Since my earliest days in the U.S. I noticed a small but interesting linguistic difference between here and the U.K. In America, when someone says, “thank you,” the reply is usually “you’re welcome.” In Britain, it’s more often “my pleasure.” Both are polite, but they are not the same. “You’re welcome” subtly completes a transaction: something was given, gratitude was owed, the debt is now settled. “My pleasure” carries no implication that a debt ever existed.
This crossed my mind as I sat waiting for my barber to wrap up with the customer ahead of me a couple of weeks ago. The guy in the chair seemed like a nice enough fellow and the three of us were having some light banter. We got on the subject of TVs and the guy in the chair said that he had bought a large TV from Costco before the holidays because he had family coming in but would return it after they all went home because, “everybody does it.”
I responded that not everybody does it and that I never would and that it’s because of such behaviour that Costco had to change their very generous return policy. (and BTW, although my wife tells me I am very comfortable with conflict, the conversation remained friendly.)
I believe we are witnessing a gradual course change for American mores. Increasingly, we are being invited to be more transactional in our interactions, on both personal and community levels, and I think it is one ingredient in the declining mental health we see across the country (and world) — because when interactions become more transactional, those with the most power and money tend to bend behaviour and outcomes in their favor. Which means the vast majority of people are on the losing side (and perhaps looking to score “wins” where they can, at places like Costco).
Whether it is airlines, credit card companies or even non-VIP lines at Disneyland, people are increasingly finding out that the way they are treated is in direct correlation with “who they are.” (via how much money or power they have.) Unfortunately, the way this translates identity-wise is that you are how you are treated — and for many people, that identity is repeatedly reinforced as a powerless nobody. When losing ground feels like it has become the arc of one’s life, hopelessness can set in. And hopelessness is an onramp to rage, depression and, for some, even suicide.
I recently gave my new talk, Public Communications: When Beliefs, Truths and Trust No Longer Align, to the annual conference of the California Communicable Disease Controllers. Epidemiologists are living in a new and confounding world. Positions that were once accepted as non-partisan and dedicated to the public good are increasingly being seen, by some, as promulgating lies and purposely harming health. It’s a bewildering turn of events that sadly will turn out worst for those with the least protection in this changing world. When public servants can’t do their job, it is the public that pays the price.
It should not be a surprise that many of the people with the least protection are the ones pushing hardest against the very rules and regulations that provide what protection they have. This has rather always been the case — and it has to do with stigma, identity and external rationalization — all at the very core of The Relational Intersect. What has changed over the last two decades is the power of social media and the causticness of politics that have made these demarcations feel so binary and so strident.
Without a change in direction, the end result may well be putting us on the road back to such times as Thomas Hobbes referred to in Leviathan with, “The life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish — and short.”
Over the holidays, one of the books I read was The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. The book discusses the discovery of 50 gospel texts across 13 papyrus scrolls in 1945 by a peasant in the Egyptian desert (similar to the Dead Sea scrolls, but much less studied due to decades of academic squabbling). The scrolls have been carbon-dated to the first 100 years after the death of Christ and the current theory is that they were buried in the large earthen jar by Christian monks from a monastery that was nearby in ancient times. The texts, including those written by Christ’s brother, James, give some different viewpoints of Christ’s teachings that were labelled as existentially heretical by some church leaders of the time.
In the first 300 years after the death of Christ, major battles ensued over doctrine. It culminated in the Council of Nicaea in 325, which was brought about by the Roman Emperor, Constantine, the first Christian emperor, essentially telling the various churches to “settle their differences” and come up with one “orthodox” church.
And… because humans..., or perhaps more accurately, human men, it came down to power. The Gnostic Gospels, which preached that God is someone you have your own relationship with, and that heaven is not a destination but a creation here and now through the life one leads, (and that women were equal to men in the church) were — often with extreme violence — pushed aside in favour of a power structure where the only way to heaven was to follow the path as translated by the bishop (later known as Pope) and the army of prelates under him. (I’m paring this down to simplify, but this is the gist).
Once humans have a power structure in place, whether religious, military or political, decisions tend to be made through the lens of keeping that structure in place. So, the orthodox church nixed those gospels and then kept the Bible solely in Latin for 1200 years, so only priests could tell you what it said and, more importantly, what it meant for you —how you should act; who you should give money to or fight. Many Christians were burned alive in the struggle for regular folk to have a bible in their spoken language — and experience the rebalancing of power that came with access to such knowledge.
Today, with vast amounts of knowledge so easily available across so many formats, the squashing of exposure to knowledge is unavailable as a power strategy — at least in the US (at least currently…) So, a different and much more corrosive tack has emerged: Don’t trust anyone. —Particularly, mainstream sources or public health or local government. Or even the local school board. (With the unfortunate caveat of possibly trusting AI — unregulated black-boxes masquerading as primary sources.)
Once truth is conditional and trust is scorned as “weak,” the very bonds of community become stressed and frayed. People stop asking “is this right?” and begin asking, “what’s in it for me?” “How do I win?” “What do I owe and who owes me?” And the steep price being paid for these changes is common humanity. We are seeing evidence of this transition everywhere, from the simple lack of decorum and politeness in comment sections to the casual cruelties directed toward various groups designated as “other” or “them.”
Funnily enough, what made the “Great Religions” (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism,) so dangerous in their emergence is that their basic teachings used such behaviour modification systems to promote service and love toward others. It is why so many Christians ended up as lunch for lions — they threatened the old power structure’s capacity to exert control. When you live a life of truth and trust and service, you take away the levers for others to manipulate you toward darkness. (It is from this concept that the sometimes-confusing idea of “the meek shall inherit the earth” springs from — although I do need to take a moment to fully recognize that many many people that identify themselves by their “faith” do not live a life of service or love.)
A life based on service without debt allows you to believe that others live similarly. It replaces suspicion and scorn with trust and hope. It changes your life for the better as much — or even more — as the lives of those you serve. And it makes you much less susceptible to external nefarious suggestion.
There is a wonderful quote by Walt Whitman, “Keep your face always to the sun and shadows will fall behind you.” The opposite is also, sadly, true: turn away from the light and you will live in darkness. Spend even a short amount of time on X, Nextdoor or comment sections and you quickly learn that it is a darkness that many people are now living in.
But you know what happens in the dark? People lose their way… Much as I often find it important to remind people that no-one wants to be homeless or addicted to drugs, but that it can be the unforeseen consequence of numerous small course-shifts in life, no-one wants to be angry, hostile and untrusting. But when there are hundreds of billions of dollars to be made out of anger and divisiveness, a business will be set up to harvest it. (Social media).
My message to those in public service, whether it is your job, your personal calling or both, would be that when you turn toward the sun, everyone in the dark gets a good bead on you should they wish to hurl invective your way. But you also become a beacon for those looking for a way out and, in doing so, you offer that glimmer of hope in the here and now for them and you.
I feel confident it will be your pleasure.
When humans face true cataclysm, we pull together. When it’s about money and power, not so much.
When people see public health messages directed at them, they are very aware that others can see them also and it can trigger concern of how other people in the community now think about them.
People seek to have power over their own lives. Teens, adults, older adults – everyone. What happens when they feel powerless? What happens when you or your communications make them feel they have less power?
The way we talk to others demand that they accept an identity for themselves, and sets up a particular relational dynamic. If we're not careful, that identity can be stigmatizing or turn away the very people we're trying to help.
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