Living Out of Our False Identities (Part 1)

What's upstream from broken communities? Part of the answer is fear.

Every time I write about the problems afflicting our society, I feel called to go further upstream.

On right and left, illiberal ideologies are on the rise. That's a problem (and one I've written about at length, on both sides). But let's go upstream. Why are so many people today being drawn to illiberal, authoritarian, and divisive ideologies?

Let's take another example. I hear from a lot of Reds and Blues that they barely talk to people on the other side–even during family reunions. That's a problem (and also one I've written about at length). But let's go upstream. Why do so many of us think the other side is so bad?

I think part of the answer is broken communities. Broken communities are upstream from both problems.

Broken communities leave people feeling more lonely and adrift. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy says that we're in the midst of a "loneliness epidemic." According to a Cigna report from January 2020, 58 percent of Americans say they "always or sometimes feel like no one knows them well." 49 percent say they "always or sometimes feel as though they lack companionship" and 47 percent say that they always or sometimes feel that "their relationships with others are not meaningful." 

And that was before a global pandemic forced us all inside and made us see every one of our neighbors as a potential carrier of a deadly disease. 

It's not hard to see the link between a lonely, adrift populace and a tendency towards authoritarian politics. In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes the connection explicit. "If people can’t satisfy their need for deep connection in other ways," he writes, "they’ll be more receptive to a smooth-talking leader who urges them to renounce their lives of 'selfish momentary pleasure' and follow him onward to 'that purely spiritual existence' in which their value as human beings consists." By contrast, a dense web of civic associations can actually serve as a bulwark against tyranny. Haidt again: "In fact, a nation that is full of hives [Haidt’s term for civic associations] is a nation of happy and satisfied people. It’s not a very promising target for takeover by a demagogue offering people meaning in exchange for their souls."

Broken communities also leave us more scared of our community and neighbors. When we have less contact with people from different background and viewpoints, we're more likely to end up scared of them.  As Mónica Guzmán (a senior fellow at Braver Angels, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing affective polarization) puts it in her TED Talk "How Curiosity Will Save Us," "whoever is underrepresented in your life will be overrepresented in your imagination." When we stop being confronted with the humanity of our neighbors, we can fill in the gap with caricatures and bad intentions. That encourages us towards ideologies of divisiveness and suspicion.

Broken communities also leave more people feeling like our country is broken. That makes us more scared of the other side taking power, which makes us more likely to support extremism and authoritarian ideas—ranging from denying the results of a presidential election to trying to pack the Supreme Court—in order to stop the other side. That in turn makes the other side more scared of us, which makes them more likely to support extremism and authoritarian ideas in order to stop our side, which makes us more scared of them, which which makes us more likely to….

So broken communities are a problem. But what's upstream from broken communities?

I think it's broken psychology. Pastor Jamie Winship argues that so many of us are living out of what he calls a false identity. What is a false identity? It's the network of negative emotions that drag us around by the privates and influence how we act, while loudly insisting to us that they are what's truest about us. It's our fear and our anger and our hubris and our sense of worthlessness and our worry and our pain and our selfishness. Different spiritual traditions refer to it in different ways. Christians refer to the Flesh. Eckhart Tolle calls it the ego or pain-body. Buddhists call it the "hungry ghost" that is never satiated. My spiritual mentors simply call it Self 1.

Our false identity is divorced from our true identity, which is the spirit of love and peace and joy and grounded purpose and meaning from which God wants us to live.

Of course, none of us live from our false identities all of the time–just like none of us live from our true identities all of the time. But I suspect we live from our false identities more than we would like to admit, and that those false identities are upstream from a fair amount of problems in the world.

One way that our false identities manifest is through fear. I think fear causes a lot of broken communities, and therefore a lot of the rippling-out problems that those broken communities cause in turn. 

First, let's define fear. When I talk about fear, I'm not talking about a healthy sense of self-preservation. I'm not talking about the emotion that stops us from walking through a bad part of town at night or from jumping out of a window because we want to see if we can fly.

I mean a sense of fear that's untethered from any genuine sense of danger. More precisely, I mean the kind of fear that cuts us off from the good things in life without making us meaningfully safer.

I think this kind of fear makes us pull back from our communities. Our 24/7 news media tells us nonstop that our neighbors might all be monsters. We're deluged with stories about ordinary-looking people being rapists, pedophiles, thieves, and kidnappers. We see every violent crime, almost anywhere in the nation, blaring from the nightly news or infiltrating our minds on Twitter. We know intellectually that these stories are spread over a population of 330 million people, and that the vast majority of them are happening in places far away from where we live. But that doesn't really matter. Our lizard brains evolved to live in small tribes, and as a result we have trouble conceptualizing large numbers or making sense of large geographies. So when we see endless stories of crime across the nation, we feel as though all of that crime—all of those awful people—are in our own tribe, our own town—and right around the corner.

In The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff (president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and Jonathan Haidt document just one aspect of this trend: parenting. As a result of, among other things, a 24/7 news media that highlights every negative story involving children anywhere in the country, Haidt and Lukianoff write that "Norms changed, fears grew, and many parents came to believe that if they took their eyes off their children for an instant in any public venue, their kid might be snatched. It no longer felt safe to let kids roam around their neighborhoods unsupervised." "Paranoid parenting" became the norm, and we started convincing children that "the world is full of danger; evil lurks in the shadows, on the streets, and in public parks and restrooms."

What happened to parents happened to the rest of us too. We became obsessed with what Lenore Skenazy calls "worst-first thinking." We started to see evil lurking everywhere, and we closed ourselves off from the people in our communities that the media warned us might be monsters.

As a result, we stopped going over to our neighbors' houses to help out. We stopped sending our kids over to play with their kids. We stopped approaching our neighbors with love, and started approaching them as a possible threat. The Bible teaches that "perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4:18, NIV). I think the inverse is also true: fear casts out love. And when we don't love our neighbors, we don't watch out for them. We don't reach out to them to celebrate the good times (their kid's high school graduation, or our football team winning a championship), and we're no longer pillars of support for each other during the bad times.

With enough fear, communities get hollowed out. And from hollowed-out communities, we end up with all kinds of problems:

- Reds and Blues who are at each others' throats because we're all scared of each other.

- A population lonely and disconnected and worried for the future of our country.

- A population open to ideologies of suspicion and division, who don't trust the traditional give-and-take of electoral politics because we don't feel that we can trust our neighbors with power over our community.

So how do we reduce our fear? In her New York Times bestseller Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier quotes psychology professor and cognitive behavioral therapist Dr. Camilo Ortiz on how to overcome fear. Ortiz treats fear like it's target-agnostic: if we're scared of X, then we're more likely to be scared of Y. When we become braver about X, we become braver about Y too. Or as Ortiz jokingly describes his method with adolescents, "So you’re scared of the dark? Go to the deli and buy me a half a pound of salami.” Shrier writes that "The child’s feeling of efficacy" from performing the errand makes them "braver" and "less anxious."

The truth is that courage isn't just tested; it's built. Every time we act courageously in one area of our lives, we become less scared in other areas. When we go skydiving, we become less obsessed with "Stranger Danger." 

With enough acts of courage, we can counteract the constant stream of terror-inducing messages which which we're bombarded every single day.

So here's our action item this week, as a community of practice. Do something that scares you. It can be something fun, like skydiving; or something hard, like having a painful conversation with your spouse or kids. But do something that will build your courage.

And then let us know how it went.

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