“We want people to change because they see better ways of meeting their needs at less cost, not because of fear that we’re going to punish them, or ‘guilt’ them if they don’t.”
— Marshall B. Rosenberg
Time for Others
I stood inside of a gas station convenience store late one night about two years ago, waiting for my ride, talking with the clerk, who had asked me for my opinion about a display case she was preparing. Another woman of an ethnicity I wasn’t able to guess came in and began moving around the store with an air of business. As the clerk continued to chat with me about the night shift hours and laugh over the difference in our typical bedtimes, the other woman rapidly walked over and approached me, a look of stern resolution on her face.
“You need to leave her alone! She has work to do! She doesn’t have time to stand here chatting away with you!”
With that, she spun around and walked out. Waking up to the clear sign that this was the clerk’s supervisor, I turned back to the counter to see the girl’s mouth hung open and gaping in disbelief.
When she finally spoke, she breathed in astonishment how insanely rude her supervisor was just now. She retreated to the back of the store while I stood wondering for a moment what to do.
I decided to confront the supervisor.
Seeing she was still standing outside, I stepped out and, at that moment, for whatever reason, lost the nerve that I’d had to speak. Afterward I realized that I’d not really prepared myself emotionally and therefore lacked a little of the courage I was wanting. Instead I found myself standing in front of her with less-than-full presence or readiness.
KELSEY
Hey, sorry about that in there.
WOMAN
No. It’s not you.
[Gesturing toward the counter inside]
She’s always distracted, doesn’t do her work. There’s no time for that nonsense.
KELSEY
Mm, yeah, you sound pretty busy. Hard having to worry about that kind of stuff, huh?
WOMAN
Right, that’s right. There’s not time for that nonsense.
The woman then immediately turned and walked away, got in her car and left. As I leaned against the outside wall of the store chewing on a protein bar and thinking over our brief conversation, the clerk came out with a bag of trash.
CLERK
I still can’t believe her! That was so rude! Look —
[Showing me her hand]
I’m still shaking from it!
I began to utter something about how affected the manager herself had seemed to me as the clerk walked past me to the trash bin a few yards away. I could feel the same lack of confidence in myself that moment that I had with the supervisor minutes before. The truth of course was that I was at once experiencing a welling emotion of care for them both of and something along the lines of disconnected apathy. You know, the kind that basically translates to “not my problem.”
And yet I felt willing enough to be vulnerable, the vulnerability for a just basic social courage we’re all compelled to hold if only out of our own silly consciousness of what’s right to do. To be a little more human that otherwise. So as the clerk approached me again on her way back I gauged my preparedness to speak.
CLERK
I just can’t believe it. I mean, what does she think I’m doing? It’s not like I’m sitting on my ass all the time. I’m just trying to make conversation with customers! What wrong with that?
KELSEY
Sounds like you’d really like to be seen for valuing care for people who come in here, yeah?
CLERK
[With sudden tenderness in her voice]
Yeah…
[Cue the ubiquitous awkward pause. Should I say something else?]
KELSEY
Yeah, I’ll bet it would mean a lot to you to be seen for that. For caring.
CLERK
Yeah…
[I decided to go on and respond to her situation in the hope of providing her some relief with something I’d guessed about the supervisor that the clerk may not have known.]
KELSEY
Listen. I was just talking with her out here. It sounds to me like she’s got a lot going on in her right now. I got that she’s feeling really busy and worried about things. It seems to me that it really isn’t you.
The clerk looked at me for a second then took a moment to herself. Finally, she said she needed to get back to work. I still saw some residual fear or pain in her (I wasn’t sure which), so I stretched out my hand, asked her name and introduced myself. With a little more warmth than she’d had a moment earlier, she gave a gentle handshake and a smile and went back inside with what seemed a bit more calmness to her step.
A Human “Other “
How could anyone possibly feel care for someone who would wish to hurt them or hurt someone else they care about?
In the framework of the society we live in today, many of us may have grown up under the impression that we are all independent, isolated individuals. Not so much isolated from each other by space or contact (a 7.5-billion and growing population has mostly remedied that), but isolated in the sense that our actions and expressed intentions could be interpreted to not (or “ought” not) affect one another as deeply as they do.
— “If she thinks she can do that to me, she’s dead wrong.”
— “It’s him or me, and I’m not going to be the one who gets screwed.”
— “What does it matter if what I do hurts them? I don’t know them! Heck, if anything they’re the enemy!”
— “It is a simple fact of life that there are bad people in the world, and there is sometimes no other recourse than to correct their ways or eliminate them before good people get hurt.”
Any of these familiar?
There’s a lot of debate as to when exactly, but at some point in the long history of our (now global) culture, implementing power-over strategies that force others (especially those we presume to be least related to us by family, territory or culture) to do what we want them to do, which is often something we don’t want to do ourselves. Not just physical or financial slavery (such as indebted servitude) but social and emotional slavery as well.
