How Do You Deal with Profound Disappointment in Humanity?
I ask myself this question a lot, and I decided to publish this on Christmas Eve, the night commemorating the birth of a child in a manger because nobody considered his parents good enough to rent a room.
Here we are, together, spinning around the sun on a little blue marble we call Earth, one among a bazillion solar systems and galaxies, a tiny spec of dust in the context of the cosmos. We are born with an innate curiosity to explore and create.
How awesome would it be to collaborate as one team — team humanity — and use all of the tools and resources at our disposal to expand and venture out into the universe? To collectively cheer for our accomplishments and accelerate progress eradicating poverty, the underlying economic trigger of most violence and hatred in the world? How proud would I be to be part of team humanity?
Yet we remain attached to divisive conceptions of teams inherited from our ancestors. You must be “one of us” (race, nationality, religion, gender, class) in order to belong. We are one small evolutionary step from being monkeys and apes. Tribal by nature, prone to act out of self-interest, subject to the whims of the most dominant males. Ruled by our fight or flight instincts to protect ourselves, uncaring about the rest of humanity, justifying hatred and rage to gods perceived to only care about “us.”
I wish that we could anchor our identities in things we accomplish after we are born. The mandate to be proud of our lowest common denominator — the circumstances of our birth —is the root cause of much suffering. We celebrate things we cannot control and elevate to highest importance qualities that require no skill like nationality, religion, race or gender. These labels that were once useful for social order in premodern times curse us to perpetual cycles of war, violence, poverty, bigotry, crime, inequality.
I don’t want to be on anyone’s team except team humanity. I want to live my life. Except I can’t. By wanting to live my life, I automatically join the team of people who think teams should not define who we are. It’s not possible to be on team humanity, working towards co-creating a collaborative society characterized by values of fairness, equality, and shared resources. That makes you a threat to most teams on the planet because they are defined by underlying assumptions of inequality and opposition.
These insider/outsider categories seem silly in the context of the big picture. We have remarkable tools to alleviate suffering and solve humanity’s problems. We could share abundance and free up our time to do more meaningful activities together instead of mundane jobs we hate. The best minds in the world could articulate a vision for a collaborative society that empowered humanity to reach our true potential. We could transcend polarizing divisions based on things we can’t control, and judge people for what they do instead of where or how they were born.
Except that’s not going to happen. A tsunami-sized tidal wave of suffering is on the horizon from automation, disruption, economic inequality, and climate change. The next 10–20 years will be brutal in this new era of exponential everything as upwards of 50–80% of jobs are at risk of automation. Economic triggers of massive job losses, especially among low-skilled workers with little education, will fuel more hatred and rage.
Our answer to the radical uncertainty of our future is to double down on broken systems of inequality and collectively scream “fuck you” to anyone that disagrees. It’s no wonder zombie movies are so popular — they reflect how we dehumanize to the point where we are incapable of dialogue. We are racing towards a cliff on the verge of economic, political, and environmental collapse.
I feel at times like I am drowning in a sea of profound disappointment, powerless to stop the madness of it all. There is so much potential to uplift humanity through innovation and creativity, collaboration and co-creation, and instead of acting on it we appear to exponentially increase suffering and remain trapped in systems of inequality. What can I do? What is the appropriate response? How do we move forward when we remain trapped by the past, haunted like ghosts by the circumstances of our births?
The stark reality is that caring about all of humanity makes you a target and object of hatred. If you think the most important thing in the world is to love everyone irrespective of race, religion, nationality or gender, then you are labeled dangerous. You are not supposed to question anything inherited by the circumstances of your birth. There is no opt-out box to check when coming out of the womb. There are consequences to making this choice.
Religious groups will tell you that they are under attack. Nationalist groups call to raise arms in defense of their country from so-called liberals, socialists, hippies, atheists, or whatever label works best to demonize caring about humanity. Media pundits and politicians wear the clothing of equality and then moralize with condescension and self-entitlement. You’re either on a team that embraces lowest common denominators from birth, or grouped in with an intolerant team that labels everyone else ‘stupid.’
A store wouldn’t attack its customers for shopping in other stores or not buying stuff. It would offer incentives and try to build relationships to bring you back, form partnerships and collaborate with key stakeholders, doing whatever it takes to turn things around. If that didn’t work, it would go bankrupt and close. Teams inherited through circumstances of birth don’t work that way. They demand and expect unquestioning loyalty and obedience that can only be maintained through inequality and opposition.
True freedom is best exercised by behaving like the rest of the team. The fulfillment of your individuality and highest self comes through submission to the group. Douglas Atkin, Global Head of Community for Airbnb and author of The Culting of Brands refers to this as the cult paradox. People don’t join cults because they are “brainwashed,” but rather because membership makes them feel like their true self. It is not surprising that ‘freedom’ is the most commonly used term in the names of fascist movements around the world.
