“Too many men, there’s too many people making too many problems and not enough love to go ‘round. Can’t you see? This is the Land of Confusion. Now this is the world we live it. These are the hands we’re given. Use them and let’s start trying to make it a place worth living in.” — Genesis, Land of Confusion
I will come as no surprise to readers of this Journal that the backdrop for my formative years was the Cold War. Although I was born in the first half of the 1970s, I became aware of the world with the eyes of a Reagan baby. There was good and there was evil. Right and wrong. True and false. Human beings were not expected to be avatars, embodying a public persona all the time without fail or excuse, without nuance or shortcomings. It wasn’t as if everything was great all the time or as if there weren’t problems, but things seemed a great deal different. I’ve struggled with what the difference is, worrying that distance and hindsight always makes a person’s youth seem a little less complex and nuanced than it felt when they were living through it. Things don’t really change that much over time. People are pretty much people, the problems we create are pretty consistent at least in their motives, and we are astonishingly good at ignoring the problems our solutions create until they’re big enough to make a lot of money from. There have always been good people and bad people, smart people and dumb people, lazy people and driven people and all the shades of humanity that populate the world today. While there have always been in-groups and out-groups, cliques and divisions, they seem to have spawned. A massive brood of special, unique, “divergent” groups have emerged from the soil and begun taking over the narrative when it comes to all things social, political, or personal. So what gives? Why’s everybody so angry all the time? What is it about the world today that’s making it so damned hard to find common ground with anyone about anything?
It’s a conundrum for sure. I don’t know why it happens, only that it most assuredly has happened. I suspect there are a lot of reasons, some interconnected and some isolated. Technology has made the world a very small place in many regards. You can now have a close friend group that is geographically spread all over the globe. The individuals in that group may interact, play games together, share music, chat, debate, and in most ways do all the things that friend groups did 30 or 40 years ago, all while never having physically met one another. In my childhood, social groups formed by observation and interaction. You looked around for kids who liked what you liked, did what you did, who seemed fun, and who liked being around you. They were small, and geography mattered. While it happened on occasion that a kid would move away and stay in touch, it was not the norm. Out of sight, out of mind was the rule. You took care to observe a certain kind of unspoken etiquette within the group, because ouster from the group meant you had to start all over again right there in the same school or town where everyone could see the dramas unfolding. That meant you learned to let some things go. Danny could have a bad day and say something hurtful without everybody holding it against him forever. Jeremy could get so mad he wanted to fight with his best friend. Sometimes it cooled off, other times, they’d go a few rounds in the dirt lot behind the 7-11 after school. Either way, it ended up ok. Two factors made certain of it. One - the group looked after itself. We all did the dumb stuff we did, but if someone got too far off the reservation, the rest of us would always try to rein them back in. If they made it a habit and refused to listen to their friends over and over again, they’d fall by the wayside. There was a certain sort of love in that kind of friendship. The second thing was that we all cut each other enough slack to be ourselves. Every group had a kid who was a little bit weird, but he was still part of the group. Every group had a kid that was better at sports or who had a college-level vocabulary or whatever it was that set them apart, but there we all were together. It meant you didn’t have to be an avatar. You could be yourself, or at least yourself as you best understood it. I feel like that’s changing.
Today, kids and even many adults find friend groups online. They meet people playing video games. They join groups on social media. Participation and membership in the group isn’t generally based on observation and interaction, but on the topic of the group itself. In many ways, this has shifted the dynamic of friend groups away from the little tribes of flawed-but-developing people we used to know and it’s made them something more akin to sports fans supporting a given team. Consider the analogy. Sports fans dress up the same, usually in a way that identifies them readily with the thing that brought them all together. Their own nuances of personality matter far less to others wearing the same colors than does the team they support. Importantly, it also shows everyone in the group who they’re not. It shows the rest of the group that they have a shared interest, but it also shows that they have a shared hatred of the opponent. Internally, you see fans cluster up. Mini-cliques within the clique. There’s “real fans” and there’s “casuals.” Real fans are all about the team. No breaks in the persona, no trivial piece of information related to the team is unimportant. The farther one goes from that “real fan” persona, the less they fit into the group. Now, the price of belonging to the group is that you are as close to a perfect avatar for the group’s values as possible. Deviation from the group’s icon is noted, and enough deviation in any direction labels you as a “casual” not to be taken seriously, or even as a poser. Consider also the dizzying array of sub-groups within today’s cliques. People are finding it more and more necessary to parse their particular identity into smaller and smaller, more tightly defined sub-groups, and they are able to do so because they simply have so much more access to the rest of the world. It would have been absolutely baffling 30 years ago to hear anyone who liked comic books, for example, go down the rabbit hole today’s cosplay crowd is capable of going. It wasn’t a lack of “wokeness” back then either - it was a lack of need to define things that tightly. There was simply nothing practical in separating “jocks” from “athletes,” because it was a distinction without a difference. Now, “jock” is either a pejorative term for an arrogant athletic type who abuses his popularity, or it’s a highly sought-after gay man. Jesus. Better be careful which crowd you’re talking to, huh?
The point is, we’re seeing our society reprogramming itself in a way that societies have reprogrammed themselves for all of human history. New circumstances, new technologies, new social boundaries, and all those other things are shaping the way we interact and the way we coalesce. What’s troubling to me is the explosion of sub-categories we’re sticking each other into and the rigidity with which the boundaries of those groups are enforced. Collectivism first requires that your self worth come from the opinions of the group you admire most. Approval from others defines a member of the collective and the way to gain that approval is to live as the avatar without nuance. That’s a very tough environment for an individualist. It also highlights why individualism is so critical today. The more social groups consume the individuality of their members, the more they demand conformity on penalty of excommunication, the more the individual stands to impact the world. The more minds are bound up and limited by the rules and constraints of their chosen in-groups and the more personal ambition is tamped down in favor of living the group’s vision, the more important it becomes for the creative, ambitious, unrestrained individual to stand firm and refuse constraint. The more who subscribe to a hive-mind type of existence, the more critical it is for there to be individuals who remain sovereign, self-directed, self-reliant, and capable. The potential for these individuals to change the world for the better rises dramatically in the absence of anyone else trying to do so. The importance of these individuals actually taking up the cause and doing it cannot be overstated.
The world’s become a pretty confusing place. But, as Mr. Collins noted so eloquently, this is the world we live it. These are the hands we’re given. Use them and let’s start trying to make it a place worth living in.
Bravo! Great insight.