What Lies Between Us: My Journey in Pursuit of a “Good Society”

My struggle with early parenthood led me on a journey that redefined my understanding of a good society, from the family unit on up to our economy, political system and beyond.

By Stuart Gill

Despite an unprecedented number of people experiencing unprecedented prosperity, many of us still struggle with the pressures of modern life, which often manifest in malaise, mental illness or deep existential dread. So, what are we doing wrong? Well, lots of things, obviously. But what would need to change to start getting things right? What would need to be put in place for society to move from its current state of dysfunction to one of health? What conditions actually give rise to a good society?

Years before a personal crisis shed light on answers to these questions, I thought I had them figured out. While researching and teaching astrophysics at Columbia University, I had the opportunity to engage with academics across disciplines, which solidified my understanding of the established definition of a “good” society: one that strives to strike the right balance between the market and the state — the pillars of Western societies — thereby equipping individuals with the freedoms and protections to pursue happiness.

I initially agreed with the broadest strokes of this established view: Over the last 400 years, the market has proven itself an unrivalled engine of production, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and providing a quality of life early kings and queens would have envied. This enormous redistribution of wealth resulted in a redistribution of political power, shifting the centre of sovereignty from monarchs and emperors to the people through the birth of the modern republics. But, despite all this apparent good at scale, the flaws of the Western system are clear. In our market-based society, wealth production is heavily biased towards the wealthy, creating an imbalance in power that ties our politics, media and futures to the will of the wealthiest 1%. Meanwhile, the modern democratic state, driven by electoral cycles and the contest for public opinion, focuses on too few issues that often become polarising and thus work to divide us.

With all these costs and benefits in mind, I subscribed to the belief, common within many institutions seeking to address societal challenges, that in an open society, any problems with the market or state could simply be innovated away. When I joined the World Bank in 2009, designing solutions to reduce climate and disaster risk, you could say that I joined the establishment. Yet, as I flew around the world as an optimistic ambassador of this worldview and beneficiary of this system, my mental health and personal life began to crumble.

During my “dark night”, I discovered I no longer believed that society will solve the challenges we face by simply innovating them away.

I didn’t know it at the time but I had entered a period the renowned psychiatrist and spiritual writer Gerald May described as a “dark night of the soul”, a process of loss, doubt and discovery that in the end leads to liberation and transformation. During my “dark night”, I discovered I no longer believed that society will solve the challenges we face by simply innovating them away. The realness of life forced me to interrogate the base assumption I held about market and state that underpinned my life and our society. This ultimately led to a simple shift in thinking that has fundamentally shaped me and my family, and helped me see a future where we could move toward embodying the good society we so long for.

A Personal Crisis Awakens Me to Society’s Brokenness

My dark night of the soul was largely a result of my “success”, as defined by Western society. I had earned multiple degrees and landed a job at a respected, mission-driven institution that paid well and offered me the comforts of modern life. The price I paid for these trappings included long hours, high stress and continuous travel. In one year alone, I travelled twice to every continent except Antarctica. I became disconnected from my wife, family and friends, battled infertility and illness, and ultimately found myself withdrawing from everything other than the demands of the job.

When my wife finally became pregnant through in vitro fertilisation, I quit the World Bank, fearful of becoming the kind of dad I did not want for my kid. Unsurprisingly, leaving my job did not magically restore balance to my life, and my wife and I were seriously challenged by the demands of early parenthood. Our daughter, born prematurely at 33 weeks, spent the first weeks of her life in the hospital. She developed colic soon after coming home, screaming for hours on end, and slept extremely poorly into her third year of life. There were nights I felt like my arms were falling off as I tried to pat her to sleep. I had to ask myself, if billions of people had done this before, how could it be so hard? In her infinite wisdom, my wife pointed out that we were trying to do something alone that was never meant to be done that way.

As an introvert, I had never seen being alone as a problem, until suddenly it was, which prompted me to look inward and consider what role I had played in our isolation. Why had I chosen to live abroad for years, away from my family? Why didn’t my wife and I have strong connections to our neighbours? Why did we lack sufficient emotional support and practical help when we needed it most, despite the proximity of loving family?