Starting from a position of moral or religious high ground, they reject basic principles of equality and democracy. If you claim salvation in this lifetime through religion, then by definition you are closer to God than anyone who disagrees with you. Nothing you do can be wrong because your intentions are always right. It is OK to insult, harm, bully, lie, cheat, or force obedience and submission because the ends justify the means. You could stand on the corner of fifth avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any supporters.
Total conformity is antithetical to innovation and creativity, which are the drivers of economic growth. “Freedom” gives justification for anger and hatred. It is easier to “defend” against a perceived threat from another team (immigrants, gays, religious minority groups, whatever) than to learn new job skills and adapt to an uncertain future. Complex economic and political problems get distilled down to single issues. Are you one of us or not?
Silicon Valley’s response has been just as bad. Startups compete with each other on a race to automate jobs and destroy the middle class, championing “basic income” as an inevitable solution because it is a foregone conclusion that they have no accountability or responsibility to anyone besides their investors. Silicon Valley should be able to growth hack away prosperity and hide profits offshore without consequences. After all, they talk about diversity and equality in their content marketing.
“Basic income” is the lullaby Silicon Valley sings to itself in order to sleep at night, the sweet melody that lets founders and investors believe they are different than Wall Street when they make billions and act out of self-interest. It’s an engineer’s solution to problems created by engineers, the logical giant bailout they expect the government to provide after they eviscerate and hollow out jobs. They expect politicians to act rationally when the levee breaks, oblivious to the possibility of backlash by those who have no money left to afford food, let alone the latest iPhone.
I respect your right to celebrate the circumstances of your birth, the lowest common denominator of accomplishment in life. Please respect my right to love everyone. Sure, I love “our kind” of people in the sense that I enjoy sharing common characteristics and having something to talk about. I dedicated 10 years of my life to researching American religious and cultural traditions, including Ph.D. studies at Princeton. I agree they are important to preserve. But please don’t hate me for ignoring your call for unquestioning belief and conformity. I just think we should celebrate what people do after they are born.
It’s fascinating to me that billions of people around the world have their own traditions— democratic, religious, national, cultural, philosophical — with similar values of equality, decency, and mutual respect, what is commonly referred to as the Golden Rule. The diversity of how these traditions manifest in different beliefs, rituals, gods, architecture, dress, and so on is a testament to the creativity and innovation of the human spirit. Then the people that claim to uphold and defend traditions shit all over each other.
We are born into this, as Charles Bukowski said. We cannot get out alive, trapped in a maze of superstitions and identities forged from arbitrary lines drawn in the sand. The same pattern repeats itself, over and over, like a curse upon humanity. Brilliant, charismatic, visionary leaders come up with a view of how the world could be somehow different and better. Teams and organizations build around them. And then weaker men (and it’s always men) capitalize and take advantage for personal gain.
Religious and national leaders are the most obvious examples, but the same thing happens with innovation and entrepreneurship. Timothy Wu in his excellent book The Master Switch notes a pattern where the inventors of the telegraph, telephone, radio, television and cable all had a vision of connecting the world. They were motivated by altruism, not profits. Then a business person came along and transformed their utopian ideals into monopolistic empires that ruthlessly crushed competition.
These same monopolistic empires hijack every good intention for marketing, recruiting the world’s most creative and innovative people away from doing things that add value to humanity and applying their brilliance to sell us crap we don’t really want or need. It feels impossible to have an authentic and genuine public conversation about community, altruism, or humanity’s true potential. Every good intention about connection and authenticity has been repackaged and sold. Salvation is a lead magnet.
I struggle sometimes to interact with my peers and not tell them they are wasting their lives. Oh really, you’re passionate about disrupting X market? That’s really what you want to do with the precious gift of life? Congrats, the company you spent 4–5 years building got acquired and will now be ruined from mismanagement the day after you leave. Maybe now you can sit on the other side of the table and be an investor. Let’s build monopolies on top of a scorched earth. Bring humanity from zero to one, and back to zero.
Since the dawn of time people have searched for the meaning of life. We have the answers. The joy of life comes from alleviating suffering, compassion and wisdom, sharing and community, access to new experiences. We have the tools and resources to improve the overall quality of life for everyone on the planet. To generate sustainable energy, provide enough food and water, uplift billions out of poverty and co-create a society of abundance. And we have somehow labeled this a dangerous threat.
I don’t know what to do with all of my profound disappointment in humanity except talk about. Name it. To make it the subject of meditation and contemplation. I choose to embrace the path of the bodhisattva, who out of compassion returns to earth to alleviate suffering. The only thing that I can do is run directly towards it, knowing that I am doing everything possible to improve the quality of life on the planet.
I will tell a different story of equality and hope, the same type of story upon which the world’s religious and national traditions are founded. I will look back on my life without regret, knowing my work contributed to laying the foundation for a world that benefits all of humanity. I will persevere and rise above, because I must do better. We all must do better.
If you like this post, please check out my latest book Empower: How to Co-Create the Future. The full 200+ page ebook is available by donation
