The Opposite of Loneliness
It’s a mistake to think that Communism sold an ideology any more than modern cults sell a theology. What they sell is company, otherwise known as ‘community’. For the greatest need of most men, after survival, is need to belong. David Horowitz, long a man of the left, observed that “the truth is that man cannot live for himself alone, that sooner or later the emptiness of such life overcomes him and he seeks involvement with others.”
That’s why they join political parties, cults and churches. To have company. For there is nothing so terrifying in this world as to live alone.
Abraham Maslow argued that immediately after satisfying the animal needs, next on most people’s hierarchy was friendship, family, intimacy. Higher still were the tokens of esteem that were society’s acknowledgement of existence. There’s even a modern word for this craving: belongingness.
Greg Walton of Yale University and Geoffrey Cohen of the University of Colorado argued in a paper that unless people who belonged to certain social or ethnic groups were provided with a something to belong they would suffer from “belonging uncertainty”.
We suggest that, in academic and professional settings, members of socially stigmatized groups are more uncertain of the quality of their social bonds and thus more sensitive to issues of social belonging. We call this state belonging uncertainty, and suggest that it contributes to racial disparities in achievement. …
Stigmatization can give rise to belonging uncertainty. … Two experiments tested how belonging uncertainty undermines the motivation and achievement of people whose group is negatively characterized in academic settings. In Experiment 1, students were led to believe that they might have few friends in an intellectual domain. Whereas White students were unaffected, Black students (stigmatized in academics) displayed a drop in their sense of belonging and potential. In Experiment 2, an intervention that mitigated doubts about social belonging in college raised the academic achievement (e.g., college grades) of Black students but not of White students.
And so if there is any reason why certain minorities are underpeforming in academic and professional settings, it’s because we’ve made them feel that they don’t belong. Fix that and they’ll be OK.
But Walton and Cohen are probably wrong in thinking the need to belong is restricted to persons of Black ethnicity. Everyone has the herd instinct. During the period of the great Soviet purges many of the Bolsheviks persecuted by Stalin begged for readmission to the Party because it was the only thing that was meaningful in their lives. Punish them, starve them but don’t cast them out! That would be too cruel. There are accounts of party militants dying under torture who proclaimed “I bless Stalin with my dying breath!” The need to belong is powerful indeed, maybe even more powerful than the need to live.
When a widely linked video at the DNC proclaimed that “the government is the only thing we all belong to … the conservative blogosphere blew a gasket at the complete reality-inversion of the Democratic worldview. Tea Partiers and small-l libertarians and constitutional conservatives railed We don’t belong to the government — the government belongs to us!”. Conservatives must have felt that the aversion to being “owned” would be shared by all.
No way.
Interviewers at the DNC found that many attendees were sincerely puzzled by this conservative aversion to be somebody’s. Why wouldn’t one want to belong to something? Many wanted to belong to the government if it were at all possible. In response after response they made it clear that they would like nothing better than to owned by something – preferably by the dispenser of tasty government cheese.
Not everybody wants freedom. One reviewer of Dostoevky’s novels reiterated the great novelist’s observation that “the terrible truth is that human beings cannot bear the burden of freedom … Man yearns for nothing more than to surrender his frightful liberty to some benign ruler, who will care for his bodily needs and relieve him of the spiritual suffering known as the will to choose.”
Dostoevsky’s argument on the point are quite clear. In his chapter on the Grand Inquisitor, a tyrant captures Christ before he can pollute the crowds with his vision of freedom. The Inquisitor asks Christ what the crowds could possibly do with freedom? Why torment them with the uncertainties of faith? That would only make them miserable. Give them platitudes and give them bread. Give them spectacle and pageant, hope and change and few potato chips, and they’d be happy.
Enslave, but feed us! … and that is what Thou didst reject in the wilderness for the sake of that freedom which Thou didst prize above all. [you should have accepted the bread for] … by accepting the “bread,” Thou wouldst have satisfied and answered a universal craving, a ceaseless longing alive in the heart of every individual human being, lurking in the breast of collective mankind, that most perplexing problem–”whom or what shall we worship?”
