Today I have an unusual story for you. It's not going to make a lot of sense at first...because it's going to make a whole lot of sense all at once.
You are about to take a walk in some very ancient moccasins, an exploration in the very ruthless origins of the human concepts of hope and despair.
The tale is about a screw-up whose error causes a young girl to go blind, and a someone who faces justice for the crime of negligence, then faces the toughest question of all: How to go on, when going on is unbearable?
That person is you...for the duration of the story.
So, if you're interested, let's take a walk back to the old days together....when the world was young and our humanity was new.
Meet the Great Pine Nut Clan
Let's have a look at you. You're a young ambitious member of a small clan of archaic Homo sapiens that has discovered that a certain pine tree bears very nutritious nuts and the fortunes of the band have improved greatly since discovering this secret, as the pine nuts in question can be stored indefinitely and during good weather, the plentiful trees are very busy sprouting cones.
The only catch is that an only slightly less common tree bears nearly-identical cones, only its needles are long instead of short...and this tree's pine nuts are poisonous. However, the difference in appearance is not great, and new hands learn to watch the expert gatherers closely.
Alas, you miss that part of the lecture the night before your first nut-gathering mission.
Oops.
The next morning, you march out with a group that marches past a number of trees with plenty of the distinctive short, fat-bladed pinecones on them. You wonder why the group is ignoring them, but figure there's good reason. A couple of hours later, you arrive at a grove of trees that look no different to your eyes from the ones with pinecones that you saw. Maybe younger trees, you figure, and anyway you see everybody else is picking, so you're good to go: pick picking pinecones, pick picking pinecones, pick picking pinecones, to and fro. A little song (not in English) goes with the motions of the pine nut harvest. Workers fan out through the forest, gathering cones.
Somewhere along the way, a horn sounds; the gather signal. You set one more cone into your sack, unknowingly from a nearby longleaf pine tree, and off you march to camp with the others.
The entire day's haul is crushed into pine nut flour the next morning, and stored by bag, as a way of marking not just where and when but by whom the pine nuts in the flour were gathered.
About three weeks later, a family falls ill; no one dies, but one of the children is permanently blinded by the experience. The cause of the sickness is easily recognized by the Pine Nut Tribe; longleaf poison.
And they know who collected the pinecones that went into the flour from which the poisoned bread was made.
Oops.
Your situation looks...non-great. Are you hopeful for a reprieve, a chance to make things right? Or are you expecting to wake up naked, staked to a longleaf pine tree, with nothing but the poison cones to grant you a shorter, but assuredly painful, death?
We'll check up on your case momentarily.
What Good Are Memories, If You Can't Bear To Think Of Them?
What kept humanity from wallowing in despair and slouching back toward the scrub brush and non-sentience the first time we hit a bump in the road? After all, the downside of being self-aware and capable of remembering your mistakes is that, occasionally, you make mistakes and everybody else in the hunter-gatherer band remembers it, too.
Early human societies were always living on a razor's edge, trying to balance the risks of having too few numbers with the risk of having too many. Too few, and an attack by large predators, other humans or simply the latest fashion in diseases would reduce the band or clan to unsustainable numbers. Too many, and any variation in the availability of game or water would incur the same risk. Bad news.
Every band had to come up with some methodology for triaging its own membership, to get rid of the very young when children were simply unaffordable, or to say good-byes to the elderly or infirm, or to deal with the occasional incorrigible or incompetent, when no option to obtain additional resources was available or possible without even greater risk to the band or clan.
Two separate and competing impulses were in play at all times, both of them survival traits: mercy, and mercilessness. Empathy and identification with the prospective, ah, dischargee of such processes, versus Dispassion and alienation against the same, as a means of making the necessary decision on the basis of group (and self) interest. The first engendered a willingness toward self-sacrifice on behalf of affiliated individuals and for the group itself; the latter engendered a willing toward asking for volunteers to sacrifice on behalf of the group...and of oneself. Both impulses checked the excesses of the other.