At what point in the human journey did the integral importance of prioritising our relationships with each other shift to the periphery, and why don’t we all see the urgency in restoring its value?

Over those long nights and bleary-eyed days, I came to believe that our lack of practical and emotional support was not so much the consequence of a personal flaw as a flaw in the very society in which we exist. Why don’t we grow up striving for healthy community, like we learn to strive for high grades, good jobs and other markers of personal “excellence”? At what point in the human journey did the integral importance of prioritising our relationships with each other shift to the periphery, and why don’t we all see the urgency in restoring its value? I began to notice similar forms of lonely struggle all around me, manifesting in the anxiety, depression and general melancholy that has become something of a backdrop to Western society. My personal problem, I realised, was rooted in something much more foundational: I began to see that our society is starving for community. And that all of us who struggle with isolation and its consequences have simply arrived in our dark places by absorbing and adhering to the rules of our broken society.

Uncovering the Roots of the Problem: How Did Relationship Lose Its Value?

How did our Western society come to value community so little, I wondered? I turned to psychology, political economy, social science research and long conversations with friends and colleagues for answers. What I found reorientated my understanding of what makes a good society and how we got to where we are now. We can trace it back to the ancient Greeks and their fierce commitment to logic in pursuit of objective truth. They believed the world could be categorised (“objectified”) and broken down into independent parts governed by rules. According to this way of thinking, an individual could obtain a predictable outcome by adhering to the system’s rules. In other words, to the ancient Greeks, the world was deterministic and, thus, by extension, individuals had the power to shape the course of their own lives.

While this way of thinking is common today, it was profoundly different for its time, which tended toward more circular ways of thinking shaped by the seasons or belief that the world was too complex to determine. The Greeks’ deterministic worldview birthed the sciences, my foundational area of study. It also birthed the idea of the individual, imbued with rights, freedoms and agency to exert control over their own destiny, and it elevated logic as a superior form of reason.

The Enlightenment resurrected, refined and disseminated the Greeks’ way of thinking across Europe, in reaction to a world in which the Catholic Church and landowning minorities wielded absolute power, suppressing individual freedoms. This intellectual movement, centred on the rights and needs of the individual, gave rise to the market and state systems we know today, with all their benefits and flaws.

Over time — for better and for worse — responsibilities and power shifted away from the community. Safety, justice, education, health care and just about everything else were no longer the sole responsibilities of families and interdependent neighbours. The state and market began to fulfil these needs, and as these twin pillars of society grew more powerful, communities weakened and became less relevant. Through colonisation, this pattern replicated itself across much of the world, cumulating to a crippling overreaction.

Individuals, once valued for their contributions to their communities, became valued primarily for their contributions to the market and the state. And today, as the state increasingly concedes to the primacy of the market, we find the “good” in society is now measured by what the market values. From the market, we expect qualities such as efficiency, full employment and profit. Profit got us hooked on debt, and debt demands growth, leading to an obsession with growth — rising GDP and personal income — at the expense of everything else. This effect cannot be overstated: it has transformed our economy, our values even, most importantly, our way of thinking.

Why We Cannot Simply Innovate Our Way Back to Community

In his book The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why, social psychologist Richard Nisbett highlights the striking cognitive differences between people in East Asian and Western societies. His research has found that East Asians tend to think more holistically, accept contradictions and focus on harmony, while Westerners tend to be more analytical, prioritising logic and focusing on objective truth.

He concluded that the relationships between people and their distinct environments lead to unique economic structures that influence social practices, which in turn influence how our brains process information. This leads to distinct attitudes, values and behaviours that loop back and reinforce a society’s culture and economy. Nisbett writes, “The social practices promote the worldviews; the worldviews dictate the appropriate thought processes; and the thought processes both justify the worldviews and support the social practices.”