Daniel Quinn (in his renowned book Ishmael) saw the moment this started happening (whenever that was) as the point when one tribe decided to dominate another tribe for their resources, in the name of things as seemingly arbitrary as agriculture. Anthropological disputes ensue in light of such proposals, however the historical evidence still stands that not all cultures at all times through history have engaged in this sort of behavior. The history of structures of domination had a beginning (and with any luck may have an ending).
Some argue that there’s evidence that among social species in the animal kingdom, species of ape, such as chimpanzees, demonstrate domination-oriented behaviors in their culture, and therefore creatures like ourselves with genetic descendance have simply inherited, for better or worse, this orientation toward domination and punishment in implementing it.
Meanwhile, scientists like Robert Sapolsky have demonstrated converse evidence that regardless of patterns of behaviors in distinct species (whether chimpanzee, bonobo, or baboon), primate societies — communities of some characteristic culture — show the potential capacity to change their own culture, whether by sudden unintended change or by the miraculous ability to perceive and interpret feedback and instantiate change in their interactions.
There’s a potential capacity to change culture, whether by sudden unintended change or by the miraculous ability to perceive and interpret feedback, and instantiate change simply through our interactions with others.
The essence of domination relations requires a disconnect between myself and another (human being, other organism, natural environment) where one of us strives to force what we want from the other, preceded simply by a disconnect in care or compassion for the other. Such disconnect may not be a totally conscious experience, and in fact the very attempt to force connection or care or compassion could itself be the source of it for some of us.
What precedes that, however — the disconnect itself — is the innocent primal need for self-care. Such care can extend to other related individuals, that is, to family or state or nation or ethnicity — however wide the circle we care to frame around our personal well-being the well-being of those we identify with. This sort of protective intent is evolutionary and is universal to us all. But how we choose to respond to our own desire to protect can result in very different forms of actual care.
Care-Less or Care-Full
Any manner of belief may promote the initial disconnect that “I don’t know this person, so what does it matter?” It may be part of a whole socio- (or ethno-) centric system of beliefs by which I tell myself that I’m responsible for the care of my people/family/nation/self/etc. and anyone outside of that is responsible to whatever extent for their people/family/… And so the illusion of isolation is propelled forward. “Dog eat dog world”: I’m alone in my being in the world, and the rest of the world couldn’t care less about me (or those I care about).
Protection emerges from the desire to provide care where we suspect care won’t be immediately available to us. The preciousness of this need and its intensity is awe-inspiring to me. The fact that it could just as easily lead to killing others as it does to embracing our loved ones more fully is therefore of little surprise to me. But there is a difference.
We could say that violence is often a matter of protection in the form of rendering oneself inaccessible to connection (imagine a hardened shell around yourself) and the annihilating of the other, the “enemy” or “bad person.” The “us” in the “us-versus-them” paradigm is protected and woe unto “them” who trespass.
Violence is often a matter of protection in the form of rendering oneself inaccessible to connection and the annihilating of the other.
But what would protection without punishment look like?
Protection, as a universal need, actually has no inherent link to punishment. Punishment as a strategy meant to help us achieve what we’re needing — protection, security, stability, respect — in reality always falls short of providing it. What it promotes is the possibility (read “practical inevitability”) of retaliation, heightening evermore the unfulfilled need for protection and lessening our sensitivity, and the potential to care for, the people we fear that retaliation from.
Counter-intuitively, perhaps, protection can be realistically cultivated through the willingness to be vulnerable. In the small everyday example at the beginning of this post, this vulnerability could have been expressed in my attempt to listen and empathize with the other person(s) involved or to express myself honestly. In a more severe situation, protective vulnerability could be demonstrated by a nation’s leader who is willing to express precisely the safety he wants for his country’s people and to ask for (not demand) measures that would help both nations find a mutual ground for understanding each other.
Vulnerability in our culture is often viewed as weakness. In many cases, this isn’t inaccurate. Passivity and victimization are very real instances of a dominator (individual, group, country) overtaking another the moment their defenses are down. And while the intent of martyrdom may be honorable, the actual act may violate self-care and the possibility of long-term changes for all toward making life more wonderful.
Nonetheless, vulnerability from the standpoint of authenticity, not victimhood, and courage, not defensiveness, is both a short-term and a long-term impactful way of confrontation or presencing. It may or may not require force (by getting attention, surprise, or temporary immobilization), but it certainly requires a level of commitment from this standpoint, a level that only adamantly empathic “warriors” of our time could successfully embody. Which could be anybody who is in touch with the care and compassion underneath the intent for protection.
Vulnerability from the standpoint of authenticity and courage is both a short-term and a long-term impactful way of confronting or presencing another.
And the best part about it: No violence required. True security ensured.
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