related bias in healthy men. Biological Psychology, [online] 166, p.108210. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2021.108210.