Fear, Anger, and the Mythology of Difference
What follows probably won’t have much of an impact on the people I think could benefit from it most, and will probably piss off some of the people who read it. That said, it has been banging around in my head for a long time, especially during this last year plus of political and social unrest in the United States, and the re-election of Trump. I need, for myself if not for anyone else, to get it out of my head.
In an article I wrote in October, 2024 on Medium, I talked about the power of language, the unique ability that we humans have to literally create and shape our experiences in the world with the language we give to those experiences. This is not an aerie-faerie philosophical discussion. Think about bridges, cities, electric transmission lines, office buildings – whatever it is, it began with an idea (talking to myself in my head), given form by language. If you think I’m full of it (try thinking that without words), go ahead, stop talking. See if you can shut off that voice in your head that’s providing running commentary on your world 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Language is like the air we breathe, in that we take it for granted – we speak, and it rarely occurs to us, if at all, that how we speak, the words we use to express our feelings and beliefs, shapes our experience. Breathing is an autonomic function, controlled by our nervous system, necessary to keep us alive – it changes if we’re exerting ourselves, under stress, relaxing, sleeping – and if we bring our attention to this involuntary bodily function, we can consciously control it. This fact is at the root of most meditation modalities.
Can we change our experience by speaking differently about it? Just as we can control our breathing by focusing our attention on it, we can control our language by making a conscious, not reflexive, choice about the words we use to create and describe our experiences.
We can speak great things into existence. In September 1962, JFK gave a speech to rally support for the US space program. He said that, before the end of the decade, we would send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth. The materials and technologies needed to make that happen either didn’t exist, or were in their infancy relative to what would be necessary to bring this vision to life. And, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on the moon. JFK literally spoke into existence man on the moon!
What does this have to do with anything? For as long as we’ve had language, we have used it to create our identities, individually, and as groups of people. And we divide ourselves into different social groupings. White vs. non-white (a massive overgeneralization, by the way); Christians vs. non-Christians; Christians vs. Muslims; Christians vs. Jews; Jews vs. Muslims; Christians vs. “non-believers”; Republicans vs. Democrats; conservatives vs. liberals; progressives vs. conservatives; left vs. right; pro-life vs. pro-choice; “Americans” vs. anybody else...I could give a thousand more examples. We use those divisions to help ourselves feel comfortable with who we believe ourselves to be, and superior to other social groups, or to claim higher moral authority, or to denigrate those who are not included in our particular social hierarchy or political philosophy or income class or a host of other things. We are afraid of what we don’t identify with or understand, and we learn to fear and vilify “the other,” and our otherwise baseless fear motivates sometimes intense anger focused on whichever “other” we’re obsessed with at the moment. This has worked to the advantage of despots for centuries.
We make tangible and real what is nothing more (and, indeed, nothing less) than a creation wrought with words. Let that sink in for a minute. These divisions among us, to which we cling as though our very lives depend on them are just one of many possible fictions which we’ve chosen to speak into existence.
Let me give an example to illustrate what I’m talking about. America is a racist society. The divisions between black and white or brown and white or Asian and white could not be more stark. Racism has led to inequality and violence over and over again in our history, and we talk about racial purity, racial (in)equality, racism, reverse racism (an absurd concept on its face), and on and on and on. Yet, the very concept of race as a way of segregating one group of humans from another is a fiction! There is only one race, the human race, and even that concept is fallacious, because there are no other “races” that exist.
Scientists classify organisms, whether plants, animals, insects, or indeed, us humans, on the basis of scientifically observable characteristics. Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalized binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy." The taxonomy which Linnaeus described classifies all organisms as follows – kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species (“race” is not one of the classifications in the taxonomy!). For us humans, that looks like this:
Kingdom: Animalia
I hate to break it to you, kids, we are animals.
Phylum: Chordata
Among other things, these are creatures that are bilaterally symmetric, with a spine.
Class: Mammalia
Mammals are warm-blooded, have milk-producing mammary glands, and fur or hair, as well as a number of other distinguishing characteristics.
