Believers by Lisa Wells

Author:Lisa Wells [Wells, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub

5

THE PROBLEM OF OTHER PEOPLE

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.

—SIGMUND FREUD

I have said that my Promised Land is located in other people, that I suspect our salvation lies in cooperation and interdependence. But that doesn’t mean I think cooperation or interdependence comes cheaply, or that I haven’t been as wounded and as burned by other people as the next guy. Human beings are social animals, and it’s a central paradox of human life that other people should confront us with our most difficult problems while possessing our only hope for a solution. “That’s life,” to quote Sinatra. A cynic might call it pharmakon—we are, at once, each other’s poison, scapegoat, and remedy. However you want to cut it, we require other people to survive, to love, to be loved by, to reflect that we exist in time. Or at least, we used to.

In a technocentric society, isolation—or the illusion of isolation—is not only possible, it is increasingly unavoidable. But for most of human history, isolation meant death; so human cultures, by necessity, developed ceremonies, laws, rituals, and stories to redress the common conflicts that arise between people and to teach their members how to live in accord. Metabolizing conflict while maintaining the bonds of the group was not so much a moral endeavor as a practical one.

What becomes, then, of a people who invent a way to live without relying on others directly? I think we’re finding out.

As is true of other survival skills we’ve lost, social skills atrophy with disuse, and once our survival no longer depends on our togetherness, what impetus do we have to tolerate the conflict, confusion, and vulnerability that are the price of relationship? I’m not certain that it’s possible to sustain communalism long-term based on ideals alone. So long as there exists a more comfortable world to defect to—even if that world is laced with depression, anxiety, and isolation—we will be tempted to take the out.

This goes for noncommunal endeavors as well. Time and again I hear stories about idealistic people, wholly devoted to worthy causes, who wind up tearing one another apart over relatively minor disagreements before retreating to their former lives of quiet desperation. “Community is the cure for tragedy.” But what if community (or the attempt to build community) becomes the source of tragedy? What follows is a small case study of one such instance that unfolded close to home.

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