Gratitude Friday 02 14 25 A Mean Self-Centered Society or a Giving and Empathetic One

It is Valentines Day, the day of love. One of the things I think about is who we are as a nation. Are we a mean and self-centered society focused on only ourselves or are we a generous, empathetic and loving one? If there are Vegas odds on such a poll, I suspect the current odds would be on the former and not the latter. My money on first consideration would be on the same. We humans are complex beings that defy simple explanation. I suspect we are a mix of both. I also think we tend to have a better functioning society when the balance of these traits is on the empathy side of the scale. We are better people when we see ourselves as a collective who care about each other. A single tribe concerned about the whole instead of a mob out for our own benefit at the expense of all those around us. I started writing this post over the holidays when the health care executive was assassinated in New York City. I looked on social media and saw the darker side of who we are in this moment. Yet we are also what I wrote in July 2022  A Front Row Seat to Human Resiliency.

In it I reference a documentary , Julie and I watched about a bike ride that followed the route of Dust Bowl migrants during the Great Depression as depicted in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The movie was called The Bikes of Wrath. As noted in the IMDB description:

“In 2015 five friends from Australia set out to bike from Oklahoma to California the same route the families traveled in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. The friends did this on a budget of just $420 which is the equivalent to the $18 each family had on average that made the same trek during the dust bowl. They were overwhelmed by the generosity of the people in the states they biked through which are known as Red States. During the editing process of the documentary, they realized this trek was more about the people they met than the actual trek.”

I wonder how humans can be mean and distancing in one minute and the very next show tremendous compassion for another person in need. Truth be told, I have done the same. Say for example opening a door for an older person as I leave a store and then a minute later cutting someone off in the parking lot. Same person less than five minutes from one action to the other. I have done this. As a reader of history and psychology, it is my sense that this is the norm rather than the exception. Why are we like this and how do we engage the empathy drive we all have more often?

Behavior is infectious. If I get cut off or treated rudely in public, I am more likely to treat another in the same way. Paradoxically, if I run into a person who is kind and compassionate, I am more inclined to act that way with people I meet after encountering the person with the open heart. Group psychology dynamics in action. As an aside, of any college course I ever took in my subject area of concentration, it is what I learned in a group psychology course decades ago that I have found most useful. In essence we often act like a big herd instead of as individual people. This why studies show that if you are unfortunate enough to be assaulted in public you actually have a better chance of someone stepping in to help you if there are only a few people around and not a huge crowd. The huge crowd tends to watch, and everyone wonders why someone else does not do something about it, a dynamic called diffusion of responsibility.

We have a lot of “mean scapes” in our age. It was not always like this, at least from my perspective. In this era, it seems like most of us walk around in a threat-oriented stance rather than a humanistic stance. We mean mug each other instead of smiling warmly at people we encounter. It is even sad to write this, if you think I am wrong, please set me straight. I would love to see a different perspective here.

This is what I was thinking of when I recalled that documentary cited above. The riders encountered people who had experienced hardships and who were kind and generous to them. Back to group psychology here. We are wired for threats, particularly in respect to people we do not know, yet we are also wired to help strangers as a group survival trait. Altruism exists because helping people in need is important. It could, and is likely to be, any of us at some point.

One of the themes of the movie is urban people (sub narrative “blue state” people) who are portrayed as more generous than the communities (sub narrative “red state” people) ride through and depend on their generosity. People whom, if all you listen to in the media are so different in every way as to have no common ground. Of course, and perhaps fortunately what unfolds in the movie in incredible generosity which defies the stereotypes. In the movie and in life people can find significant common ground despite their differences. There are not red or blue states of red or blue people. We are all one people, if we continue to decide to be so.

We can see through the labels we have for each other and responded with humanity. In essence, I think this is our only real hope in keeping our mean society tendencies at bay and nurturing our better selves, collectively. For me the lesson is to seek common ground today with other humans and perhaps to smile at those I encounter today. Grateful for the opportunity to try to erase my mean mug.

What are you grateful for today?