How To Be Human
Any why should we even need a guide?
The last thing I thought I’d ever be doing almost a quarter into a brand-new century is putting together a guide on how to be human. The subtext of the decision alone pains me. It suggests that the cognitive layer that allows us to exercise better executive function and emotional regulation has somehow been compromised.
The pandemic managed to strip us from the calibrating influence of the social construct of the past and we have yet to find a new mooring around which we can curate what must now be a new identity. We need both the calibrating influence of society and identity in order to know how to behave.
Let’s unpack these two first before we get to the crux of the matter. With the benefit of hindsight it’s easy to see how isolation, uncertainty and the real possibility of an untimely death conspired to make people question the foundations of their existence, first, and those of the social construct, second.
Our massively complex brain has evolved to do one basic thing: help us survive. It does that by performing a next-to-impossible task: predicting the future by predicting the next moment. It does that by establishing a stable perception of reality predicated on social norms, shared traditions, shared values and shared beliefs that enable trust to emerge.
The scientific definition of trust is that it allows us to predict a response even in a totally new situation. We need trust for any relational exchange to take place. In its absence nothing happens. As an interesting aside, it is worth noting that untrustworthiness is not the same as lack of trust. Our ability to calculate the possibility of a third party betraying our trust is still a calculation of known variables and unknown but predictable and therefore calculable variables that allows a relational exchange to occur (which is why we can all choose to buy a house or car from a complete stranger, for instance).
But for all these things to happen we need two more fundamental ingredients:
- A framework within which some calculations of known and unknown but predictable variables to occur.
- An identity we can use to ascribe a relative value to the calculations we make.
The framework, in the first instance, is provided by the unique social construct of each culture. Culture is the result of collective emergent behavior. That behavior, in the first instance, is guided by both the natural and man-made environment (which is why we perceive Mediterranean countries as warm and friendly and their Northern neighbors as closed and calculating) and, in its secondary curation and formation stages by our own efforts to make sense of our role in all this.
Inevitably, nothing is linear here. Who we are is a mix of when and where we are as well as who we associate with and what we do. Context is important to us because it helps us make sense of our identity.
“We Are Not In Kansas Anymore”
Dorothy’s timeless line to her dog, Toto, in the 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz, perfectly captures the interwoven complexity of time and place to guide behavior.
Presented with a new context the fictional characters of Toto and Dorothy must learn to navigate a new reality. The post-pandemic world is not like it was before the pandemic and we can, pretty successfully, argue that the 19 years after the turn of the century were in themselves full of challenges the scope and magnitude of which we were barely equipped to face:
- 9/11
- The Afghanistan War
- Its impact on migration
- The rise of tension within Western Countries because of illegal immigration
- The Global Credit Crunch
- The rise of extremism in politics
- Brexit
- And, the 2016 election in the U.S.
All this without even pausing to consider the rapid evolution of technology and the social media revolution it fuelled and its impact (of which context collapse is just a small part) already challenged our sense who we are and why we are.
The pandemic, when it came, appears as inevitable as the sun rising in the east every morning. And since then we’ve also had:
- War in Ukraine
- The current phase of the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Even a cursory memory scan through recent headlines will bring to mind a long list of woes: “energy crisis”, “supply chain issues”, “food insecurity”, “energy insecurity”, “inflation”, and “personnel shortage”.
Again, I’m glossing over obvious things: climate change and the uptake of relatively intelligent machines as the explosion of AI in devices and services changes, again, nearly everything.
In many ways, without realizing it, we’ve been conditioned. Political scientists call this the Overton Window. Faced with successive, escalating crises and extreme points of view we all gradually gravitate towards norms that are different to what we’d have accepted in the past which, however, represent a relatively acceptable stability when the alternatives are taken into account.
Psychologists call this habituation. Bludgeoned by consistent waves of bad news we end up living in a perceived permacrisis where the best we can hope for is to survive unscathed.
At this point if there was an off-planet alternative we’d all be queuing up to grab some black-market tickets to it. Unfortunately, there isn’t so now, legitimately, we need to ask: what do we do?
The choices aren’t easy. We can choose to more or less do nothing and allow the circumstances to dictate our actions and, maybe, our fate. This is what’s called Zombie Mode. Or, we can rethink our entire approach to life, as a whole.
Both choices have drawbacks. The former is not much of a life, especially if you happen to survive long enough for the consequences of inaction to make themselves felt. The latter is energetically harder. It requires us to critically examine what we’ve always taken for granted: social constructs, values, beliefs, traditions, even our sense of right and wrong. Taken to its extreme it is not only exhausting but also disorienting. We have no ‘true North’ to guide us and we already know that we cannot always trust our perception.
In Frank Herbert’s masterpiece, Dune, the gom jabbar is a test of one’s human nature. Maintaining one’s self-awareness in the midst of experiencing excruciating pain is a requirement for executive control and emotional regulation. It takes a fictional device some times to make us aware of what it truly means to be human. Not just survival, but thriving. Not just instinctive action but planning. Not just an awareness of the pain, emotional or otherwise, that we feel but also the active nurture of hope.
It is in these actions that we differentiate ourselves from our animal origin. It is this different approach that marks as conscious beings that exhibit complex behavior.
We’re At A Precipice
As things are we’re at a delicate point in our history. Inaction as much as action have the capacity to tip us over into the abyss. This means that both the actions we take and the ones we don’t have to be sophisticated and nuanced. Measured and thoughtful.
Whatever moral compass we had in the past is no longer working.
We’re aware of that even if we fail to openly acknowledge it, even to ourselves.
In my piece on Three Rules For Living In The 21st Century I started with “Be Human” while I explained part of what that meant I completely failed to realize that six years later I’d have to write a “How-to” guide on that.
Yet, here we are. If you want to be truly human you have no choice:
- Be situationally aware — Understand what context is fluid. That values are never rigid. That every situation in a novel environment has no precedent and must be judge by its merits.
- Be consistent — There is nothing wrong with being selfish, self-centred and focused on your own survival. No one lives in your skin, experiences what you experience or understands your own personal struggle. Just be consistent with your choices. Fudging what’s best for you with what you think others want to hear means you’re failing to be true to yourself and, as a consequence, you’re going to fail to be true to everybody else also. Best to take one win than none. Needless to say, it’s the same if you feel your calling is to save the world from itself.
- Be accepting — We used to judge, and judge and judge others all the time. And because we used to judge them and hang out with people who mostly agreed with both judging and the judgement we made, we used to be afraid of being judged. Acceptance is easier on yourself and others. Practice it.
- Be kind — We all have an inner voice. It is usually destructive. We all have some kind of trauma. We all experience some kind of struggle. We all have insecurities. Kindness comes from acceptance but it also comes from a willingness to understand and a desire to evolve. We consistently fail ourselves there. When we are our own worst critic we find it difficult to be kind to others. Kindness, like love, has to start with us first; if it is to start at all.
- Be fearless — Fear is the mind killer. (Dune fans, rejoice). Quite literally. Our inner struggles exhaust us. The anger we often feel, is the result of our inability to face what we fear. Letting go of our fears requires reasoning, awareness, consistency, acceptance and kindness.
None of this is easy. The choice, of course, is up to us. Within our generation we need to decide what it is we want to do (or not do), why, and what we expect from our actions and inaction as a result.
The world we live in is a construct made up of all the countless choices we make. If we want to make it different it’s up to us to do so, trusting that there are enough of us to tilt the balance the right way.
