To Heal the West, We Must Heal Ourselves (part 3). (Or: What's the Good of Personal Development?)

Can personal development heal the West?

How can personal development, and becoming the best and highest versions of ourselves, help us to heal the West? In order to answer that, we have to take a step back.

There's a sense lately that the West is crumbling. At the very least, it seems to be in danger. But I don't think this sense of the West's precariousness developed overnight. I think it's been building for awhile.

In his landmark book Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam makes a sweeping case that our communities have been systematically hollowed out starting around the 1970s. Americans used to be defined by our dense web of civic associations. We spent time in Rotary Clubs and Key Clubs, made plans with our neighbors and attended block parties. We were active in sporting leagues and local government, in charities and HOAs. We spent a lot of time with friends and even more time with our families. Perhaps as a result, we were a nation ready to trust our neighbors: in 1964, surveys found that a record 77 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that, "most people can be trusted."

Alexis de Tocqueville described our great nation this way, in his 1838 classic Democracy In America: "Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types — religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute….Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America."

For generations, these lines described a unique and essential part of the American experience. As Putnam puts it, "These lines from Alexis de Tocqueville, a perceptive French visitor to early-nineteenth-century America, are often quoted by social scientists because they capture an important and enduring fact about our country. Today, as 170 years ago, Americans are more likely to be involved in voluntary associations than are citizens of most other nations…."

But starting in the 1970s, our vaunted civic society began to be hollowed out. When University of Michigan researchers partnered with the National Institute of Mental Health for a 1957 study, they found a nation full of tight-knit communities. When they repeated the study in 1976, one of their key findings was a "reduced integration of American adults into the social structure." Putnam summarizes the 1976 study's findings: 

"Over these two decades informal socializing with friends and relatives declined by about 10 percent, organizational memberships fell by 16 percent, and church attendance…declined by 20 percent. Examined more closely, these surveys found significant declines in membership in unions; church groups; fraternal and veterans organizations; civic groups, such as PTAs; youth groups; charities; and a catch-all 'other' category."

This hollowing-out continued in the 1980s and 1990s. Putnam again:

"On an average day in 1965, 7 percent of Americans spent some time in a community organization. By 1995 that figure had fallen to 3 percent of all Americans. Those numbers suggest that nearly half of all Americans in the 1960s invested some time each week in clubs and local associations, as compared to less than one-quarter in the 1990s."

As a country, we realized that this was a problem. In 1992, a survey found that three-quarters of Americans called "the breakdown of community" and "selfishness" either "serious" or "very serious" problems. But the trend continued. In 2022, United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy published a report titled "Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation" which warned that "In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness." The amount of time we spend with friends fell by almost half from 2003 to 2019. And that was before the pandemic. Today we are lonely, isolated, and adrift from our communities in ways that most Americans would have found hard to imagine in the 1950s.

I think all of this explains a big part of why the West feels so fragile right now. As the Surgeon General's Advisory notes, "Social connection is a fundamental human need, as essential to survival as food, water, and shelter." We are "biologically wired for social connection." When the world we live in fails to provide that social connection, a lot of us start to envision a different world. We become unhappy and frustrated with liberal democracy, thinking that our liberal democracy might be why we're so lonely; and we become more open to authoritarian ideas and leaders.

So broken communities are a problem. But what can we do about them?

I think the answer lies in personal development. By personal development, I don't just mean building atomic habits that help us to be more productive at work or get in better shape. Those are valuable, and I have a lot of respect for that kind of habit-building (having used it myself). But I have in mind something deeper: total transformation.

I believe two things. The first is that something made us, and that something wants us to be noble and high and selfless. It wants us to be a walking avatar of good, the kind of person who can brighten other peoples' days or even change their lives just by walking into a room.

(I should clarify that while I'm a Christian, I'm not pushing religion here. When I say "something made us," you can apply that to mean anything from the God of Abraham to the Universe).

