I Trust, Therefore I Am
Many roads lead us to the same conclusion. The proper understanding of human life must de-emphasize the natural tendency to focus on "me" and "mine" and "I" and identify with the community.
This is a very natural conclusion, but it tends to be lost as we lose our grip on traditional communities and face the world alone or in nuclear families.
Evolution has left us equipped with a natural feeling of comfort and identity with community -- the first one being with our mother, then our "nuclear" family, then the extended family, then the village and beyond. Once we reach beyond the village, an element of distrust creeps in. The natural feeling of trust we have with the folks we encounter every day doesn't extend to people in the next village or the town over the mountain. Then, we start to see things in "economic" terms. We rely on trade and, eventually, money. Stripped to its bare essentials, money is simply a token of trust. We no longer need to trust the person we are doing business with -- just the money that we exchange. Of course, we can lose faith in the money itself, either the "strength" of the currency, or perhaps in the government that stands behind it.
It is important to realize the role that trust plays in all this. It is not unrelated to the issue of religion, which is, at bottom, a shared culture -- a system of beliefs, traditions, myths and symbols that (not so long ago) bound a community together. We could (or felt we should) trust the folks who shared our culture. In effect, religion created a community that, in principal, reached beyond the borders of the village. This is obviously no longer true. There are as many definitions of what it is to be "Christian" than there are Christians. In practice, this means that people specifically distrust others who disagree about religious issues. This is not so much a matter of what is true or false -- it's our tendency to trust people who agree with us, no matter how silly our opinions may be. We even tend to distrust "heretics" in our own religion more than we distrust folks who subscribe to wholly different world views. This means that community based on nationality, neighborhood or business will trump the old basis of trust: religion.
In our fragmented multi-cultural, cosmopolitan world we therefore come to take for granted that the community that matters is the economic one and this becomes the basis of our politics. It's all about money, jobs, growth etc. But this loses sight of the fact that we are hard-wired to trust communities that are physically, biologically and culturally close to us. We despair at the fact that nobody "trusts" the government, the economy, the currency. But this should be no surprise at all.
Each of us needs to step back and ask ourselves, "What communities to I belong to? Who do I trust and who trusts me? Who are the people I deal with every day without the need to exchange currency?" These questions are particularly relevant today, when baby boomers are retiring en mass -- often finding themselves outside of the money economy. Many find themselves re-discovering community and enjoying the perfectly natural experience of "helping out" without expecting to be paid. For many, this is an odd experience, requiring explanation. Yet, it's just the experience of reverting to a natural state, where we participate in a community of people we know and trust.
Many of these "boomers" re-discover the ancient wisdom, that it the community, not the individual, that is the important, irreducible element of the human species. We make no sense on our own. Especially as we get older and sift through pile of stuff our parents leave behind, we discover that a life devoted to building up a bigger pile of stuff that "I" own is hollow and futile. We need to ask what "we" have, what "we" need to protect, what is in "our" best interest.
Most of all, we need to figure out who is "we". The great thing about our multi-cultural, cosmopolitan world is that we can chose the community we identify with. For most of human history, this was not an option.
This is a very natural conclusion, but it tends to be lost as we lose our grip on traditional communities and face the world alone or in nuclear families.
Evolution has left us equipped with a natural feeling of comfort and identity with community -- the first one being with our mother, then our "nuclear" family, then the extended family, then the village and beyond. Once we reach beyond the village, an element of distrust creeps in. The natural feeling of trust we have with the folks we encounter every day doesn't extend to people in the next village or the town over the mountain. Then, we start to see things in "economic" terms. We rely on trade and, eventually, money. Stripped to its bare essentials, money is simply a token of trust. We no longer need to trust the person we are doing business with -- just the money that we exchange. Of course, we can lose faith in the money itself, either the "strength" of the currency, or perhaps in the government that stands behind it.
It is important to realize the role that trust plays in all this. It is not unrelated to the issue of religion, which is, at bottom, a shared culture -- a system of beliefs, traditions, myths and symbols that (not so long ago) bound a community together. We could (or felt we should) trust the folks who shared our culture. In effect, religion created a community that, in principal, reached beyond the borders of the village. This is obviously no longer true. There are as many definitions of what it is to be "Christian" than there are Christians. In practice, this means that people specifically distrust others who disagree about religious issues. This is not so much a matter of what is true or false -- it's our tendency to trust people who agree with us, no matter how silly our opinions may be. We even tend to distrust "heretics" in our own religion more than we distrust folks who subscribe to wholly different world views. This means that community based on nationality, neighborhood or business will trump the old basis of trust: religion.
In our fragmented multi-cultural, cosmopolitan world we therefore come to take for granted that the community that matters is the economic one and this becomes the basis of our politics. It's all about money, jobs, growth etc. But this loses sight of the fact that we are hard-wired to trust communities that are physically, biologically and culturally close to us. We despair at the fact that nobody "trusts" the government, the economy, the currency. But this should be no surprise at all.
Each of us needs to step back and ask ourselves, "What communities to I belong to? Who do I trust and who trusts me? Who are the people I deal with every day without the need to exchange currency?" These questions are particularly relevant today, when baby boomers are retiring en mass -- often finding themselves outside of the money economy. Many find themselves re-discovering community and enjoying the perfectly natural experience of "helping out" without expecting to be paid. For many, this is an odd experience, requiring explanation. Yet, it's just the experience of reverting to a natural state, where we participate in a community of people we know and trust.
Many of these "boomers" re-discover the ancient wisdom, that it the community, not the individual, that is the important, irreducible element of the human species. We make no sense on our own. Especially as we get older and sift through pile of stuff our parents leave behind, we discover that a life devoted to building up a bigger pile of stuff that "I" own is hollow and futile. We need to ask what "we" have, what "we" need to protect, what is in "our" best interest.
Most of all, we need to figure out who is "we". The great thing about our multi-cultural, cosmopolitan world is that we can chose the community we identify with. For most of human history, this was not an option.
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