Following Nisbett’s reasoning, why wouldn’t Westerners, including myself, see community as an afterthought, oblivious to the harm done by its absence, like the proverbial frog being slowly boiled alive? While we and our leaders pay lip service to the notion of community, we are primed from birth with independence cues. The market incents us to spend our lives focused primarily on ourselves — our studies, our career and our ideas — rather than our communities and relationships. Even creating a family is often approached as another collection of assets — house, caravans, extracurricular activities for and accomplishments by children — with less focus on family relationships and little unstructured time left for family cohesion and just being together. While we may not be explicitly told that capital is more valuable than labour, ideas more valuable than feelings and individuals more valuable than communities, we learn these lessons by simply existing in the world and noticing which attributes tend to be recognised and rewarded.

If Nisbett is correct, just “innovating away” the flaws at the level of the market and the state is impossible. While my dark night of the soul had convinced me that community needs to play a larger role in our market-state system, I hadn’t considered the futility of any reform failing to address the very way we think — the filter through which we interpret the world and give it our attention.

What we truly need, I now believe, is to shift the locus of our moral universe and reorient ourselves from the individual to “what lies between us” — that is, relationship.

What we truly need, I now believe, is to shift the locus of our moral universe and reorient ourselves from the individual to “what lies between us” — that is, relationship. I am convinced that such a shift in perspective could transform our attitudes, values and behaviours and equally transform how we structure our society, economy and relationship with the planet. Why do I believe this so strongly?

May called the “dark night of the soul” dark, not because it is harrowing (though it often is) but because “liberation takes place in hidden ways, beneath our knowledge and understanding.” It was by withdrawing from relationship that I entered my dark night. Equally, by embracing relationship, I found my way out.

While this shift in perspective has personally wrought profoundly positive effects on my life and family, I would argue that we are benefitting from a legacy that can be traced all the way back to the origin of our species (in fact, the origin of all species), where our key evolutionary advantage was our ability to collaborate, to be in relationship, which our large brains evolved in service to. Not “I think, therefore, I am”. Rather, “We think, therefore we are”.

R. Baumeister and M. Leary’s 1995 review of the scientific literature establishes the need to belong as a fundamental human motivation, similar to other basic motivations like food and sex. In other words, relationship is not merely a means to an end; it is an end in itself, imperative to our health and survival. Surely, if our relational capacity is at the very core of who we are, it is reasonable to suggest it should be the paradigm we organise around.

A New Framework to Help Reorganise Society Around Relationships

If we accept the basic premise that relationships belong at the centre of our moral universe, we must carefully consider what form of relationship is worthy of organising ourselves around, and whether it will scale from, say, your relationship with your partner to your relationship with the state?

I began exploring answers to these questions in early 2019, when, after a 14-year battle with cancer, my father died. The pain of his passing and personal challenges at the time led to confusion about our relationship. I began to question whether my father had loved me. As I tried to write his eulogy, I was painfully stuck on this question.

At the same time, I had just finished reading the book Love, Power, and Justice by Christian existentialist philosopher Paul Tillich. Tillich defines love as “the drive towards the unity of the separated.” In my pain, as I sat with his understanding, I came to see that love is not equivalent to affection; it is rather a commitment to being in a relationship. While it is true that not all my encounters with my father were affectionate — he was a man of his time — I had always felt his commitment to our relationship.

In Tillich, I found answers to my personal questions — and even more. His analysis of love, power and justice enabled me to consider these ideas in relation to each other, which helped me articulate the type of relationship worthy of commitment.

Over the next few months, I adapted Tillich’s analysis into a graph (see below) that maps the power dynamics between an individual and the collective (for example, a marriage, family, business, government, etc.) at a given point in time. The Relational Imperative, or Love Framework, as my colleagues have come to call it, became the tool I used to assess the health of every relationship in my life. The concepts that underlie it, I believe, are the key to understanding breakdowns in relationships and society and, crucially, how to repair those fissures.

Central to the framework below is its acknowledgement that power is active in every encounter a person has with another person or collective. That power can empower and realise; it can also disempower or even overpower.

The Y-axis represents the realisation of the self, and the X-axis is the realisation of the collective, revealing four basic categories.

