Six temptations of the faithful × eleven American tribes

Parameterizingthe righteous

righteous(tribe, temptation) → the parable that’s about you

The Pharisee, Peter on the rooftop, the rich young ruler, the elder brother, the early birds in the vineyard, and Jonah: the stories Jesus aimed at the people who were already doing it right.

The other half of the sentence

I have not come to call the righteous but sinners. Mark 2:17

The outgroups page is about the sinners: who each tribe keeps out, and the eight different ways it does it. This page is about the righteous.

Jesus’s sharpest stories weren’t aimed at tax collectors. They were aimed at the devout, the loyal, the ones who’d been working since dawn. Those stories don’t ask you to love your enemy. They ask you to stop keeping score, and they usually end before you answer.

Every mechanism here is named after the one who resents, not the one who’s welcomed. Claude’s first draft got that backwards, and Malcolm caught it: I think you mean the early birds to the vineyard.

Part one

Six ways to be righteous wrong

Three about your own goodness, three about grace for someone else. None of them are vices, exactly. That’s the problem.

Part two

Eleven American tribes

The same tribes as the outgroups grid, turned around: not who they keep out, but what keeps them out of the party.

Archetypes, not census data. Every cell here describes something the tribe is genuinely good at, overdone: hold them loosely and argue with them.

Part three · your turn

Find your six

A guided walk through each one, for your own tribe. Your answers stay in this browser; nothing is sent anywhere.

Part three, abridged

The lazy version

Paste this into an LLM that knows you (one with memory works best) and let it guess your six.


    
Part four

What fell out

Patterns that showed up once the grid was filled in, and once it was set beside the outgroups page.