Joanna Macy says community building is the most important thing we can do for our world today. In a conference held on The Power of Community by the Global Ecovilliage Network recently, Joanna said:
“We don’t have a clear enough idea about how we have been mis-shapen, stunted even imprisoned by what has happened to our sense of the life that pours through us as a result of the dominant economic system. Of what the hyper-individualism of the last centuries has done to our experience of ourself. It has shrunken, weakened it has made us feel fragile and separated.”
We have lost our personal power but more importantly we have lost one another. Joanna describes the prevalent global culture as something called the ‘lonely cowboy ego’ which is to think that the separate self is master of his own fate, captain of his own soul and can stand there alone on the tower of his own ego sailing off into the sunset. Bucking the trend, flying solo, doing one’s own thing, being a maverick has become fashionable, each of these phrases demonstrates American culture’s approving attitude towards ditching the “we” in favor of the “me.”
Implicit in this worship of individuality is the assumption that the best way to find yourself, to control your destiny, is on your own. No one is more courageous or empowered, the idea goes, than the person who casts off the ropes of group mentality and strikes out alone.
But despite this successful marketing campaign favouring the me over the we, advances in social psychology call into question the unmitigated supremacy of the freewheeling solo act. Studies show that “identification with social groups can protect and enhance health and well-being, thereby constituting a kind of “social cure.”
Across the studies, perceived personal control (in an empowerment way) brought about social cure effects in political, academic, community, and national groups. The findings reveal that the personal benefits of social groups come not only from their ability to make people feel good, but also from their ability to make people feel capable and empowered in their lives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
You might think that joining a community you would lose your sense of self, however the opposite is true. In the World Values Survey—a large-scale project spanning 62,000 individuals across forty-seven countries. The researchers noticed that the more people identified with different groups—their local community, their country, and humanity in general—the more control and empowerment they felt they had in their lives. Moreover, perceived control also positively influenced people’s overall happiness.
Overall, then, this research suggests that belonging to a community—whether it’s your family, your workplace, your religious organization, or your country—can help you deal with life’s challenges. This cuts against the pervasive notion in American culture that the best way to find yourself is to strike out on your own. Ironically, the more you give yourself over to the group, the more personal empowerment you will feel. As the researchers write, these findings highlight “Not only how groups can help people, but how groups can help people help themselves.”
Helena Norberg Hodge is co-director of the award winning documentary The Economics of Happiness. She is also the founder and director of Local Futures (formerly the International Society for Ecology and Culture). Helena directly witnessed the destructive impacts of the dominant cultural and financial system or globalization, on a small region called Ladakh in South Asia.
She studied the demise of the Ladakhi community over a period of 40 years and subsequently created the powerful documentary, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh.
Initially Ladakh was protected by the Indian Government from external influences for several decades until it was opened to the global economy in the 1970’s. “Life was good in Ladakh”, says Helena. “The material standard of living was high. They had large, spacious houses, plenty of leisure time. There was no unemployment—it had never existed—and no one went hungry. Of course they didn’t have our luxuries, but what they did have was a way of life that was vastly more sustainable than ours. And it was also far more joyous and rich.”
Within a decade, Helena saw a healthy and self-sustaining community descended into despair with high levels of unemployment, family breakdown, urban slums and pollution.
Teenage boys who once had no problems being affectionate to their siblings now took on the lonely cowboy culture and became Rambo’s. Girls who had lived in harmony and peace with their bodies started to feel ashamed and hateful because they did not look like Barbie. As more and more people were taken off the land, unemployment escalated. The children were taken out of their natural system and placed into Westernised schools creating specialists rather than generalists. Jobs in places like Ladakh for specialists are very few and far between.
This is a personified example of the impacts of globalized trade and an interdependent economy. When commodities that are manufactured on the other side of the globe sell for much less than locally-produced goods, it destroys local trade, produces unemployment, creates unhappiness and breaks apart communities.
Helena’s research reveals concludes that the stronger sense of community the more important psychological benefits. She says.
“My own experience in Ladakh, as well as research here in the West, makes it clear that the rise in crime, violence, depression, even divorce, is to a very great extent a consequence of the breakdown of community. Conversely, children growing up with a sense of connection to their place on the earth and to others around them—in other words, children who are embedded in a community—grow up with a stronger sense of self-esteem and healthier identities.’
