To exist is to survive unfair choices.: “Tribal Ontology” in the Netflix Originals Series The OA

In 2017, Vox journalist David Roberts used the term "tribal epistemology"- borrowed from the anthropologist Helmut Wautischer (1998) - to describe a tendency for certain groups, in our current "post-truth" environment, to trust information which is "evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or correspondence to a common understanding of the world, but on whether it supports the tribe's values and goals and is vouchsafed by tribal leaders". Where tribal epistemology of the type Roberts identifies resolves problems of both being and of knowing by uniting them in a subjectivity guaranteed by what Max Weber termed the "charismatic authority" (2012) of a leader, Prairie's tribe, each of whom feels marginalized by normative society, are given agency by the knowledge they acquire. If Maggie is a fraud, then her decision to sing "Dreams" is a masterstroke: the song's familiarity immediately undermines her credibility, while her nervous, acapella delivery of it is in sharp contrast with her earlier confident oration; however, both of these factors combine to consolidate her charismatic authority over the cult. [...]of her NDE, Prairie has also learned the secrets of the multiverse and inter-dimensional travel. [...]like Maggie, Prairie may be an unreliable narrator to both her group and the audience, although her status as protagonist/audience-identification figure means that, the doubts of some of her group notwithstanding, her fantastic story is presented as genuine right up until the final episode of season one.