There exists no greater or more painful anxiety for a man who has freed himself from all religious bias, than how he shall soonest find a new object or idea to worship. But man seeks to bow before that only which is recognized by the greater majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having a right to be worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that men agree unanimously to bow down to it. For the chief concern of these miserable creatures is not to find and worship the idol of their own choice, but to discover that which all others will believe in, and consent to bow down to in a mass.
Give them chains, the Inquisitor argued, or else humanity would be tormented by “belonging uncertainty” and that would certainly be cruel. And maybe he was right. The fact is that anyone who chooses the path of freedom is by definition someone who would give up the world to know the truth. And there are precious few men like that. Potato chips and souvenir t-shirts anyone?
How to Publish on Amazon’s Kindle for $2.99
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99
No, but I’ll take a beer tho.
An old Chinese saying is “One who owns little is little owned.”
If you want to feel the hand of government upon you, if you want to feel owned, get a pilot’s license and buy an airplane.
Completely aside from the need to obey air traffic regulations about where you can fly and who you have to secure real time permission from to do so, there are a host of other regulations you have to comply with. And they are always making more. And most all of them cost you time and money. Very few indeed are ever reduced or eliminated.
I do not want to be a part of that, to feel embraced by the FAA. I have been embraced too much already and am in escape and evasion mode. I am perfectly willing to fly in a safe manner – after all, primarily my own rear end is at risk – and to follow the practices considered to be safe and acceptable by the aviation community. But I do not need the FAA verifying that I am healthy enough to fly or that I have not forgotten how to do so.
In reality, even people who want to “belong” to something want to do so only to the extent that they chose to accept. So everyone cheats, even those who say they want to “belong” to the government. And that is the biggest problem. They will sign you up to obey but they plan to escape it themselves. Even the unions who supported Obamacare immediately applied for waviers to the requirements. So “belonging” means “It’s for thee and not for me.”
They don’t just want Big Government; they want Big Government that fell off the truck and can be got from their cousin Vinny at half price.
And that indeed is the object of the exercise we are involved in. Are there enough willing slaves and willing masters to overwhelm those who would be neither? They cannot coexist. One must overwhelm the other, and since the legitimacy of our electoral and governmental institutions are shaky at best; if they [the institutions] are unable to resolve the difference peacefully, there are more primitive means that are the traditional resort.
Sides are drawn. There is no space left for compromise.
Subotai Bahadur
The research cited above is similar to that of Aaronson who said that Stereotypical Threat affected women and minorities the most (no I am not making this up).
Specifically black students were purported to do worse on tests when they were told that the tests measured IQ but the same as white students when told they were tests of other measures.
However, when black and white students were matched for SAT achievement the “effects” of stereotypical threat vanished. Please be wary of any social science research.
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/59/3/189/
http://www.udesarrollo.cl/biblioteca/scl/2005/diciembre/FP_009.pdf
For the chief concern of these miserable creatures is not to find and worship the idol of their own choice, but to discover that which all others will believe in, and consent to bow down to in a mass.
I think that’s a rough translation of much of Joe Biden’s endless speech going on right now.
Still, that’s what the modern Republican party seems not to address. What does Mitt say in his stump speech, to make Bob Paycheck feel he’s more a member of? Mom, apple pie, and the flag? That’s what Mitt *should* be saying, but I don’t recall him doing so.
That’s where the RINOs fall out these days, bunch of white-shoe country club types who have theirs, and just want to serve quietly in a Washington sinecure, and just want a few votes from Cliff and Buffy. Problem is, that doesn’t win in the general against a Democrat promising bread and circuses. And membership, even if it’s ownership.
–
rwe @ 2: An old Chinese saying is “One who owns little is little owned.”
Sounds Buddhist.
Perhaps an American might have a useful opinion:
“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
-Robert A. Heinlein
Or maybe we need a fictional libertarian from the future, Mal Reynolds:
“I aim to misbehave.”
