You're Not Alone

"No man is an island" is a common, if somewhat sexist, truism.

(Come on, those ladies? All islands. The lot of 'em. Can't stop 'em from shopping or being islands, amirite, fellas?)

Ahem.

As a truism, most of us kind of just take it for granted. Of course we're not islands. There are people everywhere, and we have friends and families and social interactions all the time. And yet the very fabric of our society (and when we say "our" we mean "American," cause that's where we live) seems to belie this fundamental and obviously empirical truth about humanity.

We'll explain.

Humans are social animals. This is indisputable. Sure, some of us are more introverted than others; some seem to thrive all alone, but as a species we evolved into and in a social milieu and that sociability may be our greatest strength. Sure, bipedalism freed up our hands to use the tools that our enlarged brains could invent, but as social animals, we were able to somehow generate, perhaps unique among our cousins in the animal kingdom, that most important (and maybe most overlooked) tool of all: culture.

Culture is how those manual tools we invented don't just go away after the inventor kicks it. Culture is how we pass on knowledge, observed (e.g. solar cycles, hibernation patterns of animals, movements of celestial bodies) and created (language, numbers and math, artistic expression), to the future. Culture gives us a profound window to the world around us, a sort of meta-tool that has allowed us to excel as we have these last 100,000 years or so.

And since it doesn't necessarily prioritize things that are "good," so to speak, it may end up being part of the death of us...But that's a story for another blog post entirely.

The point is that sociability, relying on other humans past and present, is the very backbone of what makes humanity what it is, and what makes each individual human what and who they are.

All well and good, you may be thinking, but what does this have to do with American society? Simple: American society is highly individualistic. And that's cool! We love being who we are and telling other people to suck it if they don't like it! We love it that other can be themselves! That's awesome! But there's a dark side to that choice that we, as Americans, made long ago.

In America we are unarguably obsessed with the idea of Hard Work. Hard Work will get you ahead. With Hard Work the poorest pauper can rise to the highest heights. You just need yourself, your Hard Work, and your bootstraps, and you, too, can be a baron of industry, an astronaut, the president. Whatever.

Part of what seems to define the American Left (and by this we don't mean Democrats, who are largely neo-liberal capitalist cheerleaders, but those to the left of them who still generally vote Democrat because we think it's better than than the alternative) is the recognition of the hollowness of the Hard Work narrative. It's trivially obvious that structural inequality can almost never be overcome by Hard Work, that the system seems designed to keep certain types of people from ever rising above their "proper" station.

Just look into the history of urban red-lining, or the incarceration rates of black males if you don't believe us.

Hard Work is in large part a fiction sold to the have-nots by the haves to keep them spinning the wheels that keep the bourgeoisie moving in their billion-dollar yachts.

Now, there's another obsession in America that may be just as bad for us, but almost never gets talked about. Hell, its insidiousness might make it even worse than the Hard Work story. At least many of us are aware of how impoverished that model of society is. See, in addition to Hard Work, America is obsessed with Talent.

Not good at math? Well, you're just not talented in it. Maybe you can get better with some good old-fashioned Hard Work, but really it's just not your thing. Are you bad at football? Maybe switch to hockey. Who cares if you don't like the cold? You just don't have the Talent to play football.

In addition to this believe that Hard Work is a magical road to success, we also have, deeply embedded in our cultural psyche, the idea that people who do well at a thing are just naturally Talented. On the surface, these two narratives seem to be at odds. What made Michael Jordan great: was it Talent or Hard Work? If you listen to Mike, it was the latter, but if you listen to literally everyone else who knew him in high school, there was definitely a lot of Natural Talent involved and he just likes to dramatize his narrative.

One story fetishizes a person's ability to buckle down and do what they need to do and it'll pay off in the end. The other fetishizes someone's inborn ability to do something without effort. And yet in America we are obsessed with both of these ideas. What's the deal?

We posit that it goes back to the aforementioned hyperindividualism that almost defines the United States. These narratives seem to be telling opposite stories, but the deeper tale is the same: you are an island, and by your application of either Talent or Hard Work (or hell, maybe both) you will make or break your own fortune. But, like we said, almost nobody believes that we are each lonely islands. We may feel like it sometimes, but insofar as we are islands at all, we certainly have a lot of bridges and sandbars and airline routes to lots of other islands.