Competition vs Cooperation
The other factor that is evident here in the breakdown of community is the breakdown of a system of collaboration which is the natural human way in favour of Competition which is the ethos of a globalized world buying into the myth of scarcity and lack.
“People in Ladakh started competing with each other for these scarce jobs is growing exponentially which eventually led to ethnic conflict—amongst a once secure and cooperative people. A range of related social problems has appeared almost overnight, including crime, family breakup and homelessness.”
Are We Afraid to Show Ourselves to One Another?
So it is clear then that community is vital. Yet, for the most part people are somewhat afraid of community.
The One aspect we fear the most about forming close relationships with one another is the intensity of emotion that comes up when we allow ourselves to feel our emotions. Our men in particular have to suppress their feelings. Grief, sadness and loss are feelings that our menfolk are taboo in our culture. The lonely-cowboy never feels these things. The only emotions that our menfolk are encouraged to feel are anger and rage. It’s no wonder then that our men have become the vessels of such unmitigated violence. We have become a society that not only condones, but worships violence.
“Yet,” says Joanna, “the power of emotion is the most basic form of intelligence. It is how we grew as a species. It’s how we interacted with each other and the wild world. How we found our way and found ourselves. Our fear of community is based on fear of exposure. I don’t want to be seen because the implication is that people will get the goods on me somehow. It’s a product of fear.”
It’s basically due to the inherent belief that we are not enough. We are less than perfect; we are fundamentally flawed and not okay. We are just not enough. And we don’t want other people to see it.
Our Pain for the World has Become Pathologized
Then add to it the other dangerous part of the capitalistic culture which is to pathologize our pain for the world. Yet there is so much devastation on the planet today that we are carrying for our planet today. “The sense of loss is so vast” says Joanna, “A grief so big over losses so great we can hardly begin to name them, our kin – the beautiful great animals, and the little ones and even the insects, an insect apocalypse happening. How do we begin to even take it in?”
We are not taught how to handle strong feelings. Whereas if we lived in a community such as Ladakh, we learn from a young age that nobody is perfect; that we are all good people so that when someone irritates you, you let it go because you have seen the heart of that person. In today’s culture there are no platforms for us to see the hearts of one another.
That is why I am creating this platform here today. Because I am passionate about creating platforms for us to see one another’s hearts.
When we do express our concern for what’s happening in our world, people say: Oh, you’re so negative! You are obviously upset or you’re depressed. You must have had an unhappy childhood. You had an absent father; your mother was an alcoholic; you were raised in an orphanage, etc. Well we have something that can change all that. We have the pharmaceuticals that can help you with that as well as the bill for my hours of conversation. And once again our pain for the world is reduced to that pathetic separate ego. It must be something that happened in your childhood or some fault that is just intrinsic to you.
In our absence of skills at how to handle strong feelings for fear of being ‘negative’, what happens to these feelings. They are buried or we simply turn away. We brush it aside. We don’t know how to talk about it. And who wants to be a wet blanket at the party to raise a subject that suddenly silences all within earshot?
Yet the pain that we are carrying for the world that we don’t even know, is immense. And all too often the buried pain that we hold within us turns into diseases like cancer. It is just not healthy to feel such immense pain and not give expression to it.
Joanna Macy emphasizes the natural functions of community.
“We belong to each other,” Macy says, “and we have been taken out of that natural embellishment and that has been the most cruel things we can do the human psyche. It probably is the most cruel thing of the whole human journey. Because we have been put into a little box of the ego, the separate self and isolated there which makes us prey to fear. We have not only that, but taught to compete instead of collaborate. It’s like a foot-binding to the spirit. Yet the opening of ourselves to the healing and enlivening powers of community will release something beyond our powers of imagining”.
The Work that Reconnects is very simply a form of group work designed to build community.
It is relevant to anyone wanting to foster the desire and ability to take part in the healing of our world.
This work can be done alone and has enriched many individual lives, but it is designed for groups. Its effect is deeper and more enduring when experienced interactively with others, for its approach is improvisational and its impact is synergistic.
For more info and/or to book me as a facilitator, contact me.
You can also read more about me here.
What can one person do?
Stop being one person!
“In those moments when we are held, our nervous systems down-regulate, our minds soften, our hearts open, and we come into an ancient sort of rest. That rest that we’ve been longing for in a lifetime that always seemed just out of reach. The rest from becoming.
The Work that Reconnects Communities, People & the Planet 