Eric Hoffer (The True Believer, 1951) explained it. The rest are variations on a theme.
If you watch this video on the Islamic etiquette of wife-beating, the claim is that 90% of Western women want “a strong man”, a “guardian” who will blacken their eyes every now and again. The imam says “Allah honored wives by instituting the punishment of beatings”.
This seemed ridiculous to me. But now I am not so sure. When I was in my 20s and 30s I remember hearing women complain to me about their abusive husbands and boyfriends. “Why don’t you leave them,” I would ask? The answer was always the same. “I still love him.”
Well damn. These men leeched off them, beat them, betrayed them, did everything but kill them and all they could say was “I still love him.” It occurred to me in later life that they were probably asking another question: would you like to replace him? That was the real question, the one I never got around to understanding.
I had a word for this. The “bihag ng pag-ibig” or Slave of Love. It seemed ridiculous to me. Now I’m beginning to understand. Some people want to look up to somebody else. The clues are are littered all over popular culture. “You’ve got to think for the both of us.” “Someone to watch over me”. Or my perrenial favorite:
The hardest chains to break are the ones we put on ourselves. Some people are born to bust out, but others alas, are just rarin to check in.
Roy Lofquist @7
Hoffers’ The True Believer is a great book for folk who aren’t afraid of looking in a mirror…Honestly.
Guaranteed to piss off those who long to belong.
Everyone from Anarchists to Atheists.
Dostoevsky: “the terrible truth is that human beings cannot bear the burden of freedom … Man yearns for nothing more than to surrender his frightful liberty to some benign ruler, who will care for his bodily needs and relieve him of the spiritual suffering known as the will to choose.”
A wise man once told me that many people are looking for a “womb with a view.” About sums it up.
In my community (a bunch of old codgers) we have people who are always trying to organize group activities to have someone to talk to or interact with. Fortunately, we are free to engage or not. And that is the difference between what the dems want where they belong to the ultimate group, the government. Not my cuppa, thank you.
Those who run from solitude are weak. Enforced togetherness is my worst nightmare. Leave me alone and let me think my thoughts, thank you very much. I need no external approval.
Yes, I will be that old man in the boxers and wife-beaters yelling at you to get off my lawn. Deal with it.
Adolescents need above all to get approval from a group. Most grow up. Some never do. Fifty or more years ago most people started families by their early 20′s. That refocused their concerns. Now we have millions who are rootless. This effects men and women differently. (I know stoich but first principles and logic matter so stick with me) We now have millions of women in their 30s who need constant judgment from their peers. Grandma didn’t live like that.
If people need to feel that they belong to something larger than themselves, and also to draw a bright line between childhood and adulthood, may I suggest the United States Navy? It is my understanding that there are other choices for those who like to walk or sit a desk.
Wretchard cites Walton and Cohen: We suggest that, in academic and professional settings, members of socially stigmatized groups are more uncertain of the quality of their social bonds and thus more sensitive to issues of social belonging.
Man, they could be describing conservatives “in academic and professional settings”– talk about a stigmatized subpopulation.
I had a word for this. The “bihag ng pag-ibig” or Slave of Love. It seemed ridiculous to me. Now I’m beginning to understand. Some people want to look up to somebody else. The clues are are littered all over popular culture. “You’ve got to think for the both of us.” “Someone to watch over me”.
Judging from our cousins the chimps and gorillas, we’re mostly a gregarious species, though the beta males have a hard time in those ape cultures. Apparently our other cousins the orangs are more solitary, fwiw.
So maybe even our human women are still pretty often wired to do what they must, to stay with their “alphas”. In fact, doesn’t it make a man an alpha, if he can hit them and get away with it? What a lovely self-fulfilling prophecy!
And of course, Bubba was seen to be the absentee husband for all the single moms of the 1990s. He felt their pain. Sometimes caused it, too.
Maybe we’re this far lucky, that Obambus seems personally disinclined to take on those roles, though he seems happy enough to instruct the government to hand out cheese and condoms (and ballots and tuition grants, but not vouchers, no he will never voucherize Medicare!) to anyone who wants them.