In the top-right quadrant, both I and We are realised.

Each person can read the Y-axis for themselves or an individuated organisation.

The X-axis always relates to a collective realisation (not another individual’s realisation). For example, the X-axis could represent your marriage as a collective of both partners (but not your partner as an individual), your workplace or the country where you live. So it’s not limited to any one scale.

Let’s imagine a range of workplace scenarios that map to each quadrant in the graph.

• In the bottom-right quadrant, in which the collective is realised at the expense of the individual, unrealistic workplace demands may be so high that they adversely impact an employee’s relationship with their family.
• In the top-left quadrant, in which the individual is realised at the expense of the collective, an employee may use their privilege to always be the first to speak or silence others in the group.
• In the top-right “I + We” quadrant, an individual may use their power to create a safe space to build on the team’s ideas creatively, and in supporting others also share the benefits of their ideas. Top-right-quadrant relationships are a decision to value the individual and the collective. In fact, they fundamentally recognise that individual realisation is interdependent with the realisation of the collective.
• In the bottom-left quadrant, neither I nor We is realised.

While this explanation just scratches the surface (a more in-depth exploration of this is coming soon) the Relational Imperative laid bare that just relationships exist in the top-right I + We quadrant, where each party benefits, grows and thrives from the relationship with the other.

Though, life being life, we don’t always manage this successfully, the commitment to doing so creates the space for hope to restore relationships when we inevitably find ourselves living outside this quadrant. When such a rupture happens, retributive or distributive justice may succeed in building that pathway back to relationship. But when retributive and distributive justice are insufficient, we then need a restorative justice that values relationship above all else. The commitment to live in the “I + We” quadrant then requires an undeserved gift of grace to heal the rupture and restore relationship. We are not saying commit to an abusive relationship (in which there is no commitment to the I + We, as it takes at least two) because in a loving relationship all parties commit to living in the graph’s top-right quadrant. Hence the name!

Our current system, of course, doesn’t recognise relational wealth; it treats the bonds between us as personal endeavours, not fundamental needs.

Commitment to this type of relationship — between spouses, employer and employee, government and citizen, corporation and clients, people and the land — for me is the foundation of a “good society”. For me, this means reorientating our moral universe around “what lies between us”. This balance does not place the individual before the collective nor does it place the collective before the individual. This view places ideas in service to relationship, not above it. It does not value harmony for its own sake but values a commitment to dialogue and hard conversations. These collections of I+We–quadrant relationships are what my colleagues and I have started calling “relational wealth”. We have come to view relational wealth as the building blocks of healthy relationships, which are the building blocks of a healthier society and an economy that works for all.

Our current system, of course, doesn’t recognise relational wealth; it treats the bonds between us as personal endeavours, not fundamental needs. It does not incent or empower citizens to exist in that I + We quadrant where justice thrives and the economy empowers its people. Instead, it recasts citizens as individual consumers whose purpose is to serve the economy, resulting in everything from poverty and inequality to climate change and the decimation of the world’s resources — and even the lonely struggle of isolated new parents lacking loving community because every invisible power in their lives had attuned them to prioritise the individual over “what lies between us”.

How to Build Relational Wealth for a Better Society

But what does it take to live relationally? What actually needs to happen in order to reorient our individual and collective lives around I+We–quadrant relationships, with the aim of nurturing a good society?

Over time, and with the arrival of two more children, my wife and I slowly learned to live a more relational life. This took identifying and shifting some shared narratives and behaviours. It also meant working on ourselves. For me, it was understanding how my childhood had shaped the way I relate to others and healing old wounds. Our guiding question as a couple became, “‘Will this action draw us closer in relationship or not?” This transformed arguments that were once about persuading or winning into a richer dialogue where we could talk about the hard stuff. We came to regard healthy relationship as the foundation for our happiness, not a by-product, and likewise to believe that the purpose of seeking justice was to restore I + We relationship.

The purpose of justice is to restore right relationship.

