Another blog about trust. Eyy.
Today I want to dedicate my writing to Komal. I love you dearly friend. And when people learn to witness you correctly, we will all be better for it. This is also dedicated to Mikey. For you, there’s a part two.
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Humans typically have much more in common than not in many ways. In healthy humans we have similar needs for staying alive. We typically have the same circuitry to allow emotional experience. We all must find our way in this world. As far as we know all of us live on the planet or in nearby space stations.
It’s a simple mistake.
We meet someone volunteering at the free farm stand and we assume that because we love giving back to our community, so do they. They must have a similar desire to engage generously with their time. And as we chat we discover that they love the same artists as we do, we start associating them with having a similar emotional or political sensibility. How can you love Serj Tankian and not care about his politics? But as we meet them for lunch one day and see how disgusted they are by the unhoused man on the corner… we notice something feels a little off. We go back to the farmstand and they’re not there. After a few questions we find out their presence had been court mandated. And it was “better than picking up someone else’s trash on the freeway.”
People frequently mistake “like action” with “like thought.”
And I find it feels like it’s not discussed enough, if ever, in the circles I move in. I find for many people, it is preferable to take like actions while never discussing their real opinions and perspectives in their personal and communal relationships. The unspoken rule seems to be “what should be done is what is socially agreed upon and what is suspected not to be agreed upon ought to be consciously or unconsciously avoided.”
On the other hand it is incredibly common to watch conflict arise when opinions and perspectives are understood to be similar, but different courses of action are found preferable. As if the rejection of one’s actions are tantamount to a rejection of the individual. Of their reason or rightness or righteousness.
Even amongst intellectuals, there is safety in group think.
And what is not openly justified with a rational explanation, but intuition, whether a positive hunch or distrust, can be treated as foolish and chaotic. Even if if the hunch is a prediction based on evidence:
In 1994 Joycelyn Elders, surgeon general, was stripped of her position, disgraced and pilloried about her personal opinions on health and wellness, because she had outspoken, progressive(at the time) beliefs that were too radical. How dare she suggest masturbation was natural and might be a part of sex education, believing that it could lead to less teen pregnancy, economic empowerment for women, and slow the spread of STDs? Americans were not ready for that level of sex positivity. And we still suffer today because of it. As recently as 2020 I have watched a number of a confidant’s friendships end over their caution about the covid vaccine, even though the person in question was neither against vaccines nor ignoring covid regulations. Their faith in their fellow Americans was shaken by the zealous scientism of people hoping that their trust in modern technology would bring them back to a pre-covid world. And when it didn’t, blaming “those people” who “just couldn’t listen to reason” and “do what they were told” was treated as the problem. Acting as if the issue wasn’t much more complex and the reality was that vaccine or not, unless people were of the same mind, and willing to work together, zero covid wasn’t going to happen anyway. But even as partisan rhetoric, and conspiracy abounded in the US, communally the population of New Zealand in 2020 actually managed to be covid free for a time, while Americans were dying in droves and calling the disease a hoax. What happened in New Zealand was a reflection of what humanity is capable of when like action and like thought combine. Unity instead of division.
And even then, it’s still more complex.
Sometimes, when someone does what we do, it can be irritating. Especially when we assume that they’re not thinking for themselves or that they're trying to profit from our hard work. Perhaps it comes from hypocrisy or self hatred, which is a topic for another day. But when we assume imitation is because they like, admire, or agree with us, imitation becomes the highest form of flattery.
Imitation is primal. It’s how babies learn. And cooperation is cohesion. To be like, creates kinship. Kinship creates legacy, for better or for worse.
Similarly, when someone doesn’t do what we do… When they refuse our guidance or reject our ways, it can feel like an attack on our reasoning, identity, or even our validity. We can over identify with our actions and thoughts, surely. But we can also become dependent on agreement, requiring acceptance or validation, lest we face distress. But when we are secure in ourselves, the differences can be something to marvel at and in many cases benefit from.
Our relationship to these presumptions is that they shortcut needing to vet every individual directly. But this leads to its own problems. We don't just confuse like action for like thought. We mistake community with agreement.
I said earlier that a seemingly unspoken rule of social harmony is, “What should be done is what is socially agreed upon and what is suspected not to be agreed upon ought to be consciously or unconsciously avoided.”
And I have a theory as to why this happens.
Many of us have an unconscious competence in the space of submission and agreeability. Whether it came from an authoritarian guardian or the institutions to which we are beholden and subject, it can easily be internalized that hiding or ignoring differences potentially benefits the common good. If we don’t need to know each other’s politics to get our shelter built, it doesn’t really make sense to give ourselves reasons to distrust each other or to not cooperate. If we all love the same person, it does not make sense to focus on our differences and ruin the experience of togetherness on their birthday. It’s imprudent to talk about religion and politics not because people don’t want to know what others believe or care about their truths… but because when the conversation begins, questions of one’s identity are involved. The authorities to which they may submit their thinking to are called into question, and it is possible that even a casual interaction will end with an inadvertent, or intentional attack on the identity of a person. Sure people are people, and not their religion or political party(over-identify as they may) but the state of online discourse and news media couldn’t be what they are if it couldn’t FEEL that way.
If a christian living in Ohio can feel persecuted because christianity is outlawed in foreign countries, an inability to sympathize or empathize can derail an otherwise productive interaction. Sure, a christian may be of a protected class, where you are, from your perspective. But that’s not their perspective, no matter how out of touch it is with your own perception of reality. Beneath their existential dread is the same humanity any person concerned for themselves and people like them is likely to express. Rejecting that they are persecuted because others who they identify with have been persecuted, is your choice. But if you make that the crux of your argument, you’re engaged in whataboutism. Regardless of your feelings about christianity, if you replace that identity in with some other demographic, it becomes pretty clear. People who identify with a demographic can feel that the capacity to deny the reality of their potential persecution somewhere in the world is indicative of a lack of concern with their safety and wellbeing. Replace christians with lgbtq, ukranians, jews, palestinians, uighurs, armenians, trans people.
The lines we draw about who deserves empathy create tribal lines of us and them, which derail our capacity for unity. There is one human race. (Even if there wasn’t, our mistreatment of life reflects poorly on our capacity to wield power, and illuminates our own potential for callous and abusive behavior. It does not reflect the potential or quality of the exploited beings.) This practice of submitting to our tribes decrease of which people and things are deserving of platforms and aid is an example of the divisive nature of our shortcutting and submissiveness and agreeability. Activists, changemakers, and revolutionaries must answer to higher or deeper authorities than group think.
These positive and negative attributes that we give people based on our understandings of self and our like actions affect us at every level. I’m sure sociology has a sophisticated term for the positive prejudice of assuming likeness.