Belonging is not the end all and be all of one’s existence. Take me, for instance.
BELONG! I screamed, I BEG OF YOU!
BELONG TO YOU I MUST OR I SHALL DIE!
She laughed out loud and walked away
Not wishing to behold a grown man cry
And that’s the way my life has gone
I cannot join a club or walking tour
I try and try but I have found
It always comes I’m turned down at the door
I tried out for Olympic teams
The women’s swim team saying I was Marge
Although a man I made the cut
But then let go, my boobs were much too large
I tried a church, they were so nice
Invited me to join and that was new
But Sunday morning came and went
And no one there would join me in my pew
I try so hard to get along
I even bought a dog that was for sale
But even he, a lesser breed
Refused to lick my hand or wag his tail
I’m used to it by now of course
I have my own computer and a mouse
Anonymous is now my friend
And I’m content just sitting in my house
Hunh. Maybe not being afraid of being alone because I can deal with whatever problems may arise is what separates people like me from people like them.
I know some of you have a low opinion of Twitter, but even if you do, it behooves you to look at this to see what kind of racial hatred is being stoked in the class of people mentioned above, right now:
https://twitter.com/i/#!/search/?q=%23IfObamaDontWin&src=hash
I would normally think this type of talk is false Internet bravado, but I’m not so sure now. Some of the scenarios we hash out here are getting a little too close for my comfort.
Whittaker Chambers , in the introduction to “Witness”, wrote of what it meant to be an ex-communist:
“Nor by ex-communist do I mean those thousands who continually drift in and out of the Party. The turnover is vast. These are the intellectual vagrants of our time, whose faith has been leached out in the bland climate of rationalism. They are looking for an intellectual night’s lodging. They lack the character for communist faith, because they lack the character for any faith, and so they fall away.”
Perhaps it is a sign of genius that liberalism has constructed a faith which requires no character – only self-indulgence.
Well, if all the Dems belong to the government, then when Romney wins, we can sell them all and be rid of them.
Though honestly we might have to pay someone to take them.
But in all seriousness, I came to a realization about this a few years ago reading a book, The Hypomanic Edge. The basic claim of the book is that Bipolar disorder is a genetic trait, but one much like Sickel Cell Anemia. A small dose of the disorder is beneficial, it’s only the large ones that are tragic.
The book states that Hypomanics, essentially people with very low grade bipolar disorder, are perfectly suited to successful risk taking. Their genetic makeup allows them to face the uncertainty and trust their own abilities, yet they remain in touch with reality and don’t succumb to outright delusions. People without the hypomanic edge are often paralyzed by risks, and find it extremely uncomfortable to be faced with making monuental choices about their lives.
I say “they” about Hypomanics, but I should say “we” because I am definitely one of them. The realization that slapped me as I read that book was that a significant number of people are simply not inherently capable of living truely free lives without suffering immense psycological terror. It is probably cruel to force them to live such lives.
The mistake we, the hypomanics, have made is to assume they aspire to what we aspire to. But they don’t. They want to belong and be safe and have a well-lit and well trod path through life to follow. The wilderness beyond the path terrifies them. We need to find a solution that allows them to have their world without us sacrificing ours. It is not an easy solution to find, for though they are unwilling to take the risks, they are still envious of the rewards. But I think there is a solution, a humane one. And I know it will be up to us to find it, for the people on display at the DNC are not equipped for it.
I am not a fan of tweeters, or tweetings but for fun I sometimes visit In-A-Gist which appears to be the Drudge Report equivalent for the tweeting universe. In-a-gist states that it “algorithmically curates tweets based on popularity in real-time. We collate tweets on the same topic and this page is built from such curated tweets.” Ooooo-kay.
Tonight, one of these curated tweets proudly announced “Obama peak tweets per minute 52,757, a record. Romney peak: 14,289.”
Take that Republicans! If the longing for belonging is any guide to the November 6 election result, obviously it’s all over. Obama at his peak generates three times as many tweetings per minute as Romney.
