Sunday, March 19, 2023

Save the Canaries excerpt -- What we want and what we need

 WHAT WE NEED AND WHAT WE WANT

After many years of experience and lots of research, I’ve boiled it down to an idea somebody had a long time ago. Here is what we want and need. 

                We need a sense of autonomy and a sense of belonging. 

                We want reliable ways to get both every day.


In the past 15 or so years of my intentional spiritual journey and all the years of accidental spiritual journey before that, I’d begun to hone in on these two. In men’s work I learned that being heard (seen, recognized, accepted) was huge! So huge that I judged it to be a need every bit as fundamental as food and shelter. I was also learning that a sense of belonging was critical for a student to learn in a classroom [11,12,13]. I was feeling this as well—this need for belonging and the pain of its absence. At the same time, even though individualism had gone way too far in American culture, it had some fundamental value to it. Our pursuing that path seemed primally motivated. I was sensing a dual that appeared contradictory, but didn’t have to be. Then I read a book by Bruce Alexander[14], and in it he referenced Charles Darwin with lengthy quotes. After much re-reading on my part, I refer to Alexander’s interpretations.


Human beings must satisfy both their need for individual autonomy and their need for social belonging. There is no adequate substitute for either one. ([14] p. 251)


We need both. Great!


Another way to say this is that the urge for social belonging is just as essential to human well-being as the urge to individual competition, and the two instinctive, but conflicting, motives exist for the same reason—evolution. It follows that individuals must always experience a conflict between one set of motives that impels them towards individual competition and another that impels them towards social integration and cooperation. ([14] p. 224)


This quote brings in a subtle, but important difference. The terms changes from autonomy and belonging to individual competition and social cooperation. Certainly both are alive in the United States, but in my judgment at least, we have emphasized individual competition over cooperation. Do your own work, gotta look out for number one, your retirement is up to you, that stuff. The individual competition imperative is a story we leverage when businesses punish dissent and discourage labor unions. Unionization is somehow cast as a betrayal of our individuality and the ongoing mythos of the ‘self-made man’. On the other hand, cooperation contains within it some implicit goal or outcome that we are working towards. We compete as individuals and cooperate as groups. Fine. In this sense, they are contradictory imperatives. The problem is that both avenues are commonly construed as pathways to the thing. I’m gonna get mine before you get yours, and somehow if you get yours, I’m less likely to get mine. But if we cooperate as a group, we’ll get ours before your group gets yours. (Even as I type, these sentences seem silly.) Perhaps that’s because this zero-sum pursuit is stupid. Honestly, I don’t want to spare any more words on it. Suffice to say, individual competition and social cooperation isn’t where I think our focus should lie.


Instead, I want us to focus on a sense of autonomy and a sense of belonging. In fact, play with those word pairings for a bit. Competition:Cooperation::Autonomy: Belonging. How does each pair feel to you? What images and memories does each pair conjure up? Personally, I favor autonomy and belonging. They feel safer to me, and are way less corrupted. Next step, I want us all to realize that this two are not in conflict. In fact, in some hard to explain, deeply human way, they must go together.


Important to realize is that not everyone’s sense of autonomy and belonging are the same. My flavor and yours won’t be the same, and they may not stay the same throughout our lives. Knowing what my flavor is—how those needs get fulfilled for me—is part of my own journey of life long learning. If you were to come with me on this journey, we can learn from each other. We can learn more quickly, help each other remain open to unforeseen possibilities, and we can learn to make better mistakes. 


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