Belonging will save the world
If we have the courage to allow it to.
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Do you know why homo sapiens have survived this far?
We were not the strongest of the early human species, nor where we the smartest. Neanderthals exceeded us in both areas. But we had something going for us that no other type of human had - while the others mostly lived and hunted alone, we formed communities.
Belonging and connection is what enabled us to survive and thrive while the others died out.
Belonging and connection can save us again, but we need to be brave enough to let it.
The death of the community
The world is so deeply fractured right now. The US election has been emotional for so many people for a variety of different reasons, and the rhetoric from both sides has been brimming with fear, blame and accusations. Here in the UK, we’ve had a change of government, but now a new far right Leader of the Opposition. And all these elections carried the same sense of voting not just on policy opinions, but on ideology and identity. These days, it feels as though every vote is a vote for survival.
Of course, it suits politicians to have us feel this way. Economics, public health, foreign policy… these things are, in reality, incredibly complex and almost impossible for most of us to wrap our heads around when we have ten million other things we also need to understand right now. They require, for any actual, meaningful change, deeply nuanced and detailed solutions, which will take years to implement, never mind to yield results. Those sorts of approaches aren’t vote winners - not when the other side is promising quick fixes and overnight success. So both sides resort to blaming some shadowy external villain, that can be defeated in one fell swoop, by them and them alone. By demonising one particular group and promising that attacking them is the answer, politicians avoid having to take any responsibility or do any real work.
The media plays a huge role in maintaining this polarisation of society - we’re constantly bombared with headlines and soundbites that are designed to provoke rage and fear, because these are the currency of the attention economy. Media channels - from once respectable newspapers to social networking platforms - rely on our clicks and shares for their own survival.
It never used to be this way. Humans aren’t designed to be constantly at war with each other. We’ve been fed a version of history that suggests this is our nature, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Human beings are, by nature, communal and cooperative animals. We rely on one another for survival.
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Anyway, as I was saying…
In his book Humankind, Rutger Bregman roundly dispels the myth that human beings are innately seflish and aggressive. From the real life Lord of the Flies, where the children didn’t turn on each other but, instead, helped and cared for one another, to the vast numbers of soldiers who, throughout the centuries, have refused to kill anyone during battle, he demonstrates, over and again, that, when human beings are thrown into desperate situations where they must rely on their innate programming and base instincts, their reaction is almost always to protect one another. We might squabble amongst ourselves and insult each other when life is trundling along on an even keel, but, when the shit hits the fan, we revert to a deep need for community and connection. That’s what’s core to our being, when you strip out everything else.
When anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture, she didn’t talk about tools or systems or power structures. Mead said that the earliest sign of civilisation in ancient humans was a healed femur. In prehistoric times, a broken leg in an individualistic species meant certain death - you couldn’t run away from predators, you couldn’t seek shelter, you couldn’t defend yourself, and you couldn’t hunt for food. A leg that had been broken and then healed meant that someone, or some people, had stayed with that person. They had risked their life/ves to get their injured friend to safety, and then taken care of them. They had shared precious food and resources with them. They looked after them until they recovered. This, said Mead, is where civilsation begins.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Margaret Mead
So we have always been hard-wired for community, and that programming is still within us. We’re just currently being brainwashed into believing that everyone else is out to get us, and so we’re naive to expect goodness from others. We’re trained to be on the defensive, constantly suspicious. We’re indoctrinated into believing that “the others” are our enemies - and, since they’re being taught the same thing, this has the effect of making it true. They have been taught to fear and distrust us, so how can we possibly trust them? It’s a vicious circle, and one that’s not easy to get out of.
The weight of the fight
We have lived through a deeply traumatic period in history over the last few years. We’ve survived a pandemic, when many around us - maybe our own loved ones - did not. We’re facing war raging all around us, and we’re more plugged into the world now than we ever have been, so even wars happening in distant countries feel as though they’re on our doorstep. We’ve seen protests and strikes impacting every part of our lives. We’re in the midst of a cost of living crisis.