Beyond the family unit, we sought out a community of people who listened to our struggles, saw our blind spots, offered wisdom and helped practically with life’s challenges, be it a meal, moving a couch or a ride home from the hospital. And we committed ourselves to providing similar support to others. We took steps to cultivate the oft-mentioned “village” so needed to raise our children and found others likewise hungry for the same kind of mutual support. Eventually, we found we weren’t alone anymore. While the relief was enormous, it’s worth mentioning this shift wasn’t (and still isn’t) always easy. I’m still learning to ask for help, and also learning that receiving support is not just about me but is a shared experience that likewise permits others to ask for support.

As I look back over my life, this way of living was not wholly absent. For example, growing up, I had been taught that being gay was a sin. When one of my closest friends came out when we were in our teens, I faced internal dissonance between my belief and my relationship. To build relational wealth, requires we value the relationship first. This “relational ethic” requires us first to meet the person and then explore ideas. Where there is dissonance between a belief and the experience of a relationship, a change of belief may follow, or at least a valuing of difference. In my case, the friendship led me to grapple with and ultimately abandon my pre-held idea. In view of our friendship, my beliefs changed.

Like my old belief that being gay was sinful, many of our beliefs are inherited from the culture we live in, including family and broader society, and they play a powerful force in our lives and drive much of our behaviour. While some are innocuous, like believing that one style of jeans is preferable to another, toxic beliefs that prioritise the value of one group over another can cause untold hardship at a personal and societal level. This is living in the top left “I am realised at the expense of Us” quadrant of the Relational Imperative.

These beliefs, propagated and maintained by our relationships, can likewise be changed by our relationships, as happened for me. At the individual level, this change often requires a commitment to dialogue. In other words, it requires conversations grounded in the I + We quadrant, that respect the dignity of both parties and of the relationship, reflecting a critical relational capacity between individuals. A good society, however, requires this relational capacity at scale, and I have to believe these capacities are scalable across every level of society.

Critical relational capacities (some of which my colleagues and I have identified and will be exploring in another work) are prerequisites for just relationships. Without self-knowledge or the ability to change one’s mind (examples of individual relational capacities) a person will not have the capacity needed to engage in those just and healthy relationships that sit in the I + We quadrant of the Relational Imperative. Similarly, an organisation, institution or group that lacks the collective relational capacity to engage in dialogue or create unifying social narratives cannot be expected to engage in just relationships either. Like a muscle, these capacities can be developed over time to become strong but they require consistent attention to maintain that strength. Also like a muscle, they can be injured, sometimes severely, requiring healing, treatment and time for recovery.

Currently, I don’t think it is a stretch to suggest our relational capacities within society require therapy. We need only look at the advent of social media with its anonymity leading to objectification and its echo chambers confirming our in-group biases. At the same time, there is little relational capacity to have a collective dialogue at scale to make sense of our world together. While collective dialogue would not demand everyone participate in the same conversation, nor would it be the stratified screaming matches that play out on social media, feeding tribal bigotries. It would rather require a critical mass of people intentionally connected in relationships that transcend economic, ethnic, gender and other bounds.

It is not the sort of wealth that can be spent by any one individual but is rather a “commonwealth” that benefits us all.

The relational wealth required for a good society is built upon such capacities. It is not the sort of wealth that can be spent by any one individual but is rather a “commonwealth” that benefits us all. The great poet Rumi wrote, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” From this foundational place, that relational wealth, that ”what lies between us,” may be present between individuals, within families, firms — even economic sectors, or our oceans. It may be present wherever relationship exists. And that is everywhere.

While “relationship” may sound soft and difficult to quantify, the science of “relationship” is a rich and active research field across disciplines and these relational capacities can be measured. For example, Harvard University’s long-running Grant and Glueck studies have been tracking the physical and emotional well-being of two different groups of men since the 1940s. According to Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, “The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.” Furthermore, “It’s not just the number of friends you have,” says Waldinger, it’s the quality of your close relationships that matters.”