In such marginally survivable conditions, an unwillingness to part ways with a single or several individuals could lead to the demise of the entire group. Likewise, too great an ease with exile or execution of undesirables of the moment could lead to vulnerability, not only to outside threats but to bloodshed within the band or clan, as well.
There simply had to be a balance.
Oh, yeah...you were on trial for your life, last we checked...
Let's face it; you're in a tight spot. On the one hand, you didn't intentionally collect poison pinecones. On the other hand, you're supposed to know better, and you didn't and even if no one died a child was maimed by your negligence, and people are pissed about it.
Further, they are scared, because this has been the risk accompanying the rewards of harvesting the pinecones, this has happened before, and it could happen again. Many small children have grown up in the wake of the Great Pine Nut Discovery; fully one-third of the clan is under the age of five years. I mean, it's a serious baby boom, and more little ones are on the way.
At the moment, fully half the available labor of the band is dedicated to marching out to harvest the shortleaf pinecones, and some risk of longleaf contamination remains. Collecting bad cones is a risk; to keep little kids from wandering off and feeding themselves, they are told until age of maturity (which you just attained) that all the trees are poisonous unless picked in a very special way, because of accidental deaths early on. No one questions the wisdom of the subterfuge.
Alas, it leaves the possibility open for new gatherers to miss the important safety tip, lot of good that does you or the little blind girl down the way.
Talk has been made of slowing down the gathering of the shortleaf cones, using a few expert collectors rather than having the youngest and least experienced adults perform the task. Mostly, the objection is economics: Any significant slowdown in the gathering would require first a cutback in fertility (to the point of requiring more than few of the currently-pregnant women to abort) and sending off a few of the adults to take their chances in the wilderness.
So there is an incentive in place to assign blame to the person, not the process.
Not that it helps you much, but as your advisor it is my duty to counsel you on the circumstances in which you find yourself.
I mean, it's not like the economics of your now-hostile tribe are stacked against you.
Oops. Actually, they are.
Still hopeful?
Back to human nature
We are shaped by hundreds of generations of observation and participation, by no small measure of genetic selection and a far greater portion of cultural selection to place ourselves on a spectrum between being utterly associative with everyone and to some extent everything that we encounter, or utterly dissociative of same.
In practice, there are far more restrictive bands in which we exist, or at least acknowledge and attempt to honor in our overt dealings with the world outside our own skins.
So, where does hope fit into all this?
Well, consider what the associative person seeks in contact with others and other things: interest, delight, safety, support, acceptance, communication, conversation, sharing of values tangible and intangible for mutual advantage, participation in something other and more than oneself, belonging. Goods that are in some instances mutually exclusive; to be totally open and safe, even emotionally safe, is perhaps a non sequitur. Things do not always go right, the associative attributes important roles to both chance and a vague sense of destiny for events, and a trust that people generally want and can do the right thing by other people but cannot always do so. Perhaps what they need is just more people to help and support, enable and empower them.
Now that's optimism. Demented and sad, but optimism.
As for the dissociative one: I suspect the purely dissociative being wishes that everyone does their job, does not waste his or her time (or their own) with frivolous considerations, concerns and activities, and generates values that the dissociative can either take or leave at their pleasure. So long as everybody knows their place, knows their job, and does it, we're all going to get along just fine. It is not a worldview that allows for much gray area; either things work, or they do not because somebody screwed up; inanimate objects are material, abstract concepts like 'process' do not fail. People either choose to live up to their part of the bargain, or they choose not to do so.
In other words, I just hope people around me don't screw up too badly...and the fewer around to muck up the works, the better by me!
Not very optimistic, save for a profound trust in one's own perspicacity and powers.
Most of us (well, practically all of us) fit somewhere in between, even fluctuating between the extremities depending on what's eating our particular Gilbert Grape.
As for despair...
That's a function of expectations. It's also a function of basic worldviews.
For the associative, despair is a function of lost support from and contact with valued peers. For the dissociative, despair is loss of integrity and control. Sounds abstracted to hell, I know. But think of the different questions asked of persons who, say, incur a serious illness or disability. "Will people look at me or treat me differently?" is a very different question from "Will I still be able to work? To live on my own?" though, of course, both questions are usually asked in one fashion or the other by real persons in such situations.