Then there’s all the elections… Brexit. Trump. Boris Johnson and his suitcases full of booze. Kemi Badenoch announcing that maternity pay in the UK (where it is the lowest in Europe) has gone too far, and that autistic people should “work on themselves” instead of getting “economic privileges and protections” (no, I don’t know which autistic people are getting those either, it’s definitely not me). Now Trump again.
We’ve been in a constant state of flux for several generations, with more technological advancement in the last 150 years than in the whole of human history. This leaves us without solid ground beneath us, feeling continually disorientated and needing to catch up. All this technology should have brought us closer together, but somehow it has driven us further apart, leaving us polarised and angry.
It all feels a lot right now. We’re carrying a lot of collective trauma that we haven’t stopped to process. As if that wasn’t enough, we’re staring down the barrel of the potential destruction of our planet, and we need to find some answers fast.
The only way we’re going to get out of any of these messes is by working together.
My day job is Co-Creator of diversity and inclusion consultancy Watch This Sp_ce. My obsession there is analysing data to understand where organisations can make meaningful impact, and the thing that amazes me time and again is how much more successful we are when we collaborate as a diverse group. Inclusive organisations are more productive, more effective, and more efficient. They make better decisions almost all of the time. They produce better results and come up with better ideas. We are stronger and smarter together.
Belonging is ingrained in us, so it shouldn’t be so hard to get back to. Our brains haven’t evolved much since prehistoric times, we’re still operating on our early programming. That instinct to be part of a group that worked together is still playing a vital role within us. As Brené Brown notes, when we don’t feel connected to a community, it mentally and physically hurts. In the early days of humanity, expulsion from the group meant literal death - without our team, we had no protection from predators, and drastically reduced opportunities to find food. That programming is still so strong that, whilst we might not be at risk from any sabretoothed tigers these days, isolation still feels like a metaphorical death.
“We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don't function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others.“
Brené Brown
That pain makes us lash out. This fracturing of society, driven by politicians, media outlets and corporations who thrive on us feeling weak and dependent, has left us wounded and angry. These same people have been only too happy to suggest directions for us to point our anger - always at each other, never at the ones with the actual power.
I’ve seen a lot of people on social media recently talking about how they’re not going to talk to family members again because they voted for Trump. I get it, I do. It feels painful to think that someone who is supposed to love you has seemingly voted against your rights, against your very existence. But driving further divides solves nothing, and it’s looking for accountability in the wrong place.
I didn’t speak to my father for months after he voted for Brexit. I felt that he’d bulldozed my rights, and those of my children. Rights he’d enjoyed to their fullest as a young man - he worked as a sailor for several years, taking tourists on trips around the Mediterranean. When he came home, he married a half-Italian woman. How could he vote against the immigration that had given him his family? That had given me and my brother our very lives?
My mother called me a month or so after the vote and said, “Your dad’s worried that you’re not speaking to him.” I told her that he was quite right. She asked if I’d call him to sort it out. I told her he knew exactly where I was if he wanted to talk, and that was the end of that.
What brought it all to a conclusion was Christmas. My mother adores Christmas, and they always spend it with us. So I had two choices - keep up the silent treatment and ruin Christmas for my mum, who I love (and who’d voted Remain, as it happens), or suck it up and be nice to my dad. I chose option B, and we had a pleasant Christmas where we all studiously avoided any mention of politics.
It was many months later before I finally sat down with him and had a conversation about the whole thing. I did not handle it all brilliantly, I think I accused him of being racist. But he waved that aside - “It’s nothing to do with immigration,” he told me in such a matter-of-fact manner that I was, for once, rendered speechless. He had no time for the Farage-esque scaremongering on people pouring into this country from Europe, but he did have several significant economic concerns about the EU, and complaints about the impact of its bureaucracy on local communities. He didn’t like what he’d seen in those countries that he’d travelled around, that he’d fallen deeply in love with, and he didn’t believe that membership of the EU had been in their best interests. He didn’t want to see the UK go the same way. I disagreed with him - I still disagree, although, having seen what a hash was made of Brexit, I think he now would have preferred not to have gone down that road - but at least now I understood his reasons. And, although I concluded for myself that the price was too high to pay in terms of the rights and freedoms we lost, I had to admit that he had some decent points.