Envisioning a More Loving, Just and Healthy World with Relationships at the Centre

We have always been given political choices that embrace systems focused on either the individual or on the collective. Capitalist or communist economy? Democracy or socialism? Those questions force us to make extreme choices. As we choose, we certainly don’t want to overcorrect in the opposite direction and wind up, once again, in a world where individuals have no power or personal freedom. Nor do we want to abandon all the good that markets and modern states have brought to the world. Instead, we should aspire to a relational system that respects the benefits of our current system but corrects its systemic flaws by prioritising relationships.

So, what does a market-state system look like in a world where we are actively building relational wealth?

First, consider the market as it exists today. Economists call the indirect (social and/or environmental) cost to other parties resulting from an economic transaction a “negative externality”, and it is widely accepted as a cost of doing business. However, seen through the relational wealth lens, a negative externality is really a relationship that has not been respected in the design of a product or service. When externalities are not costed into the price of a product, the price is ultimately paid by someone else — think pollution from a mine or the human costs of cheap sweatshop labour.

Directing capital towards companies that best capture — or avoid — their negative externalities promotes a relationally focused market. It also provides a purpose for the financial industry from one just fixated on propagating itself through endless growth and extraction to one that builds relational wealth through thoughtful investment.

Taking a closer look, as the market has continued its slow march to commodify our world, it has inevitably begun to commodify our relationships. Think Big Tech. The people in your social network are now avenues for corporations to sell stuff, and to capture the “resource” of your attention — which is fundamental to relationship. Our relationships and attention are quite literally the products sold to advertisers. Business models like this cross a line of what is healthy for society; that does not mean we have to turn off these platforms, however, we must rethink the business models that fuel them. Perhaps then they could live up to their hype and build relational wealth rather than erode it.

At the political level, the legislative floor would no longer resemble a schoolyard playground. It would be a place to struggle with competing needs, to produce legislation that builds relational wealth. For example, policies that deliver services such as retraining, or that provide food or shelter, would not be merely transactional, contributing to further stigmatisation and exclusion that follows from objectification. Rather, they would be required to consider the relational environment shaping those programs, aiming to promote social inclusion and enhance recipients’ dignity.

Our educational system wouldn’t teach only facts and figures or give students the mistaken impression that things are always right or wrong or ignore the nuance of historic events. Rather than overvaluing classification and logic as ways of knowing, it would develop individual relational capacities within students and collective relational capacities within schools. Education’s primary goal would not be to prepare us for the job market but — while still acknowledging that we need jobs — prepare us to be citizens.

In homes, the quality of care provided to new parents would be a central measure of a good society, with both parents receiving (and taking) time off to care for their infant. As a community, we would strive to ensure that the next generation is securely attached, with a strong foundation on which to trust others and the world they will grow into and serve.

Profits and votes would still shape the world but they would be constrained and balanced with an understanding of the foundational importance of relational wealth to the health and well-being of our planet, our communities and ourselves.

Finally, in this world, the market and state would remain intact but continue evolving to serve humanity. Profits and votes would still shape the world but they would be constrained and balanced with an understanding of the foundational importance of relational wealth to the health and well-being of our planet, our communities and ourselves.

While on the surface it may seem too difficult to achieve such a fundamental shift in the way we think about and approach the world, history is full of examples of significant, world-changing shifts in thinking that have led to vast improvements. Consider the shift in base assumptions that had to occur to enable women to vote and enjoy more freedom to work outside the home, even after marriage. Consider the shift in base assumptions that was needed to abolish legal slavery. And think about how movements like Black Lives Matter are promoting shifts in thinking today, to make each of us accountable for our role in perpetuating racism in our power structures.

We sit at the precipice. How we respond to the unprecedented global threats facing humanity will have existential consequences. “Business as usual” is not going to cut it. Nothing short of a paradigm shift will do. As more people journey through the dark night of the soul and find themselves coming to similar conclusions, I am convinced that fundamentally reorientating the centre of our moral universe from the individual to “what lies between us” will be vital in building the relational wealth required for the good society we long for. Addressing the most pressing social and environmental challenges of our times at their deepest roots is a monumental task. The stakes could not be higher. Nor could the possibility of what we might achieve together.