Thinking Like Our Lives Depend On It

The pandemic has revealed many interesting things, but this is one standout: our need to embrace paradox.

In America, we have this widespread, intoxicating fantasy of the man with a gun in the wilderness. Crocket, Boone, or Hugh Glass, for example. It’s something practically archetypal in the Jungian sense.

The illusion ended when armed citizens pushed into the Michigan statehouse to demand the reopening of the state’s economy. The gunmen appeared ready for the end. But the economic (and perhaps more mundane) realities of COVID-19 had been too much to handle. The illusion of the man in the wilderness with the gun had been revealed as fantasy.

Why and how?

Pretending in America

Let’s begin with biology. COVID-19 thrives off of proximity. The first hot zones were urban centers were multi-unit housing and public transportation accelerated its spread. Put Americans in the wilderness, and there is a lower threat of coronavirus. If we were a nation of far fewer people, living in wilderness, we wouldn’t have a COVID-19 pandemic. We wouldn’t be seeing evidence of the pandemic in more remote areas and states.

America is not what some pretend it is. There is no place on the map that is so remote as to be outside of the virus’ reach. Where there are people with access to modern transportation, the virus spreads. Many pretend otherwise, opting to believe the myth.

This leads to another question. Why do adults make pretend in America?

To pretend is to take a reductionistic viewpoint, one that reduces complexity into something more manageable. A wiring diagram, for example, reduces the complexity of yards of serpentine wires into an abstraction – something that’s pretend, but accurate enough to be useful. This is true of all theories and frameworks. None is perfect. They’re all simply right enough. Newtonian physics is great for explaining why my laptop isn’t floating as I write this, but it doesn’t explain how I’m able to talk with colleagues over live video feed. We need another theory or framework to explain that.

Turning to our theory of what America is, perhaps a more useful theory is that the country is a vast network of people spread through cities, suburbs, and backcountry. We are all inexorably linked by economics, digital communication, mimetics, and literal viruses and other communicable diseases. One might think that this obsolete theory (the man in the wilderness with the gun) would be cast aside for a better one (our relationships to one another and to a global economy through vast complex networks). But it hasn’t been. The myth persists.

Again, why?

Realer than real

This more complex representation of America is obstructed by American individualism – the same thinking that perpetuates the man with a gun in the wilderness archetype. American individualism has been practically mythologized in the U.S. And for good reason.

Boyd Varty once said that a myth is like reality, but truer. Here’s the truth in the myth of American individualism. We are individuals. As far as we know, we’re the only meaning-making animals on earth and that superpower is coupled to our sense of individuality. It’s why we write books and make art. It’s why we sing and dance. While we are each a node in a vast network, we are sentient, meaning-making nodes.

To see it both ways – the myth and the reality of American individuals, the individuals and the networks – is to embrace paradox. Which is precisely what many seem reluctant to do right now. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ongoing political and cultural wars. The useless archetype of the man in the woods with the gun persists. The futile backlash against American individualism survives.

Our illusions (and perhaps delusions) have become increasingly politically stratified. If the modern right worships the supremacy of the individual, the modern left worships the state-as-savior illusion and the supremacy of the collective. It’s easier to rationalize the shuttering of the U.S. economy, and subsequent destruction of thousands of businesses and lives, when you view yourself as the ultimate rational savior of the collective.

But we need collectivist frameworks for making sense of America just as much as we need individualist frameworks. Need proof? More than 180,000 Americans are dead, many needlessly, as a result of ideology, rhetoric, and the ongoing blame game. If there ever was a time in our history for collective thinking to take precedence, this was it. And we blew it.

But this is all very easy for me to say and believe. Maybe too easy.

Again, why?

Entertaining individualism and collectivism

I can rationalize the shuttering of the U.S. economy because I have a job that I can do anywhere with an internet connection. I imagine this is true for most U.S. elected officials. It’s easy to demand sacrifice when you have to make only trivial sacrifices. It’s very easy to think that the despair is overblown when you check your investment portfolio (if you’re wealthy enough to have one) and see that it has surpassed its January value. For a moment, let’s set aside the foolishness of open-carrying semi-automatic rifles, which I think has been well-established in the aftermath of the Kenosha killings. It’s easy to look at the people with guns in Michigan and feel no empathy for their financial and emotional hardships.

What’s good for the collective is stemming the loss of life. It’s hard to argue with that. Though apparently 57% of Republicans can, calling the number of deaths so far acceptable. I suppose not many in that 57% have lost somebody to COVID-19. That’s the myth of American individualism and the death of American empathy manifesting on the right.

But it’s just as easy to see the savior myth of the collective manifesting on the left, too. Joe Biden’s pronouncement that he would shut down the economy again, if told to do so by scientists, is troubling. What, precisely, does he mean by “shut down,” for example?

Let me be clear on something: I trust and believe the work of the scientific community during the pandemic. I believe if the Trump administration had listened to Fauci, Birx, the CDC, and the NIH, fewer Americans would be dead. But it is not the job of scientists to make public policy. That is why we elect leaders.

True leadership sees through mythology and embraces nuance, complexity, paradox. If we are in a position, come autumn, where we need to social distance again – and I my hunch is that we will – I would hope that our leaders wouldn’t treat it like throwing a switch, and similarly that they wouldn’t pretend that everything is fine. I would hope that instead our leaders balance interests of the collective and the individual. Making that happen will require a rejection of mythology, illusion, and delusion.

So, what do we do?

Thinking carefully

We must think better. We must learn to embrace paradox. To solve the complex, existential problems we face, we need both, and thinking, not either, or thinking.

Humanity and its institutions are a complex adaptive system that is greater than the sum of its parts. This is why a virus breaks out in China and scuttles the global economy, why New York has a spike in cases and tech companies in San Francisco change their work-from-home policies, why your spouse feels anxious and depressed and eventually you feel it too. You are one, but you are also many. Both are true.

In short, we must strive to see the pandemic, the nation, and the world more completely. To do so will require relying on multiple theories and frameworks, not right- or left-wing ideology. This is a tall if not towering order. It’s going to require adults who are capable of moving beyond groupthink and can ask higher-level questions without being blinded by tribalism and emotion. It will require more of us to become self-authoring and self-transforming adults, as described by psychologist Robert Keegan.

That takes a lot of time and effort. It takes a lot of self-study and work. It’s not sexy, it can’t be enacted by legislation, and at times it can be terrifying. But it’s necessary, and our continued existence likely depends on it.

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 Suggested resources

·      Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

·      The Further Reaches of Adult Development, a lecture by Robert Keegan

·      What To Do When The World is Falling Apart, an essay by David Zeitler