Maybe They Need Heard Too

Madame,

“Lots of people tend to think of our problems in little compartments that don't affect anything else. It may be our fatal mistake.”

Well said.  You keep spinning the gold!

Our blind and often destructive bludgeoning of nature to force it to do our will is meeting the lack of wisdom we have exercised in that force of will.  Various short-term tasks or challenges we “successfully” address blow back on us with consequences we have chosen to not foresee. As just the honeybees example demonstrates, we can probably dispense with the sapiens sapiens part of our species classification.  Maybe even the sapiens part entirely!

Or maybe we should just auto-exclude America, as we seem to lead the charge into unwise behavior—and our behavior then manifests into 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th order effects across the rest of the world.  Yes, yes, there is much wrong in the world that is not a result of America’s actions and inactions, but the America-can-do-no-wrong crowd are injurious fools for failing to acknowledge where we have gone and do go rogue.

We know why many of us refuse to acknowledge reality, or worse, distort it or allow others to distort it for us:  “Reexamination of basic assumptions temporarily destabilizes our cognitive and interpersonal world, releasing large quantities of basic anxiety.  Rather than tolerating such anxiety levels, we tend to want to perceive the events around us as congruent with our assumptions, even if that means distorting, denying, projecting, or in other ways falsifying to ourselves what may be going on around us.” Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership.

I see and hear many angry statements from the above crowd. Are those statements not in most cases the result of anxiety? Anxiety that deep down they know something is off and maybe wrong, that their world-view is not consistent, that the world is changing in many ways, that their previously established “standard order” is transforming and they’re not ready for it to do so, that despite supporting the views and policies they have that things are not getting better and in fact are getting worse?  Are they not people who do not know what their place in the world might become, but in any case are fearful that it might not be a good place—at least not as good as what they’ve become accustomed to?

Is there a way to reach out to them in their anxiety?  And, especially, is there a way for those who will collectively become the new majority to reach out to them?  To acknowledge their fear, the anger, the anxiety, the division, and then try to transcend it?  That maybe if we acknowledge that we hear their anxiety, that we can then address its roots and have healthy, healing conversations about all that?  Or is this vocal quarter so resolutely, blindly, destructively on the wrong side of history that the tide of history must simply wash them aside until they are ready to swim with it?

I think we as society should be strongly seeking to answer the above.

Your ideas for positive, empowering action should be heeded by all.  The depressive assault must be combatted, and people must empower themselves to the greatest extent—the various political and economic and institutional systems out there are rarely if ever going to do it. 

Seeing “Tomorrowland” might help a bit.  No spoiler alerts here though! :)