Sense of Self
Know who you are, and know what you’re not
Chickens are flocking animals. If you separate a chicken from the rest of its flock, a lot of them will just lay down and die.
Humans aren’t chickens, but this behavior isn’t alien to us. Among our cruelest punishments (and we’re good at being cruel) is ISOLATION — or “solitary confinement” — a punishment that makes a person lose all sense of reality, all sense of self. You don’t need walls tho.
Many of our ghost stories are really stories about being isolated from your fellow humans: the ghost moves among the living, hearing, speaking, warning, but the living can’t see or hear them. The ghost can’t touch or change anything. They are surrounded by people but they are isolated.
Sometimes in our stories, the “ghost” is just a person others prefer not to see, and the story ends with that “ghost” exploding like a dream deferred.
The “vibe shift” that Very Online people started talking about a couple years ago could, with the 20/20 benefit of hindsight, be described as “dawning realization” — that feeling you get when you look back at the shore and realize you’ve gone too far, or the sensation when you realize they put something in your drink, and your friend who drove has already passed out, and this entire night was a huge mistake.
I dreamed last night that my husband and I got stuck hiding about a dozen dead bodies. When the first person died, a friend hinted that no one would ever believe we hadn’t killed them, so we acted to protect ourselves. But then more people kept dying in our house! First we buried the bodies around town, but that got difficult and risky, so finally we buried them all in a corner of the back yard. When the bodies were discovered, in my dream, during a big party (dream logic 101: if people keep dying at your house, throw a party!) I, for a moment, considered the prospect of feigning ignorance and innocence, but instead I immediately turned on my friend whose advice, earlier in the dream, doomed us: “we only did it because you said no one would believe us!” I said this in front of everyone, a public confession.
When I woke up I was thinking about George Washington and the cherry tree.
I was picturing a little man holding a hatchet, with great satisfaction, feeling its heft, feeling how good the well-worn handle fits under the grip of his small hand. The tool demands you swing it, and not into dumb air. The tool wants to feel itself thunk into the grain of the wood. It would be cruel not to give the hatchet what it wants.
The first swing and the hatchet is sticking and has to be tugged free. The second swing ends with a chunk of tree trunk broke loose. The next swing sets that same piece of chopping to ricochet off the little man’s trousers, and now he’s got a rhythm, now the hatchet isn’t a thing that sings to him, now the hatchet is himself. All his desires strike the center of the tree. He is no longer a boy, he is a man and he has power. He is sweating and smiling when he watches it fall.
W.E.I.R.D. people (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, in Joseph Henrich’s formulation) done messed up.
We WEIRDs have forgotten what the industry and democracy was for. We’ve become obsessed with riches and devoted to constantly re-educating (or re-training) ourselves to adapt to changing trends. Now we’re looking back at the shore and realizing we’ve forgotten who we are.
We WEIRDs are partially defined by our commitment to “the principle of the matter.” We WEIRDS hold truths like “All Men Are Created Equal” as “self-evident” despite living in a dog-eat-dog world. We WEIRDS would rather die on our feet than live on our knees. We WEIRDS disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it, AND we demand liberty, or we’ll just take death, thank you very much!
But then someone handed us a shiny, hefty, powerful tool. And we wanted to see what it could do. We’re only human.
The hatchet I’m speaking about is the modern social web, which itself is just the lure dangling from the head of a blind, needle-toothed monster called Surveillance Capitalism. It’s the tool I’m using right now. It landed in our hands and felt good there; it tapped into our wonder and desire. We liked the feel of using it, and we used it again and again, well past the point of wisdom.
With the illusion of connection, it isolated us. And having isolated us, it re-trained us.
And now we’re looking up and realizing that the things we have destroyed, our industries and our democracies, were actually valuable sustenance-granting treasures. The cherry tree crashes to earth, its half-ripe fruit bounces in the dust. There is no way to restore a tree that’s been felled.
Our baser impulse might be to lie, to deflect, to pretend, to blame someone else. But if we actually stand for something, if we actually DO believe in the principle of the matter, we should take ownership of what we’ve done.
So the question of the day is: do you know who you are? Do you know what you are not? Do you know what you stand for?
Raw power is not enough.