17. Dworkin Barimen
Your linked tweeting seems to have been taken down.
Wretchard has put light on a powerful force and tension in life. To me the idea of belonging might also be expressed as the idea of being accepted. That also extends to love.
So does our fulfillment come from within or without? I think those are the extremes and most people move to some mix that suits them and their circumstances. Those who do not find love and acceptance may go on a rampage, or they may find sustenance and new insight in their own muscle. I think people may move to one end or the other at various times in their lives as they deal with the circumstances in which they find themselves.
So is it one or the other? Or should our choice be to find a balance between the two?
Without shadow who knows light?
So Jimmy J summarizes Fyodor well. “A wise man once told me that many people are looking for a ‘womb with a view.’”
Gives new meaning to the recurring birth imagery in Dostoevsky.
We adults and bright children do so wish that the sleepers would wake, yet they wake not. Instead they seek to preserve the lifespan-in-womb as the life experience of the majority of the once-conceived by means of aggressive abortion policy and celebration of the act of abortion. The creation of the never-left-the-womb set includes more than those souls aborted before birth it includes those souls left in the strangling lifetime embrace of the nanny-state.
20 @stevesmith
Seems to be working OK on my end. Who knows?
You can manually see it by going to twitter.com and typing in #IfObamaDontWin in the search box
Cage of Freedom: Between master and slave is the foreman, who serves opposite interests before his own belongingness. He must also listen to God if he believes in that, so that’s three things competing for his soul. The job is nothing but grief until he finally dies and can rest a bit.
Also beware of Escher worlds like Castrovalva, which uses recursion and false rules to trap victims in space performing endless dumb rituals. The pictures are hypnotic and rob people of will-power. You could be stuck there right now and not know it. Escaping requires faith against what you think and observe — to enter a void without your space helmet on.
Freedom is not always easy of course. My girlfriend left me over a year ago and it has been very bad. She keeps playing games despite my warning against it. She is also being unreasonable about fixing things up. It’s almost time to move on.
For a certain class of those who are independently wealthy – the 1% of the left, if you will – this “need to join” applies. David Mamet nailed it in his recent book.
For the bulk of Dems, the joining, the belonging, is in large part a bargain.
“Make sure the food, shelter, money, relief from anxiety (hat tip to JMH #19), and status can never go away, and I’ll join”. It’s a simple, animal decision.
Security blanket, womb living, call it what you will. Don’t confuse the need to belong with te perceived need to remove all doubt about tomorrows’s cash flow.
Baobo #26 –
“Almost”? She left you. Life has already moved on. Stop being beta and find another. There will never be a fixing of things.
And to the extent that the need for belonging matters….
People used to belong to families. People used to belong to churches.
The state has tried, often successfully, to do away with both and replace them with itself. Leaving nothing else, the state hopes, to which one can belong.
In my working life I have been repeatedly subjected to various seminars explaining group dynamics. Y’all know, the ones where you take something like a Briggs-Meyers survey, determine which of the four or six groupings you are part of (Extrovert with a brain, Introvert without a brain, etc) and learn how to handle each type. (Politicians train to this prior to debates/ public appearances etc. in order to delivery correct body language, type of answer etc.)
Bottom line, depending on scheme, 40 to 60% are sheep.
Some of us are in 5% boxes, either leaders or despots.
Go figure.
It seems many of those interviewed were satisfied with the concept of “belonging to” implying “ownership by” rather than simply “being a member of” or similar.
However, had they taken the concept a step further, would they have been as satisfied after realising that a person who is owned by someone or something is in fact a slave?
For many years, I have responded to the question “Who do you work for?” with “I work for myself (and family), I’m currently employed by……….” Never fails to get an interesting reaction.
Thus the ‘community organizer’. Building a nest into which the self-selected shall all warmly fit, and outside of which lie only despicable enemies.
