by Celia Coates

A few weeks ago, I headed for my favorite grocery store and I was not feeling peaceful – I was a little edgy. As I wandered down the well-stocked aisles, one of the cheerful staff approached and asked me what I was looking for. Flippantly I answered, “The meaning of life.” Without missing a step, she said, “What is the meaning of life?” My quick answer was, “Love.” Then she said, “Where do you find love?” I responded, “You have to begin with yourself.”

I was surprised by what both of us had said. It happened so quickly that I’d answered with what is true for me and both of us had bypassed ordinary chitchat. We did talk a little more then, since she had wanted to know how you begin with yourself, but that’s a subject for a future WINN. What I’d like to write about here is that for a long, long time, around the whole world, those who are wise have taught that the opposite of love is fear.

We are in a time of great and painful divisions and one way of thinking about what has caused them as well as what might mend them, is to look at how fear is operating in our society now. We are frightened about many things – climate change, gun violence, war, civil unrest, and people who are not like us … it’s a long list. And although it’s an oversimplification, it is useful to say that there are two ways people are meeting fear – by becoming part of a community or by joining a cult.

I have continued to think about what I blurted out in the grocery store and it was true  – life is about love. And love’s greatest enemy is fear. The fears we are filled with these days make life hard and turn us mean and combative. Many of us join together with others to find some way, somehow, to get through this darkness. Some of us gather in problem-solving groups or find some sort of activist collaboration, a group of people who choose to work together – a community.  Others of us begin to follow a charismatic leader who seems to have the answers and we join what I am calling a cult. And whether we become part of a community or part of a cult, most of us develop some sort of affiliation with a political party that fits our outlook.

First, some thoughts about community. Ruth Benedict, an anthropologist and author, was curious about two very different cultures that lived in the same area – one was peaceful and one was not. She wanted to know what had created the two separate approaches to living together. Humans are social animals and we cannot survive without our groups, but there’s no single set of rules for how we are to treat each other. Here is a brief statement about her understanding. (She is one of my favorite thinkers, so being brief is hard.) In 1941 Benedict described that pair of cultures characterizing one as anxious and the other as calm. One was surly (her word) and one nice, one with low morals and one with high, one characterized by hatred and aggression and the other one by affection. Initially she described these different cultures as either insecure or secure. Psychologist Abraham Maslow, a great innovator himself, said that Benedict had developed a revolutionary concept. She described the differences in the values and life philosophies of the surly and nice cultures and developed a concept she termed synergy. She wrote,
“From all comparative material the conclusion that emerges is that societies where non-aggression is conspicuous have social orders in which the individual by the same act and at the same time serves his own advantage and that of the group.”
The nice, cooperative cultures (low aggression) are high synergy, while the competitive, combative surly ones are low synergy.

One of my favorite examples of high synergy is found in a story told about a member of a tribe, a man who had been given a car, the only car owned by anyone in the tribe. It immediately became the tribe’s car, available to anyone who needed it, used and taken care of by everyone. He was surprised when an outsider asked him why he didn’t keep the keys himself. In our larger American culture, a car is most often “just mine,” a mark of individual status and power. If you watch the ads on TV, you see bright and shiny cars alone, driving fast, taking turns at speed in eye-catching settings. It’s not about sharing, it’s about winning the individual race for power and status.

In our current society we have created a battle between the surly and nice cultures that is taking us to the brink of disaster. In my view, we have divided into nice communities and surly cults. The difference between them lies in their opposing views of what the situation is and how we are to behave towards each other. The two positions are incompatible and there’s little point in arguing (hoping to  change the other’s views) because we are dealing with core beliefs, not facts. Both groups are living heartfelt realities, not discussion points, and logic has little to do with what is going on. As an aside, there are also surly communities and nice cults. Just look at a repressive, rule-bound and rigid religious community (low synergy) and at a creative and quite generous cult like Taylor Swift’s fan club (high synergy). It is risky to make sweeping generalizations in a short article but there are some observations I’d like to make.

A healthy nice community has a view of the common good that guides its actions. A cult, on the other hand, is a human group that’s usually guided by a charismatic head man and his dominating needs. It’s about what is to his advantage and then the benefit is supposed to work its way down to those followers who support and identify with their powerful leader. The mutual advantage comes from following his dictates no matter how rough they are, and punishment and exclusion are the result of any “disloyalty” to his edicts. (His because although there have been women cult leaders, most often they are men.) Fear of losing the support of their social group produces obedience. Communities typically work with the collective interest of the members for their mutual good while cults tend to be hierarchical and require loyalty to one person’s commands. Another way, a quick take, is to say that communities are organized from the bottom up and cults operate from the top down.

It’s hard to be a peaceful person if we live in a surly society (low synergy) where  needs are met by fighting others and ignoring what they might want. In a high synergy society people can usually deal together with mutual trust and cooperation for the common good while in a low synergy culture there is little security without a strong alliance with the dominant leader who wields power.

Facing today’s dangerous divide what are we to do? First, it would be best if we could stop criticizing, judging, and blaming all those others we think are so wrong.
I find this hard to do. Last Autumn I heard advice from author and commentator Rachel Maddow that I’d like to follow. At the end of a large town meeting hosted by Chris Hayes, he asked her what we can do to deal with these hard times. She paused and then said that we should meet our neighbors even if we don’t agree with them. We should get to know each other – we should go out to meet them, look them in the eyes, and talk to them.  Then she said, “Because we are going to need each other.”
I hope we can learn to share the car keys.

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You might like to read an earlier post about synergy: winnpost.org/2018/12/14/what-does-synergy-mean/

The image that leads this post (an echo of WINN’s golden ripples logo) is from Pixabay’s free downloads.

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