2024-11-23
We're in this together
Annie Meuller has reshared a post she originally wrote in 2017: The problem with individuality. I read it and knew immediately that I would need to share and write about it. She's offering us an important reminder that we are not alone. We are in this life together even if our culture has taught us otherwise.
I go through life, for better or for worse, with myself at the center of it.
I don't know how any of us can break out of that perspective, the individual perspective, the individual will, the separation of me and not you, of I and not us.
Perhaps that lesson—unity—is the lesson all of humanity must learn before we can move on to anything better than what we have now. I think we must.
There's so much to be said about this. In some ways, I consider it the core lesson of my life. This is everything to me because it is fundamental to us, to our shared existence on this planet. Somewhere along the way, many people in modern societies lost our way with one another and our awareness of our connection to all life around us.
This past week, I came across a couple of recent interviews with Indy Johar. I was unfamiliar with his ideas and struggled to understand the first interview. A few hours later, I tried another interview with him. As I listened to the second interview, my confusion gradually cleared up as concepts were being repeated. In the second interview with Nate Hagens, he discusses the individual not only as a part of a larger human collective but also in terms of scale and perspective. He mentions that he himself, his body, is a collective. It's something I've thought about often as I enjoy the perspective of it.
Yes, I am a part of a larger human collective, but my body itself is a fantastic collective of diverse organisms working together. My human body comprises not only human cells but also mites, viruses, bacteria, and fungi. There is no singular entity called “I.” Even my thoughts, what I think of as "my" thoughts, are interwoven with the biological community that constitutes “me.”
In this context, where are the boundaries? What is “other” when our relationships are so deeply interconnected? My human body could not survive without this non-human ecosystem within it. Nor am I separate from the ecosystem outside of my body. Perhaps it's not so apparent because we, in the "civilized", modern world, live and behave as though we exist independently from everything else.
Back to the interview with Indy Johar, he appears to be suggesting that the fundamental root cause of our current social ecological crises lies in the concept of “othering.” Our interactions, whether large-scale or small-scale, our organizational structures, are based on separation rather than a deeper recognition of the fundamental connection he refers to as “entanglement.” In discussing potential solutions, he emphasizes the need to operate “in entanglement, in unbounded organisms.”
It's a complex and layered conversation with much to digest. I intend to give it at least one more listen and delve into some of his work. It's far beyond the scope of this post, but I wanted to mention it because it is a substantial body of work focused on the same questions Annie raises in her post: How can we transcend the limitations and insecurities that define the individual?
It reminds me of a phrase used by the Lakota, Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, we are all related or all my relations, all my relatives. I learned of this phrase sometime in the early 1990s as I read through a variety of works by Indigenous writers and activists. It resonated with who I was trying to be as a person in a community, and I clung to it, adopting it as a guiding principle.
Annie writes:
As long as we are trapped in individuality, we are frustratingly limited, severely impaired. Even when we’re as right as we can possibly be, we’re at least half wrong. And we’re often lost in error, utterly mistaken about the things we assume so blithely and ignorantly to be truth.
If we could see beyond, beyond our individual perspective, we might get a glimpse of how much we don't know.
Annie has called out a fundamental problem in the European or Western worldview here. I'll take his moment to point out the connection to settler colonialism, a topic I’ve been contemplating and writing about recently. Specifically, the colonialism imposed by European invasion on the indigenous world was not merely a subjugation of people but also of the entire continent, encompassing all its ecosystems. To colonize is to take control of, to dominate. This has been the project of Europe visited upon the Americas, and it is ongoing. But it involves self-colonization as well. Just as we seek to dominate we also submit ourselves to domination by others within a hierarchical worldview that based on systems of command and control.
But this subjugation, this colonization, is carried out in the name of "freedom". It's interesting to consider the willingness of some to subjugate others in the name of freedom.
How do we define freedom? What is the narrative of freedom in the context of the United States? How is it connected to the “rugged individualism” that subtly underpins the self-narrative we in the US share as part of our national and personal identity? What are the possible unintended side effects of such a focus in a culture? This excerpt from the Wikipedia entry for rugged individualism delves into a particular favorite of American culture, the frontier:
This kind of environment forced people to work in isolation from the larger community and may have altered attitudes at the frontier in favor of individualistic thought over collectivism.
Ah, yes, the “pioneers”! This narrative places a strong emphasis on individual effort and romanticizes the settlers’ journey across the prairies in covered wagons and horseback. However, it conveniently overlooks the fact that the settlers were colonizing lands already inhabited by people, tribes, and nations. And, to the point of this post, they were a people whose culture acknowledged and valued the deep relationships and kinship within and beyond the human family. They were not in conflict or at odds with their landscape because they were the landscape. They were of the land. This culture was not centered around the individual “I” or “me,” but rather on the collective “we" and this we encompassed everything from the grass, the stones in the river, the trees and buffalo; all were recognized to be in relationship, all necessary for the whole.
In 2024 those of us decended from the original settlers and those that came later are still struggling in our relations with one another and with the landscape of which we are a part. I don't want to oversimplify the problems we face but on some fundamental level it seems that we have not yet discovered the basic truths of our common bond. We are a family, all together. We help another and we hurt one another. Yes, we are all beautiful in our individuality, but it's when we sing together, work together, care and love one another that we begin to see who we can be. I'm not sure how we take that step together. We have to begin to forgive one another and reach out to one another. We have to ask those that were here first for forgiveness and for permission to stay. This is not our home yet though we have been here for generations.
I do hope we will get there some way. Together.
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