Who's Hamlet?

The last couple of weeks have been rougher than usual. Oh, it's not that I'm taking one for the team or anything, but there have been a number of smaller incidents that just all seemed to be related to the same theme. Life's like that sometimes. There are stretches when it seems you're confronted with the same ideas, the same issues, the same problems even though you're in different environments and situations. That's what it's been like lately.

The theme? Oh yes ... having and being. Yeah, I know: "Not that again!" But yes, that again. It has struck me that I'm not going to be able to move on until more people "get it".

Why has this been so prevalent? I don't know, but I do know that I had an interview for a new business course and it all centered around what I thought about business and having. OK, it wasn't that direct, but how should I understand that not adhering to the mantra that the purpose of business is the maximization of profits places me squarely in the minority? Or, what am I to make of the recent and hefty Greece discussion ... in or out of the euro, who pays and who saves? Or, what about the recent Republican presidential debates about taxes and saving and just letting people without health insurance die? Or, wondering why my daughter's job is at risk because higher education doesn't have the funding it needs to fulfill its mandate? Or, why if productivity has increased by over 90% in the last 50 years do I still have to wage-slave for 40 hours a week? Or ... well, I think you get the idea.

Though I hate to say it, we've been screwed (again). It's all about what you have, and who and what you are just doesn't matter any more. Being a good person doesn't matter if you have to slave away at more than one minimum-wage job in order to make ends meet ... if that's even possible. Being a caring person and mother doesn't matter if you're single and have to give your child to someone else to raise while you figure how to make the rent. Being optimistic is almost a waste of time if you know that you're kids are never going to have it as good as you had it, even though what you had was really nothing to brag about. For all we have to brag about is how well our (football/baseball/hockey) team does, how high-paid our star players are, how much our company grew last year ... or our new ride, or the fancy, all-inclusive package tour we were able to take, or an upgrade on the house.

No, it's no longer who you are, it's what you have. The little tent community in New York will soon be disparaged as rebels, do-nothings who want something for nothing, but in reality they are just unfortunate people, like you and me, who ended up on the wrong side of a mortgage. They have come together, formed a community, established their common rules and we only now have to wait till the media brands them as communists, socialists, or worse. How dare they rub our faces in the fact that the top 0.1% abscond with all the goodies while the rest of us just dream about the birds in the bush.

A recent article in the New Scientist made clear that there is a growing body of sound evidence that cooperation trumps competition in evolution. In other words, while competition may bring short-term benefits to individuals, in the long run, these are secondary to the benefits that the group acquires through cooperation. Having traded our society for a mere economy, we've lost sight of who we are as a group. And moving a step away from society, we have lost sight of our own biological roots. Homo sapiens has become Homo voratens.

Hamlet was a troubled soul, and that's why we remember him. He had everything: he was Prince of Denmark, he had money, wealth, power. Yet, he still found the time to ask the question that haunts us still: To be or not to be/That is the question. Too bad most of us don't believe in ghosts anymore.

The myth of the individual

Human beings are odd creatures. We have the longest post-natal dependency of any primate, maybe of any mammal. After all, we are carried internally by our mothers for nine months; it's nine more months till we can even walk (if we're doing well), and if things are going according to plan, we can eat most of what the adults are eating, if it is prepared properly. Some of us never learn to obtain and make food for ourselves (fast food doesn't count ... it may not even be "food"). We can't construct our own dwellings ... well, we really have to ask ourselves what we are capable of doing on our own at all.

On the other hand, we were given supposedly large brains. That is, we ended up with brains that are allegedly capable of more intellectual processing power than any of our mammalian relatives, that provide us with some sort of evolutionary advantage, that make us just "smarter". Anyone who stops to look out into the world quickly realizes that this must be a generalized statement, for there are just too many individual instances in which this apparently does not apply. Nevertheless, some maintain that we compensate for physical and hence environmental disadvantages by compensating with intelligence.

Let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that this is the case. What does it mean in the grand scheme of things? Why is it that we human beings have been able to subjugate nature, as we have (whether the way in which we have done it was good or not is a different issue altogether), and rise to the top of the "food chain" when we are really so apparently unsuited for life in the natural world?

If we stop and reflect for a moment instead of just repeating the platitudes we're so often fed, it slowly becomes apparent that humans have been evolutionarily so successful because they don't have to rely on themselves in any way. Let's go back. We aren't mobile on our own for nine months, we can still easily get lost in strange surroundings at nine years. We can't do anything really and don't know anything till we are taught -- by others, either in the family, community, or, in the West, in school. We can't fend for ourselves, we don't grow our own food, we can't build our own dwellings, we don't make our own clothes. We just buy it, if possible, whenever we need it.

We can do this, of course, because we, as a species, are smart enough to utilize the division of labor relatively effectively and because we have the ability to cooperate with others. There is a growing body of evidence (see David Sloan Wilson, My New Scientist [online], Magazine Issue 2824, August 3, 2011) that group selection, for example, predominates over individual selection in evolution. In other words, the very idea that cooperation is in all probability a more powerful evolutionary factor than competition should give us pause to think about the role we ascribe to the individual in our modern society.

Modern western society, in particular industrialized society, places an inordinate amount of emphasis on the individual. Capitalism itself is the new religion of the individual. It is the CEO who makes or breaks the company, hence the need to reward him or her appropriately. It is the individual investor who makes or breaks his own success. It is the quarterback (alone) who leads the team to victory; it is the coach (alone) who causes the team to fail. It is the individual gold medalist who receives more praise at the championships than the relay team. It is the individual who makes or breaks himself in the competition of life. I grew up having this pounded into my own head, from John Wayne to Ronald Reagan, but it never quite made sense to me.

No, the idea of the lone individual meeting and overcoming the odds is as illusory as the ancient myths in which gods on Olympus (or wherever) intervened in the affairs of humans. The individual is just him or herself. No more, no less. This individual is worth respect and admiration as long as whatever s/he does benefits the group that allows that person to stand forth and shine, but no more. The individual who aggrandizes him or herself at the expense of others, though, deserves simply to be ostracized. If you really believe you can do it all on your own, then go out on your own and show us you can do it. If we want to stop a good portion of the insanity that we seem to be overwhelmed with these days, then maybe we only need to put things back into their proper perspective: WE is and always will be more important than ME.