In 1375, a North African statesman in his early forties, sick to death of courts (and with good reason to be) withdrew with his family to the castle of Qal'at Ibn Salama, on the edge of the high plateau, in what is now western Algeria. He accepted the protection of a desert tribe, whose word he had come to trust. Behind him was a career that might have served as an abstract of his century. The Black Death, sweeping through Tunis in 1348, had carried off both his parents. He had served a succession of rulers, been imprisoned by one of them for nearly two years, changed allegiance when prudence suggested, and been sent into exile more than once. He had seen enough of princes to know that they rarely understood the forces that raised them up, and never the forces that brought them down.
In the relative peace of the castle he began to write; and by the autumn of 1377 he had finished the draft of an introduction to a universal history. He called it the Muqaddimah.
The author's name was Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun, and his book remains one of the most penetrating works of social analysis the world has produced. At its center is a single idea, for which he used the word asabiyyah: group feeling, solidarity, the invisible force that makes a collection of individuals act as one body.
The argument was simple: Groups rise and fall on the strength of their asabiyyah.
A tight band of people, bound by shared hardship and mutual loyalty, displaces a softer, richer, longer-established power. But their victory brings wealth; wealth brings ease; and ease dissolves the hardship that was the source of the band's cohesion in the first place. Having won, the group begins to come apart at the seams, and in time it falls to a newer group that still possesses what the first has lost.
Hardship makes the group, the group makes the dynasty, the dynasty makes wealth, and wealth unmakes the group.
Ibn Khaldun traced this through the Berber tribes, the Arab caliphates, and the kingdoms of the Maghreb, and he reckoned the length of the cycle to be about three generations: the founder who remembers the desert, the son who learned of it from his father, and the grandson who knows it only as a story.
He believed he was describing dynasties.
He was describing something older than dynasties, and something newer, and something a great deal more general.
The founders of every Unicorn, every billion-dollar company, like to reminisce about their early days like veterans remembering a glorious campaign. There were nine people in the room before the product launched; there were the weeks when no one went home; there was the ferocity of shared purpose, between young firebrands, who had nothing yet and wanted everything.
What they're describing, likely without knowing the word, is asabiyyah at its height: a cohesion forged from shared scarcity and shared stakes.
Airbnb began in 2007 when two young designers in San Francisco, unable to meet their rent, laid air mattresses on their floor and charged strangers to sleep on them. A year later, with a third founder and very little money, they were selling novelty boxes of breakfast cereal to keep the company alive. The adversity was not incidental to the culture that followed; it was the foundation on which that culture stood, giving everyone present a common reference, a set of trials endured together, and a loyalty that only mutual dependence breeds.
Then came the venture capital, the hiring, and in December 2020 the public offering. Within a few years Brian Chesky, the chief executive, was dismantling his own organizational chart and preaching a return to the way the company had been run at the beginning.
But men seldom talk of returning to first principles until they've left them.
The original group feeling can't be restored by a retreat to the founder's values, because it wasn't produced by those values.
It was produced by conditions, and the conditions are gone.
The literature of management has labored over this problem for decades without getting anywhere particularly useful.
Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team sets out the stages of the decline: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, inattention to results. But Lencioni offers these as causes; Ibn Khaldun would have recognized them as symptoms, a description of what the absence of asabiyyah feels like.
The Ramones were four young men from Forest Hills, Queens, who by 1976, the year of their first record, had absorbed one another's sensibilities so thoroughly that the result sounded like a single temperament. Affection had little to do with it. Johnny had zero patience for Joey, the tall, shy, liberal singer; Dee Dee would later describe the atmosphere within the group as largely hostile. But they were bound together by the neighborhood that produced them, by the music industry's refusal to take them seriously, and by years of playing small clubs for little money in the service of a project that worked only if all four of them showed up.
The records of those years are remarkable for their internal discipline - with every instrument locked to every other, by a group making collective decisions in sound and in real time, however grim their view of each other.
In the early 1980s Johnny took up with Joey's girlfriend, Linda, and later married her. The two men went on sharing a stage for more than a decade afterward, and are said to have scarcely spoken to each other at all. Touring had become an obligation. The industry that had ignored them had grown rich on bands that copied them. The solidarity of shared exclusion, which had held them together, had nothing left to push against. They disbanded in 1996, after twenty-two years. Joey died in 2001, Dee Dee in 2002, Johnny in 2004.