The way back to each other
And that, ultimately, is the only way forward. We’re going to have to learn, or relearn, how to talk to one another.
We seem to have forgotten how to have complex conversations. We’ve forgotten the art of disagreement. It’s hard when everything feels so immediate and so threatening. When the media and politicians have whipped us up into such a frenzy of us vs them that someone holding a different opinion might actually mean them seeking our personal destruction. It’s safer to retreat into echo chambers where everyone will tell us that we’re safe, and we’re right, and that they’re on our side.
It’s frightening, and draining, to be listening to the alternative narrative. The one that says that who you are isn’t ok, that you are worth less, that you deserve suffering. It is tough, tough work that not everyone can handle, and no one can keep up all the time.
But it’s necessary work.
We can’t heal, as a species, we can’t remember how to be a community again, until we can listen to one another. We don’t have to agree with each other, we don’t have to like what we’re hearing, but we do have to hear it. And we have to share our opposing views as logically as possible, without name-calling and apocalyptic doom-laden denouncements.
I don’t believe that any humans hate each other as much as some of them like to make out. It’s easy to posture and rant about abstract ideas - from immigration to abortion to trans rights - but once an actual human being is introduced into the picture, most people tend to simmer down a little. Keyboard warriors spew all kinds of vitriol, because it’s all still just 1s and 0s. But put two actual 3D people face to face, and they find it much harder to throw cruel words at each other.
Most people who do believe that they hate a particular group do so because they’ve been told those people are a threat. They have been told to be afraid, to defend themselves. That’s why the people in power work so hard to keep minoritised people out of the media and the public eye - if the general public gets to see them and hear their stories, they’ll realise they’re actually not that different from them. They’ll start to empathise. Good lord, they might even start to care. We need to get as many of those stories out there as we can - the greatest act of resistance we can engage in is to enable systemically silenced people to be heard.
Humans were nomadic tribes for most of our history. And we weren’t in a constant state of tribal warfare - these groups rarely had so much as a cross word for one another. It was the advent of agriculture and industry, when humans began to settle in one place and lay claim to land and property, that fighting began. People with power started to want to defend what they had, and gain more of it. Capitalism is where the trouble started. And it’s where it has remained - it is the people with the power, now, who want us to hate each other. If we’re fighting amongst ourselves, we’re too tired and distracted to notice how much they’re screwing us over. If we’re directing our hatred at minoritised groups, we’re not channeling it into dismantling the system that keeps us all oppressed. If we’re constantly afraid and feeling vulnerable, we’ll believe we need their protection. And we’ll keep buying stuff to make ourselves feel better.
This isn’t how we’re supposed to live. We’re facing an epidemic of isolation and loneliness that is making us mentally and physically unwell. Stress and anxiety are through the roof. And society is crumbling. War, economic instability and climate change are all symptoms of the breakdown of that core human need - community. But if we can rebuild that sense of community, if we can remember how to work together as a diverse team, we will have the skills and abilities necessary to solve the huge challenges our species faces.
We have to be able to step away from the media messaging and political brainwashing and listen to one another as people again. We have to search for common ground and mutually acceptable solutions. We have to be able to talk to the people whose views we despise, and try to recognise the humanity in them. We have to seek to understand how they reached the conclusions we so strongly disagree with, as that’s the only way to have a productive conversation about what happens next.
We have to let go of the narrative we’re being sold that we should pursue wealth and power and the accumulation of stuff at all costs. We need to reject the scarcity mentality they peddle to keep us in a state of competition with one another, and believe that there can be more than enough for all of us. That we can rise up, and lift others up with us, and that we can all live lives of joy and abundance without a fixation on material gain. Enjoying simple pleasures and participating in a circular, less disposable economy is more powerful than you can imagine.
Step by step, painful, laborious and tiring though it will often be, we have to walk back towards one another. We have to rebuild our fractured communities, and rediscover the art of talking, disagreeing, understanding and solving. We have to relearn how to collaborate. We have to make space for everyone - people like us and people who are totally different; people we love and people we don’t get along with - so that we can create a society where everyone can belong. We have to all come together.
It’s the only way to save the world.
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