Sorting Ourselves Out

gated community in Liverpool England; photo by Ronnie Hughes

We humans are pretty good at self-organizing. We’re a social species, after all, and we want to know where we ‘fit’ in our communities, even though “community” has largely lost its true meaning. It is through conversation, collaboration and observing others that we make sense of things, so we naturally want to make sure the people who make the most sense to us will welcome us into their circles.

The downside of this is that it is easy to exploit, and can lead us into behaviours that are unhealthy for us and for our communities. Fear of ostracism can make us obedient and compliant. We can also self-select (“self-sort“) into echo chambers that make us deaf to ideas, knowledge and points of view from outside these chambers, and can leave us dangerously out of touch with what most people actually believe and how most people actually live.

So we get entrenched in our perspectives and worldviews, less open and adaptable in our thinking, less able to learn and appreciate things outside our circles and comfort zones. We lock into labels and brands — both those that commercial and political organizations eagerly urge upon us, and those we create for ourselves — and they become a limiting part of our identity. We are defined by these labels and the demographics that correlate with them. Those who defy pigeon-holing are often viewed with suspicion.

We then become “unconsciously exclusive” and others in turn unconsciously exclude us. This is understandable human behaviour. We are by nature pattern recognizers and simplifiers, and our minds quickly learn to accept information, and people, that resonate with our evolved worldviews, and to disregard, disbelieve, ignore and avoid information and people who don’t fit those worldviews. We associate with people who share our views, our goals, our activities and our interests.

We end up living in huge cities remarkable for their anonymity and loneliness, and obliviously pass by those who live near to us to ‘meetup’ with those, farther away (or online) whose worldviews echo and mirror our own. Talking to the “stranger” next door or at the bus stop becomes an act of courage and defiance, crashing the implicit boundaries that separate all of us, until and unless we’re explicitly invited across them.

No wonder then that change is so hard to bring about, when the prerequisite association and trust needed to broadly inform, persuade, expose and share knowledge, ideas and perspectives is absent by default in our modern society.

We are well-trained, we self-domesticated humans. We self-sort, for marketers’ easy mass distribution of whatever garbage or propaganda they are hawking. We raise our hands, our profiles, our ID cards and our ballots on demand, when asked to identify ourselves and our preferences to the aggregators of consumer products, services and ‘political’ messages.

We self-censor, out of (often exaggerated) fear of prosecution, opprobrium or ostracism. We self-colonize, twisting ourselves into who we are not, for fear of being thought “crazy”, or of thinking ourselves to  be so. We “haze” those who want to become part of our groups, in brutal, devious and often-subtle ways. We engage in coercive groupthink with others we think we belong with or want to belong with. In this manipulative behaviour we prey, often abusively, on the inherent human craving for appreciation, attention, belonging and reassurance, and the human fear of ridicule.

And so, whether or not it really makes any sense to us (and even if it makes the cognitive dissonance in our lives bewildering), we willingly:

• accept responsibility, even for things we have no control, power or authority over
• overwork at jobs we loathe, because of others’ expectations and unsupported claims that “we are capable of anything if we only apply ourselves sufficiently to it”
• accept that our culture is the best (or only viable) culture that has ever existed
• “play well with others”, even when the others are cleverly abusive
• persevere doing things (notably in large organizations, schools, and “self-help” books and programs) that have never actually worked, because other people allege, without real evidence, that they do
• “get with the program” rather than challenge its failings or even its absurdity
• present everything with, and maintain a posture of, hopefulness and “forced optimism” for fear of being ostracized as a complainer, or lazy, or an unconstructive, defeatist doomer
• self-ghettoize into places with others dealing with the same endemic scarcities (of power, education, wealth, income, health) so we are invisible to, and won’t inflict our misery on, those living with abundance
• self-victimize (blaming ourselves for our poverty, our lack of “achievement”, our unemployment, our mental or physical illness, our despair and our exhaustion)

This is the system that evolves when it becomes necessary to have nearly 8 billion people vigorously support the economic, political, social and other systems of industrial civilization culture to prevent their utter collapse. It is, of course, unhealthy and massively destructive. But large complex systems evolve to prevent reform and change, so now they’re the only systems, and the only conceivable culture, on offer for most.

Even where that civilization culture has already collapsed (like most third-world nations and many chronically poor and resource-exhausted and desolated parts of first-world nations), the well-financed leaders and propagandists perpetuate the hope that with hard work and good fortune each of us can escape the disaster and join the ‘exclusive’ ranks of the rich and powerful.

This is an observation, not an accusation, admonishment, call to action, or claim of personal exemption from this propensity. It is a key sustainer of abuse of privilege, discrimination, abuse of power, and inequality, and many other outrages. The fact that we self-sort does not in any way exonerate those who exploit it and those who commit these outrages, nor does it mean that self-sorting, self-censoring and self-colonization are the cause, “to blame” in any sense for these outrages, which we should never tolerate and should work tirelessly to recognize and defeat.

But I have no faith that awareness and education and condemnation of self-sorting, self-censoring and self-colonization will reduce these human propensities. They are in our nature, especially in times of stress (discrimination, abuse and inequality, on the other hand, are not in our nature: they are personal and systemic pathologies of our sick and reeling culture).

What we can do is ask ourselves these questions:

1. In what ways do I self-sort into and self-identify with particular groups? Why do I do that, and why these particular groups?
2. What are the dangers, harms and other costs (of ignorance, misunderstanding, discrimination, mistreatment) of this self-sorting and self-identifying with selected groups to the exclusion of others?
3. In what ways do I self-censor, self-victimize and self-colonize? What am I afraid to say and do, and why?
4. What are the dangers and costs of this self-censoring, self-victimizing and self-colonizing (see the bullets above)? To what extent is doing this a disservice to myself, my loved ones and my communities? At the end of my life, to what extent will I regret doing so?

We may not be able to change the culture, but knowledge and awareness of what we do to ourselves, and allow to be done to us, can at least help us appreciate some of the costs of this culture, and how we can cope with, and adapt to, the damage it does, with our unwitting complicity.