They couldn't bear to be in the same room with each other.
The Ramones are one example. The Beatles lost their manager Brian Epstein in August 1967, and with him the external center of gravity around which relationships already under strain had continued to revolve. The quarrels of 1969 over the finances of Apple Corps and who should be trusted to manage them were hardly a sudden eruption, and they certainly weren't Yoko's fault. They were just what asabiyyah looks like when it runs out: energy once directed outward, toward achievement, turning inward, toward conflict.
A circle of friends formed in a particular setting, a school, a neighborhood, the first years of a career, possesses asabiyyah in the same way as a young company. Everyone is passing through the same experience at once. The group has no need to manufacture a reason to cohere, because the reason lies all around it.
Then the setting changes.
People move away. Careers diverge. Marriages alter the geometry of the group; children consume their parents' hours; one member grows rich and another does not. What's left is a set of relationships that must now be sustained by deliberate effort rather than by proximity. Some groups manage the passage. Most contract. A few members emerge from the wider circle still close, and the larger formation dies.
Ibn Khaldun wouldn't have been surprised. The conditions that produced the cohesion had changed, and so the cohesion changed. A group can't be held together by the wish to hold it together, any more than a company can be held together by announcing that it has a Great Culture etc.
The instinct of the management consultant is to treat a failed team as a problem someone caused: the founder who wouldn't delegate, the drummer whose ego outgrew the band, the friend who moved away and didn't reply in the group chat, etc. The instinct of popular psychology is to treat cohesion as something available to and achievable by any group that tries hard enough, if only its members communicate better and hold their retrospectives faithfully.
Ibn Khaldun is less forgiving about it. In his account the dissolution of asabiyyah is almost inevitable, brought about by success as surely as by failure. The very things a group achieves, stability, resources, recognized standing, remove the conditions that made it cohere. A company that reaches scale no longer faces the existential stakes that forced its first employees to rely on one another. A band that fills arenas has left behind the scarcity and obscurity that formed its character. A circle of friends that reaches settled middle age has lost the proximity and common striving that first gave it life.
The groups that resist the cycle are those that contrive to rebuild the structural conditions of cohesion: not the feeling of the early days, which can't be summoned, but the mechanisms that produced it. These are shared challenges that demand mutual dependence, stakes borne by the group collectively, and pressure from outside that makes solidarity within a practical necessity rather than a professed ideal.
Patagonia, over some fifty years, has maintained something nearer to durable cohesion than most companies manage. The explanation its founder, Yvon Chouinard, has offered is consistent: the company has deliberately kept an identity under siege, a mission that sets it at odds with larger economic forces, a sense that its people are engaged in something requiring solidarity because the surrounding world is hostile to it. In 2022 Chouinard carried the logic to its conclusion, transferring ownership of the company to a trust and a nonprofit devoted to fighting the climate crisis. Whether all this reflects strategy or merely the temperament of an unusual founder is a fair question. The structural feature, however, is plain. The company has preserved the conditions that produce asabiyyah by keeping the stakes alive.
That's the rare case.
Most groups can't manage it, because most don't perceive what's happening to them until the cohesion is already gone.
Ibn Khaldun was no pessimist. He was a historian, and he understood that cycles don't end; they repeat. New groups rise with fresh asabiyyah and displace the old. The Berber tribes he described had once been the new formation with the binding energy, and newer formations would displace them in turn.
He lived to see the proof. In the winter of 1401, now an old man in the service of the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, he was lowered by rope from the walls of besieged Damascus to meet the conqueror Timur, whose armies were at that moment demonstrating asabiyyah at full strength across half of Asia. The two men talked for weeks. Ibn Khaldun died in Cairo five years later. The Mamluk state he had served, itself founded by a hardened caste of slave soldiers, lasted another century before falling to the Ottomans.
It's an enormously clarifying frame - if you can read it without sentiment. The company that loses its early energy doesn't lose it because the founders were weak or the investors mistaken. The band that falls apart doesn't fall apart for want of talent. The circle of friends that contracts doesn't contract through anyone's disloyalty.
The cohesion was produced by conditions, and when those conditions changed, so did the cohesion.
You might as well blame them for succeeding.