Tribal Isolation

It's April 1967. Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California. History teacher Ron Jones is having the kind of week that's about to go spectacularly sideways. He's teaching World History to a bunch of sophomores. They are discussing Nazi Germany when some kid asks a question: "How could the German people just go along with it? We'd never do that." Jones pauses for a hot second and thinks, "I'll just show them a little example."

Day 1 starts simple enough. Jones introduces "strength through discipline." Posture straight. Questions answered standing. Precise hand movements. Basic stuff any drill sergeant would approve of. By the end of class, his usually chaotic teenagers are moving with military precision. Some stay after class to perfect their technique, like they're training for the Olympics of Sitting Straight.

By Day 3, they have a name - The Third Wave. A salute. A motto. Members start reporting other students for "insufficient discipline." One kid gets confronted for "walking wrong" between classes. The school newspaper's editor writes a critical article and gets banned from class - which would be a perfect lesson about censorship if anyone was still paying attention to the irony.

Meanwhile, other teachers are complaining that their students are now demanding to sit at attention. The school librarian reports students excluding "non-members" from study groups. The cafeteria has somehow spontaneously segregated itself based on whether people are doing the Wave salute or not.

On Day 5, Jones walks into a room of over 200 students from all over the school. They're waiting to hear about a "National Third Wave Youth Movement" announcement. Some have brought friends from other schools. Everyone is sitting perfectly straight.

Jones tells them they've just participated in recreating the rise of the Nazi party. The room goes dead silent. Probably the first time the teenagers have ever been quiet out of shame rather than boredom.

Some 50 years later, another group of people are learning about belonging the hard way. In an office building, an acquisition is going exactly as planned - which is to say, completely off the rails.

The acquiring company's executives expected some resistance. A few rage-quits, maybe some passive-aggressive Slack messages. What they didn't expect was for the "acquired talent" to transform into cultural fundamentalists overnight.

People who used to joke about their old company's terrible coffee are now hoarding the remaining beans like doomsday preppers. Engineers who wrote "this code is shit" in comments last year are now defending the same code like it's their grandmother's secret recipe.

Each morning, fewer badges tap against the turnstile. Those who remain gather in corners, speaking in a language of inside jokes and obscure acronyms that mean nothing to outsiders. Their shared history has become an exclusive club, their mantra a weary "That's not how we do it here." They're not preserving a culture anymore - they're fossilizing one.

In the HR system, resignation letters pile up like autumn leaves. Most cite "pursuing other opportunities" as the reason. None mention that their only opportunity is to become someone else's cautionary tale, another wave of refugees searching for that thing they didn't know they loved until someone tried to take it away.