Finding the Root of The Problem

So what the heck is the problem with people/the world/humanity/the United States these days?

What really is at the root of the problem?

I’ve been thinking about this my whole life, but I recently had the help of some magical folk to help me distill it down. I’m going to give a shot at explaining how I see it as simply as possible.

Watch the Video:

The Story of Us by Tim Urban

But first some context and credit…

I spent a huge amount of time reading the amazing “blog post” by Tim Urban of Wait But Why? called The Story of Us. The Story of Us is a heavily researched and very well written explanation of what the problem is with our current society and culture of discourse. 

Urban explains the subject of his ¿blog post/essay/book/treatise/manifesto/research paper? this way:

"…some combination of... society’s current situation and why it’s an especially bad idea for me to write about it—and how those two things are related.

I knew this would be a deep rabbit hole. Did I think I’d follow some sick-ass rabbit down a hole for three years, deep into U.S. history, world history, evolutionary psychology, political theory, and neuroscience, through dozens of books, hundreds of datasets and articles, and into literally thousands of conversations, some very pleasant and some that made me want to pull my head off and throw it into the trash? No I didn’t."

Urban literally goes all the way back to the very beginning of life to explain why things have so completely degraded in today’s political and social atmosphere. I am so grateful to Tim Urban for his tremendous effort in researching and writing this piece, and I really think that everyone should take the time to read it. And it takes a lot of time, but it is totally worth the effort. Joyful and rewarding effort. I promise. It is both entertaining and informative. Plus, I really want to have a thought partner to discuss it with. (If you've read it, please schedule a call with me and Let's talk!)

Last year I also had the fortune of hosting a discussion circle that was facilitated by an amazing friend of mine, Mansi Kakkar. We discussed a similar question: What is at the root of the problem? We defined the problem generally, but all of us easily recognized that there was one. Our conclusions were similar to Urban's. And that's what I want to talk about. 

The Problem

In summary: There is an issue that is at the heart of evolution; the drive for survival. This drive has led to some really bad habits that we're afraid to look at, because we don't want to be the "bad guys." Everyone assigns that role to someone else. That’s preventing us from growing and we’re stuck. We need to change the way we change.

The following is my personal understanding of the situation that we're in. I’d love to hear from you if this resonates with you.

Self vs. Other & Us vs. Them

We all have a drive to take care of ourselves, and it seems to take a slight precedence over our drive to take care of others. It makes sense, evolutionarily an all. This dynamic of self and other was well described by the theologian Paul Tillich. He says, “all living beings are motivated by two fundamental drives,” which he calls power and love. For Tillich, "power is the drive of all living things to express themselves with every greater intensity and extensity," and "love is the drive of all living things to reconnect with the separated." 

Whether we’re a human or a bear or a fish or an ivy plant; we all are scrambling to survive. And this drive to survive is both natural and amoral (ie: neither good nor bad). And we all have a drive to connect with others, to join into groups and care for each other. 

As humans the tension between these two drives takes on even greater complexity, because we are a collectivist species and the struggle extends into our group behavior. Even as we unite as groups, we want our group to survive at the expense of other groups. And this too is a natural part of evolution. And we keep forming into larger and larger groups. Which is also a natural strategy. So we have this primal part of ourselves that is focused on survival, and it is part of us at all scales (it’s a fractal!).  

As humans, however, we also have a rational and empathic conscious mind. Urban calls this “the higher mind.” Our higher mind has the wisdom to consider values and think about what is the best for all of us, collectively. This higher mind longs for equality, dignity and freedom from oppression, for everyone.

This is a long way to say (but not as long as The Story of Us (which I still encourage you to read)) that we have to learn to let go of this idea that we are either good or bad. We need to let go of the idea that others are good or bad, and we have to begin to understand and believe that redemption, healing and change are not only possible for everyone but necessary. 