Order: Primates
Large brain sizes, binocular vision, color vision, vocalizations, shoulder girdles allowing a large degree of movement in the upper limbs, and opposable thumbs (in most but not all) that enable better grasping and dexterity.
Family: Hominidae
Yes, creationists, in common parlance, “the Great Apes.” I get it, you don’t like where this is heading.
Genus: homo
Pongo (the Bornean, Sumatran and Tapanuli orangutan); Gorilla (the eastern and western gorilla); Pan (the chimpanzee and the bonobo); and Homo, of which only modern humans (Homo sapiens) remain.
Species: sapiens
Yep, us.
In case you missed it, let me say it again – there are no subgroupings anywhere in this taxonomy which describe and differentiate “race.” Yet we have fought wars and killed countless millions of ourselves over this fictional concept, not just in the US, but in various places around the world in our roughly 300,000 year history on the planet, though mostly in the last couple thousand years.
There are countless more examples of what I’m describing, equally incendiary. Think about sex vs. gender, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, national identities (in case you missed it, there is an ongoing genocidal war in the Middle East between Jews and Palestinians), men vs. women...
Scientists who study the brain and PTSD, particularly Complex PTSD[1] have shown that the language we associate with traumatic incidents quite literally wires circuits in the brain in response to those traumas. Trauma recovery, therefore, is a process of giving different language to those traumatic experiences, thereby rewiring those circuits. If, as a child, I was repeatedly emotionally and psychologically abused and ignored by my parents or caregivers, and I learned through those experiences that I don’t matter, healing the resultant trauma is almost entirely about re-examining those experiences, recognizing that what I suffered was a projection of my parents’ own childhood wounds on me, and learning to love myself as I am, and that, in fact, I do matter. This then frees me to see my adult experiences through a different, emotionally mature, lens than the one triggered by (usually unconscious) childhood memories.
As a trauma recovery coach, this is perhaps the most important skill that I teach my clients. It’s conceptually simple and straightforward, and it takes presence, awareness, and lots and lots of practice to hone this skill to the point where it almost becomes second nature – stop, breathe, recognize that you’re not in danger, that you’re reacting to an old experience, and you can choose to respond differently, as an emotionally mature adult, rather than reacting reflexively as that wounded child you once were.
So what? The first step to solving a problem is recognizing that there is one. Do I naively believe that we can change humanity by all of us choosing to speak and think differently? Well, yes, that is the key, and no, I recognize that affecting that kind of change on a global scale would be all but impossible. As the saying goes, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!” My encouragement to you, then, is start with you, one bite at a time. Start to be aware of how you speak, to others, yes, and also to yourself! When you find yourself having an opinion about that jerk that just cut you off in traffic, and how you’re going to pass him and cut him off in return, with some choice words and gestures hurled his way, stop. Breathe, consider that you don’t know what’s going on with that other person. Are they rushing to get to the hospital because their wife is about to give birth? Are they late for work for the third time this week, and afraid of being fired? And so what if they are just a jerk? Of all of the things that are going to happen in the course of your day today, how much value is there in giving an outsized amount of your energy to that person?
The only person you can change is yourself. By your example, perhaps you will inspire others in your life to be more attentive to how they speak to themselves and others, and they may inspire still others by their example. Be the butterfly in the butterfly effect.[2]
We can have a world in which we all realize that we want the same things, for ourselves and our children and our children’s children, and our energy is far better spent on bringing that vision into reality than on tearing ourselves and others down based on perceived differences that are really just a grand fiction we’ve created. We can create any story we want, so let’s make it a good one with a happy ending! Or, we can continue to divide and destroy one another and the world we live in.
I know what I choose…
[1] Complex PTSD is the term used to describe what can result from experiencing chronic trauma, such as prolonged child abuse or domestic violence.
[2] This term is closely associated with the work of the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz. He noted that the butterfly effect is derived from the example of the details of a tornado (the exact time of formation, the exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as a distant butterfly flapping its wings several weeks earlier.