Too many of our stories, our books, our movies, our religions, our personal narratives, our inner beliefs, our Politics, our collective future are focused on the one. For our narratives to function frequently need the individual to represent our collective needs and salvation. Even when just a metaphor for the whole, we cling to the story of the individual mostly because we are not practiced at telling stories of the whole.
Our inability and unwillingness to imagine the whole , without individuals driving or leading the whole like an animal, limits our ability to address the needs of the now and the future. Our evolution and our history shows us to be a people of individual competition, a survival of the fittest with no mercy for the whole. No thought to the whole. Kings, employers, dictators, presidents, representatives, individuals. Great man history repeated again and again because we struggle to see our collective power exercised in a manner which is not controlled by an individual.
We struggle to act collectively because it is so difficult to see the collective response. We fail to grasp the cause and effect when our small input to the collective action is swept away in the stream of the world and we can not tell our own contribution to the ocean of collective existence apart from others contributions.
Our heroes battle evil and injustice on our behalf, whether it be a comic book character or a special prosecutor appointed by the President. These are narratives our minds can capture and process. The abstraction of small acts of kindness leading to a collective better world can be understood in a theoretical manner, but lacks a visceral understanding which tells a comprehensible narrative. I can reduce my carbon footprint through gardening, but many people struggle with feeling the healing go into the world even as the can logically understand the logic of small effects adding up.
The narratives of heroes disable us. To move the world is the province of the empowered other. And as we live in a world where we empower a few to make decisions for the many too many of us remain in the disempowered. Whether the empowered is put justly there or not doesn’t matter. Whether it is power through money; our billionaires who control incomprehensible amounts of power simply through a claim to already held capital. Or if it’s power through force; the dictators of the world corrupting others through violence, threat of violence, bribery, or otherwise. Or if it’s power through revolt; strong voices who can hold a movement together, present it, and stand and fall for it. Or if it’s power through election; President, Senator, Governor, Mayor. Only a tiny few of us get to inhabit our roles of power actors on the global stage. Some of us get a role at the national, local, or small group level.
But the reality is that all of us have power and use that power to effect the world. Too often our choices in how the power is used is circumscribed by the larger narrative role players. If there is no electric car to buy, then I can’t make the decision to buy one. If there is no mass transit to take, I cannot catch an imaginary bus. And too often our power is claimed by the narrative role players. Our heroes leading a movement; Gandhi, King, Chavez, etc; derive their power from our collective action and collective demands. Occupy Wall Street is the counter movement I can think of which eschewed such a figurehead.
Our religions have long placed figureheads above us, whether it be a divine individual at the top of the religion or leaders of the most local religious establishment. There have been a few exceptions as there always are. But much of the history of religion (at its best) has been to place the role of the individual in a subordinate position to either divine power or principle in a manner meant to “bring out the best in us”. And of course religion has been frequently corrupted to serve the whims of unethical individuals and groups who have used it to strengthen themselves at the cost of others. Just as many secular organizations of once noble purpose have been corrupted as well.
Our limited understanding of the collective has certainly damaged many lives over the years. But now our inability to envision a collective power threatens our ability to exist as a species. Our individuals of leadership, empowered by our society, are currently failing to rise to the challenge of climate change and many actively work against it. And there are many reasons why that is from greed, to ignorance, to indifference, to despair and many more. But it also comes back to our ability or inability to see ourselves in the collective whole.
I’ve seen many people wonder, including myself, why we can’t have peace in the world. It simply requires a collective decision to eschew the use of violence. We certainly attempt in some ways to do away with violence through laws, government, advocacy, religion, and so on. But it only takes a subset of us with too much power at their disposal to spin the rest of us into cycles of violence at a global scale. And at personal levels, there are too many of us broken in some way still willing to hurt others for whichever reason. We could have peace if we all choose it. If we ALL chose it. Or at least some level of peace if those who want peace have sufficiently more power than those who embrace violence. Enough power and the willingness to act to remove the power from those who embrace violence.
When our world was a disconnected and unorganized system of kingdoms and tribes, some could still survive simply by being the “winners” of the localized competition. But we now live in a world where those unwilling to positively deal with the climate crisis cannot win by “winning.” They can only doom us all to ensure they are comfortable, for a time, while the world burns.
The only way out of the climate crisis is the collective action. I cannot solve the problem as an individual while everyone else on my block expands their carbon footprint. Even should I be President of the United States, I cannot solve our climate problems while countries like Russia remain uncooperative, or while our US born and bred oligarchs fail to take action or actively oppose us with their economic empires. And should I be dictator for life of the entire world, I could not save us if the global population fails to embrace our goals of dealing with climate change.
We need large scale cooperation. We don’t need new technology. We have everything we need in terms of material and know-how. We lack global cooperation. And part of that is we lack a global story of collective cooperation that can be told without the need for the narrative of the individual. We must comprehend a story system which transmits in a visceral way the story of everyone coming together to do our part. And for those who are willing, to come together to pool our resources and remove power from the few who oppose us. For they are the few. They simply control a lot.
We need to retell our morality tales not as a person subservient to a god or an ideal, but as people who willingly embrace a responsibility to each other. We must figure out how to come to collective, responsible decisions AND action. We must come to a collective understanding to commit ourselves to living in a collective world. And that includes figuring out what to do about those who don’t. We need to help people hold the fire in their heart that the combined heroes of all the nations, the many billions of us, can collectively embrace a positive future. We all get to remain our quirky selves and individuals. But we embrace the actions of collective individuals to make a paradise. And we need to figure out a way to tell that story so that people can understand that vision and embrace it.