Misguided Strategies for Surviving and Connecting

With these two drives and minds operating in each of us, we have come up with some powerful strategies for protecting our group and ensuring its relative survival. Here's the rub… The strategies that we have come up with, for surviving and winning the survival contest are super effective in the short term, even over a couple of generations, but they do not play out well in the long term. These strategies are the very forces that are prompting us to destroy our planet (read: humanity and human life). They include colonization, xenophobia, racism, unrestrained industrial capitalism, and other such efforts to conquer, own, control and oppress life. 

The incredible stroke of luck is that we have our higher mind, and we have an amazing collective higher mind. In the year 2020 we have enough knowledge and perspective for us to be able to recognize that our current course will lead to impending catastrophe. We know what the problems are AND we already have all the answers we need to solve them. 

But, For some reason it’s really hard for us to have coherent and productive conversations about how to face our shared past. It seems hard for us to collectively grieve and mourn and celebrate who we all are together right now in the present. And this gets in the way of our ability to unite in the co-creation of a beautiful future.

Inability to Evolve: Stuck in Right & Wrong (Us & Them)

We cannot talk about all the things, because there’s a myopic glitch in our mind. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we seem to have a tendency to see things as static, fixed and unchangeable. It gives us the illusion that if we do something wrong that means that we are wrong. 

We live in a culture that is oriented around defining who is good and evil, who right and who is wrong. People often act to destroy the lives of people who have done what we think is wrong, because we confuse that with them being wrong. That means that our current culture makes it really hard to admit that we've made mistakes.

And if we see things that way, how are we going to face that we (all of us) and our parents and our ancestors have made a big, grave mistake. We've all been acting in ways that are fundamentally destructive and dangerous to life and to future generations.

Our standard approach to this dilemma springs out of those survival strategies that we've learned: We transform the debate about "right and wrong” into a paradigm of “us versus them.” That makes all of the complexity of our situation into a much simpler problem: ‘good guys vs. bad guys.’ 

The truth is that we are all good people, and we are all also deeply flawed. We all make mistakes. We all hurt people and we all definitely make bad decisions sometimes. 

All together this creates the terrible illusion that some people are fundamentally good and some people are fundamentally bad. And everyone knows what group they’re in. 

If we can’t learn to admit our mistakes, then we can never hope to change. We’re stuck.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Uniting in Our Capacity for Redemption & Forgiveness

Brené Brown saves us by making the distinction between shame and guilt. Shame is the belief of ‘I am wrong’ while guilt is the idea of ‘I have done something wrong.’ While guilt can inspire us to want to change and act in ways that are more in integrity with who we really are. Shame undermines our ability to change because we can’t imagine that we could be any better.

I like to say it this way “There isn’t good and bad. There is just what is and what isn’t. But there definitely is better and worse, and we can define that together.” 

Alan Watts and Terence McKenna talk about our need for a sense of unity as our global problems are getting worse and we have become enemies of our planet.

This opens up a world of possibility. For any given situation we can decide what direction better would be and what direction worse would be. We can collectively come up with criteria to measure our progress.  With this better/worse mindset, and a huge dose of compassion and self-forgiveness, we can begin to think and act in ways that give us space for improvement and progress.

We understand that our fates are bound up with one another's and we understand the stakes. And, miraculously, we already have all the solutions we need for all of the world's problems. We just need to face reality and also give ourselves a break. We also can recognize that despite the headlines, we’re actually doing a damn fine job, and we worked really hard to get this far. 

Terrance McKenna explains that well here.  

"The central issue of our times is our inability to surrender to what we know is right. We have the ability to feed the hungry. We have the ability to educate our children, to clean up our environment, to eliminate sexism, to eliminate racism. The question is can we change our minds fast enough?"

There has never ever ever been a better or easier moment than right now to take stock of our situation, to face the problems of our past and our present and to collectively remember that we can do better. 

So, it's time for a strategy upgrade. The goal is still surviving and thriving, but this time it's not about conquest, because there is no longer an “us versus them.” This time we get to recognize that our team, our self, is all of us. We all win, or we all lose. 

Do you want to live in a better world?

I sure do, and apparently it's up to us, you and me, the make this happen.

Let's do this y'all.