Mussolini and MeCHa stated the extreme condition pretty concisely: All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
Since the current election campaign settled down to two Presidential candidates, a Facebook community of musicians of a certain style has blossomed into a striking demonstration of the mentality. All members and ‘friends’ consider themselves warm, caring, sharing, sensitive and smart – but in their statements of opposition to individuals of the Republican persuasion, it’s Katie bar the door. Not a single argument, not a single reason given, just the nastiest pejoratives, denunciations and invented descriptors of the evil non-community Others, as if in a lynch mob working up its fury to tear off the jailhouse door and get their work done.
One might question Obama’s success in transition from ‘community organizer’ to President of (all members of) the United States. Perhaps, pre-election, he felt he could bring us all along into one happy nest, given the mighty levers of power and patronage that his office holds. But since then, his signature tactic has been the denunciation of strawmen, leaving us with a picture of a cozy nest full of Democrats surrounded by a field of greedy plutocrats and racists, ripe for the plucking.
Conservatives live a paternalistic life where they are master of their own fate and draw to their families, churches, and communities. Leftists, it would seem, can only find belonging with a big brother who is armed and willing to perform violence on their behalf. They belong to the fascist club like the beaten woman who instinctively returns to her brutal husband. When there is enough wealth to go around, both parties can have what they want. But when the other demands more than is possible an imbalance falls to the men with guns and choice and freedom are no longer an option.
Belonging to a new friend in government is swell until your parent finds a new child to amuse it. None of these perceived gains will survive the test of time.
Those with a strong ‘need to belong’ will be collectivists – socialist, communists, etc.
Those with a weak ‘need to belong’ will be individualists – libertarians, conservatives, etc.
Not everybody wants freedom..
The problem is, such people don’t give the rest of us a choice to be free; it is all or nothing. Free people are a threat to their desire to be “owned.”
A term and meme is floating around named “personhood.” It is used by both social conservatives (to grant personhood to the unborn), and the more extreme progressives (to deny personhood to a whole host of “unproductive” and “inconvenient” innocents). The two depraved Australian bio-ethicists who want to extend the term “abortion” to beyond the womb (post-birth) use the term as a means to justify murdering inconvenient infants. America fought its bloodiest war 150 years ago in part to grant personhood to a large chunk of the American population.
What I’m getting at is that the narrative undertow is starting to completely reverse the state of Man and subjugate him completely.
I wish this topic had received greater “play”. It stands-out among all others as one of the most important, but least developed of any of the topics since conversion to PJ media.
Certainly, no offense intended. It is immense in scope, touching upon all activities of humanity since Adam walked alone. We trudge along in life, living within the framework of layers of system, never fully comprehending how they work.
A couple of post before, I tried to engage a few commentors regarding various deductions about the fossil record. It remains bizarre that people will admit neither cause nor source that cannot be measured or observed.
One hundred years ago, before the Geiger-Marsden experiment, structure of the atom was merely supposition. Neutrinos were unknown. Today we wonder if they indeed have mass as is suggested by flavor oscillation.
Had we asked the same question to people at that time, we, no doubt would receive the same response.
Existence of an eternal soul in unbelievers that is the component of human life that will face judgement for rejection of the God who was made flesh, means that the soul must necessarily interface with organic processes in the brain. All those neurons and synapses that one commentor enumerated.
Further that those processes would be unable to function, apart from the soul. That whatever appears in the fossil record is not human if it had no soul. That the source of the soul is God, and not flesh nor union of spermatozoa and ovum. This has serious implications in present day controversy concerning abortion issues.
That there is much out there regarding our behavior and belief systems that remains unknown and unmeasurable to this day.
Something not discussed above is the feeling of belonging when you accept the Christian view of God. God (as presented by Christians) loves each one of us intensely and individually. We are all Important to Him. As a result of this belief, I don’t feel the need to belong to a Government, or any group that would want to shape my destiny. God already is doing that – me working with Him, (I hope). I enjoy deToqueville’s “mediating institutions”, my workplace, the Quilt Group, Church, family, but their influence is small in comparison. I don’t have time, energy or desire to be molded and made by Government- already being in the process of being molded & made by God.
Susan Lee