Humans have only ever thrived and under dire circumstances survived, inside an ecosystem of interdependency and diversity. 

 

Ecosystem = group.

 

There is a posture that is absolutely fundamental to being in group space with each other that essentially makes or breaks the goodness of whatever happens there for yourself and everyone else. It’s being open to each other. We’ve all had individualistic, competitive, woke liberal identity politics crammed down our throats for forever and that’s not what I’m talking about. Of course, hold our differences around race, gender and sexuality, etc. etc. in mind. And expand it way out from there into being open to each other in our differences in every way, in our mental health, our relational styles, our relational charm or finesse or lack thereof, to what degree we’ve been therapized or not, our neurocognitive wiring, our economic resources and subsequent class status, what part of the country or the world we live in, how we do or don’t do our politics, etc. etc. etc. Etc. Etc.

 

The hostility and rejection going on constantly, constantly, around these differences is really hard for me to bear.

 

Western culture has been obliterating our group community skills for decades upon decades so it’s no one person’s fault we really aren't great at being around people who don’t check our boxes in whatever way we prefer them to be checked. Unfortunately from the view where I’m standing, the more time spent in therapy, the more death-to-the-group fussiness, judginess, and a hair-trigger willingness to walk away there is. That’s not surprising given the individuation machine that Western psychology is, but it’s still really awful to witness. The posturing going on around being “developed,” “mature,” “evolved,” “having done my personal work” and “having boundaries,” while being and doing these community destroying things is, well, it’s one of the important reasons why we as Americans are in enormous trouble right now. 

 

We are of course genuinely off-putting sometimes in groups and community life. We so often don’t know how to behave well in communal spaces. The only way through this is to mix it up with each other, grow our skin a little bit thicker, sometimes shut the fuck up, sometimes kindly and graciously speak up, expand our ability to tolerate being annoyed, ditch our one-on-one relational programs and sky high mutuality requirements, and devotionally foster an arms open wide posture to the group where no one needs to be your best friend unless they actually are, where everyone is absolutely your neighbor, where the person who annoys you isn’t yours personally to deal with, they’re the group’s person to deal with, and where we now, ahhhh finally, have spaciousness to be together. 

 

To my fellow white cis women - given all that personal development work some of us could afford, some of us are now therapized and spiritual and intuitive and polished and shiny and say alllll the right things. And compared to when we were in highschool, we’ve mastered, like PhD level mastery, subtlety and finesse around still being the same old thing some of us were then - mean girls who love brown-nosing the teacher. The human you’re snubbing won’t be totally clear it’s happening, though it’s definitely felt. I ran that program so I see it plain as day, including in my own learning spaces no intuition needed. It’s violent and disturbing. Many of us are going to keep hiding all of that behind feminism and the patriarchy (but the men though!) and I can’t stop us from doing it, but damn are we propping this system up with this way of being. And what could be on offer to the collective, which so many of us will say we’re about, is dammed up behind our feminist shadow. 

 

I don’t know how soon or even if, the future will require anything different from us. It bumps up against a really big ask for Westerners which is to stop deciding everything for ourselves to a degree that will really really step on our toes. I’m not in some utopian pie-in-the-sky delusion about how difficult other humans are. I just know that when it starts to happen, a certain kind of togetherness and collaboration with the kind of care and creativity that follows, it’s the fuckin best.