Individual Excellence: Part I-B-6: Grouped People

25 May 2024

This blog is one of a chain from an in-process book entitled, Individual Excellence: The 4Ps of a Well-Spirited Life.  What follows is the final passage of People, the first of four sections.  The final paragraph of last week’s entry is included to provide context for consistent readers.   

PART I-B: Grouped People

Loneliness Kills

In terms of the inferences, above, the most supportive data is provided by the Surgeon General’s statistics between 1972-2016.  In those 44 years the sense that one American could reliably trust one of his fellow Americans slid from under half (45%) to under one third (30%).  Averaged, that’s one-third of a percentage point of trust per year or 1% every three years.  How many more years need this trend continue before open hostility is common? 

Just about a decade ago, I read about a remedy to the loneliness crisis.  In that book, The Village Effect, Susan Pinker examined the attributes of people living some of the longest lives on Earth.  Below are some of her findings.

• For example, if you're surrounded by a tightly connected circle of friends who regularly gather to eat and share gossip, you'll not only have fun but you're also likely to live an average of fifteen years longer than a loner.  (Pinker, 2014, p. 8)
• Feeling lonely is as painful as being wildly hungry or thirsty.  (Ibid, p. 12)
• Behind the scenes, one of the effects of loneliness is that it can alter our genetic response to disease.  In other words, chronic loneliness--the subjective experience of feeling isolated and alone for long periods--alters the expression of genes in every cell of your body.  (Ibid, p. 30)
• We can inherit the destructive capacity for loneliness from our parents.  Given that it runs in families, it seems to be a feature of their family histories people should know, much the same way you'd want to know whether hypertension or kidney disease is in your family background.  (Ibid, p. 30)
• A study of nearly three thousand Danish twins born at the turn of the twentieth century found that genes answer 25 percent of the longevity question, at most.  (Ibid, p. 51)
• Remarkably, our bodies know the difference between real social support offered by people we know and the contrived version.  "The source of support matters," Brigham Young health psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad told me.  "Not all relationships are equal.  When you introduce social support, there may not be any real relationship there." As anyone in a failing or hostile relationship knows, interaction with the wrong person can make matters worse. (Ibid, p. 57)
• The evidence is pretty clear that we are wired for frequent and genuine social interaction.  As humans, we need to know that we belong.  (Ibid, p. 287)

On page 5, above, we began this section of the book discussing people as individuals.  It is significant that we can begin to wind up this portion with the same quote that opened it: “Now by self-sufficient we do not mean that which is sufficient for a man by himself, for one who lives a solitary life, but also for parents, children, wife, and in general for his friends and fellow citizens since man is sociable by nature.”  —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in Barnes (1995), Book I.7 1097b 9-11

This may be the only dialectically argued portion of this manuscript.  In other words, we have gone from an assertion (thesis): groups coerce, to a counter-assertion (antithesis): loneliness kills, to conclude with a resolution of those two points (synthesis): people need people; but, for healthy growth, the latter must be the right people at the right time.

Healthy Connection

It has been said of philosophy that its real purpose is to teach us how to die.  Prima facie, that seems perverse.  But the resultant paradoxical realization is that to be reading that statement, you must be alive.  Thus, learning to die is really learning to live.  Knowing this, it is unsurprising to learn that John Donne’s Meditation XVII (December 1623) was written after he nearly died.  It is the third paragraph, of this four-paragraph masterpiece, that most of us have heard:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne, Meditation XVII

I am not sufficiently altruistic (nor do I seek to be) to love all of my fellow human beings.  The particulars of their behaviours sometimes appall me and leave me wondering about Aristotle’s differentia of rationality.  That disdain is concerned with particulars of time, place, and person.  In general, I am able to endorse Donne’s magnificent regard for the family of humanity, mostly when I think like a philosophical psychologist. 

Through that perspective, I see woke professors, totalitarian spies, and Hamas murderers as sad, deeply mistaken victims of ideas they once perceived as empowering.  With that understanding comes a sense that I, too, might once have been a sad victim of dogma that then looked as though it would liberate me from the depressing reality of an underdog’s life.  Please don’t think me virtuously Christian, it is a perspective I cannot fathom.

The distance I can go, and ask you to consider, is this double view of people: their immediate idiocy is not necessarily reflective of a well-examined soul.  At some point that soul was torqued into resentment and focused on mistaken vengeful justice.  While the twisted view of such a soul is not impossible to reverse, it takes a strength of character rare in exactly those people who submit to the easier argument: I have been victimized, Life is not fair, I deserve recognition and an easy gig. 

The harder argument is I have been hurt, Life is sometimes unfair, Get on with it.  As I tell my clients, from the moment we awaken to the moment we fall asleep, life is choices, every second, every minute, every hour we are choosing, by default or intentional action, to be where we are, with whom we are, and how we are.  And this brings us full circle.

At the beginning of this first, of four sections, we explored the fundamental nature of the human soul as seen through my eyes and the eyes of wiser people who have written their own metaphysics of the self.  Per Aristotle, Maslow, Rogers, Erikson, and Frankl et al., I subscribe to the late James Hillman’s (1996) view of the soul as an acorn having the oak within.  How we nurture that acorn is a matter of constant choosing which any reader can change now.  Or not.  Such is the essence of the human experience. 

Those with whom we choose to travel, and, by nature we do require fellow travellers, is also a choice.  Choose carefully, well, and with thought out processes.

To be continued next week.

Dan Chalykoff is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying).  He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes.  He writes to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.  Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the bcc’d emailing list.

References

Barnes, J. (Ed.). (1995). The complete works of Aristotle: The revised Oxford translation.  Princeton University Press.

Hillman, J. (1996). The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling.  Grand Central Publishing.

Pinker, S. (2014). The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter.  Vintage Canada.