And different experiences send us toward different extremes of the spectrum out of necessity. We either adjust, or break and are "adjusted" by others, collapse, or die either from self-neglect or self-negation...a nice way of saying from suicide.
Oh, yeah. What's the verdict?
Well...since you didn't gather poison pinecones on purpose, and there's more need for you gathering pine nuts (albeit under close supervision) for the clan than for sending you into exile, and now there's a little blind girl who needs constant attention -- or sending into the wild herself -- the clan in its wisdom has decided you will henceforth be both constant companion to the victim of your negligence, that you will now reside with the family (which for some reason does not like you very much now), and continue to gather pine nuts for the tribe, on pain of death if you ever screw up again.
It's not an ideal situation. Happiness is most certainly not an intended condition of your life going forward. Words like service, duty, purpose, justice and restitution are. What need you once had for the acceptance and admiration of your fellows had best be set aside, for you have no such thing now. If you cannot make the adjustment, you will remain in despair, and fail, perhaps causing additional (even willful) damage on your way out. This, too, is on your mind. Perhaps, you wonder, if just marching out to one of the longleaf trees and eating your fill of their deadly fruit is the way to solve everyone's problems.
Except if you check out, everyone will know they were right to think you were a loser all along. Furthermore, there are additional stakes to consider; thanks to your actions, there is now a little blind girl who needs your attention, attention that her parents cannot give her at all times, as they have essential duties of their own, and toward their other children. You go, by the mores of the Great Pine Nut Clan, the little girl is likely to one day be walked out into the woods, per the Hansel and Gretel legend, and left to fend for herself. Being blind, that is probably not a likely prospect.
Woe, you despair. Why is this happening to you? Technically, because you weren't paying attention when you needed to, then went out on an expedition that required your full attention to rules that, good conscience be damned, you simply did not abide by out of ignorance, and innocents suffered, and one innocent in particular, as a result of it.
Metaphysically, you think of all the things you hoped for, now gone. The direction of your old life is extinguished, your new course chosen for you, again a consequence of negligence...and of justice and restitution in the eyes of the wider society which now holds you in no small measure of distrust and contempt.
You did not go out looking to cause damage, and yet you find yourself walking in the woods, doing double duty gathering pine nuts -- shortleaf ones -- and escorting your blind charge through the trails. She is learning herb lore by touch and smell. Such craft was a casual interest her mother used to share with her, now a chance for a valuable role in the clan, if she can replace the vocabulary of sight clues with her own private lexicon of textures and odors.
It is on this foray that something special occurs: You warn your ward away from a longleaf pine; you know the sight of them all too well by now. She nods; she knows already, because the bark on the low branch that she is grasping feels smooth instead of rough.
Oh? You wonder, and draw close. The bark to your feel is typical rough pine bark, perhaps smaller-scaled than usual, nothing more.
You walk on. A little later, you come up to a shortleaf pine, and decide to check out the bark. It's much coarser, far rougher; there is no mistaking the texture of the poison tree for the other.
No one had thought to look at the bark of the trees, as those with sight and a familiarity with the woods had been able to spot the poisonous trees from some distance. However, once the cones were removed, those who processed them into pine nuts and flour were literally trusting their lives and those of the tribe to the expertise (and luck) of the gatherers.
A change in gathering practice resulted from the discovery of the young blind girl; henceforth, the cones were detached with enough of the stem attached to mark them as safe or poisonous, based on the texture of the bark. In a short time, the incidence of accidental poisonings fell to nearly zero, as all gatherings occurred using the new method.
Alas, your life is not much changed, but you did help make a hero out of your young charge, and thankless as it may have been, you had a part in greatly improving the safety and fortunes of the Great Pine Nut Clan.
Happiness does not fill your life, nor acceptance or acclaim as most know it, but purpose and value you still have and it is known (if disliked by many) that you have the trust and love of the very person most harmed by your now long-past crime.
Perhaps things are looking up. Perhaps there is hope, after all.