The second thing I believe is that we're broken. Maybe we're born that way. Maybe we become broken as a result of growing up in a broken world. That's a matter for philosophers, and far outside of the scope of this article or indeed my theological wisdom. I can say that, however I came into this world, I was (further?) broken by some harsh collisions I had with broken people. As an adult, I was even further broken by addiction and by spending years of my life chasing the wrong things. I think few of us reach adulthood without being broken in at least some ways.

So what would it look like if we were remade? What would it look like if we healed from our brokeness and became more of the person that our creator wanted us to be? That's what I mean by personal development. It's not about tinkering around the edges. It's about letting go of our false self and becoming—body and soul—the person we were always meant to be.

But how can becoming the highest and best versions of ourselves help to heal the West? The truth is that every single one of our actions has ripple effects. These can be positive or negative, healthy or unhealthy; but we affect far more people than we think we do.

If we stay broken, these ripple effects can be bad. I worked at a company once with a boss who had immense anger issues. He would yell at employees, swear at them, badmouth them viciously behind their backs, and accuse them of lying without evidence. He would fly off the handle at the drop of a hat. Eventually I quit. When I checked back with the company a couple of years later, it turned out that all my coworkers had quit too. The boss' brokeness, manifested as out-of-control anger, didn't just impact him. It turned work into a living hell for everyone around him.

But the effects went farther than that. Dealing with this boss, I found myself angrier and more disconnected from my friends and now-wife. I was more depressed, and more in my head on date nights and hangouts with friends. That affected the people I cared about. If their way of being in the world was in any way affected by my own, then their own circle of acquaintances and loved ones suffered in turn. Like ripples in a pond, our actions can extend far beyond our immediate circle.

I've caused my own share of bad ripples in the world. In my 20s, I was enormously codependent with my friends. I was high-drama, alternately desperate and angry, and I honestly annoyed the crap out of them. Their loyalty was commendable, but during this time I have little doubt that I made many of their lives worse. To the extent that my neediness and anger affected their way of being, I hurt not just them but their own social circles, who went out and hurt….

But there can be good ripple effects too. My friend Jamie Winship grew up in a rough neighborhood with a rough group of friends. But when he found his true identity, he began to transform. He went overseas and started talking about true identity and God's love to people who most of us would have written off. Now he's helped anywhere from thousands to tens of thousands of militant extremists to put down their guns and contribute to society. By doing so, he has impacted literally millions of people.

The positive ripple effects that come from personal transformation don't have to be earth-shattering. Another of my friends used to be a player. He was charming but had low self-esteem, and he spent a lot of time going from one "too bad to stay, too good to leave" relationship to another. Eventually he started doing deep work and cleaned himself up; and now he's happily married. His transformation didn't just impact him. It impacted his wife and son. It impacted her social circle, because she's happier and more full of joy than if she had never met him. He's a much better father than he would have been ten years ago, and so the ripple effects of his transformation are affecting his son and will ultimately affect everyone his son meets.

These ripple effects are why, in a substack dedicated to healing the West, we spend so much more time talking about personal transformation than we do about policy changes. Policy change is hugely important. But it's also slow and unwieldy. And, it can backfire; policies designed to solve XYZ problem can accidentally create more of XYZ. 

I'd rather start at home. By transforming ourselves, we can be like a stone thrown into a still pond, creating positive ripples all the way to the shore. With enough ripples in the pond, we can change the world.

So here's our action item this week, as a community of practice. Cast your eyes to whatever power you conceptualize as having created you (again, this doesn't have to be the God of any particular religion; you can do this exercise with anyone from the God of Abraham to Spirit to Source to Infinite Intelligence to Infinite Love to the Universe to Wisdom). And then ask what it wants you to know about yourself.

And then write down what you hear without censoring.

And, if you're comfortable with it, leave a comment telling us.

(see the comments for my answer to this question).

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Bio: Julian Adorney is a volunteer with Braver Angels, a national nonprofit dedicated to reducing toxic polarization. He is the founder of Heal the West, a substack movement.

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