We are social animals, and that means that an individual's success (or failure) in life is inherently tied into that undeniable truth.

Now here's what we're not saying: we're not saying that hard work never pays off, or that some people aren't predisposed towards certain pursuits, academic, physical, artistic, or whatever. Obviously these ideas have at least a grain of truth into them. What we are saying is that these plain and unremarkable truths about the human condition have been spun up into grand narratives that create a sort of Cult of the Individual. But when you start to really look into people claiming it was "Hard Work" and/or "Talent" that got them where they are, you find that those narratives just don't stand up all that well.

For example, has anyone ever noticed how like 100% of upper-middle-class white parents say that their children are "gifted?" Yes, every child is Gifted and Talented. They're all above average, nevermind the a priori impossibility of such a thing. And yet...Have you ever noticed how AP classes in American high schools tend to be largely made up of upper-middle-class white people? Fascinating.

There are basically two explanations for this. One (the racist, classist, stupid one) is that, well, those kids are just smarter and their parents were smarter and that's why they're upper-middle-class. The cause is Talent and/or Hard Work, the effect is having a nice house and 4 smart TVs.

The other (the one that seems to map more toward actual, observable reality) reverses the cause and effect: kids without the inherent advantages of being upper-middle-class and white have a much harder time excelling at academic pursuits than those AP students. The cause is your socioeconomic and sociocultural status. The effect is your performance in school.

Upper-middle-class white kids aren't inherently smarter than other kids, and they may not even work any harder, but their socioeconomic status privileges them, allows them to do better in school. Are there exceptions? Of course! There always are! There are shitty awful stupid rich white kids who fail at everything, and brilliant wonderful poor black kids who go on to great success. But you can't base your worldview on the outliers. You have to look at the general patterns.

Now, even if you accept our narrative (the non-racist one) as true, chances are if you're an American you still want to say something about how smart some of those kids must be, or how hard they must work to maintain a 4.0. Now, we don't want to take anything away from those kids; if they excel, they excel, and good for them. We simply want people to recognize the elephant in the room: every other person in their lives whose actions (or lack of certain actions) allowed and facilitated their success. Parents who were there for them, who gave positive reinforcement, who didn't beat them or do meth or forget to pay the electric bill for 3 months. Expendable income that allowed for the kinds of things that widen one's mind and perception. Friends in similar situations whose peer pressure veered towards the good kind. Caring, supportive family members. Good god damn teachers.

Every social connection you have affects you life, and that's especially true for children. Having a paucity of positive social connections is devastating, no matter how much Talent someone has, or how much Hard Work they're willing to put in. If you're born way behind the starting line, you'll never even get a bronze. America, as a society, needs to recognize just how important an individual's social milieu is to their success. It's obvious at the extremes of poverty and wealth, but all of us floating somewhere in the middle? It's no less true for us.

Why are we who we are? Why are we where we are? It has a whole lot to do with who we were with over the course of our lives. Our social connections can build us up or tear us down, and one of the best things good people can do is to build others up, to recognize their roles in the lives of the people around them.

Caveat: some people need tearing down. Fuck those people.

But generally, be a damn builder. Everything you do has effects on the people around you. That's great power, and as we all know, with great power there must come great responsibility.

Damn right.

If you are happy, if you consider yourself a success, be thankful for everyone you ever met because they all contributed something. And pay that shit forward.

Isaac Newton was possessed of one of the most prodigious egos ever to exist in this or any other universe. He was antisocial almost to a fault, as much of a human island as one can be, and he did a whole lot of important work seemingly all by his lonesome. And yet, in 1675, he dropped the famous quote "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." Somehow, our collective American ego has ballooned far larger than Newton's. We celebrate power and importance of the individual, and downplay (when we recognize it at all) the Giants upon whose shoulders those individuals stood. We are the sum total of not only our lives' experiences, but the experiences of our friends, families, teachers, mentors, coaches, trainers, and so on. And we're the sum total of the rest of those Giants going back to the dawn of humanity. It's time we got the humility to recognize that and act accordingly.

You're not an island. You're not alone. And far from being a weakness, that is one of your greatest strengths.