What’s More Important? Me or We?

What’s more impor­tant, the me or the we? Do you fun­da­men­tal­ly believe the col­lec­tive or the indi­vid­ual mat­ters most?

According to an oft-told leg­end, anthro­pol­o­gist Margaret Mead was asked what she con­sid­ered to be the first anthro­po­log­i­cal sign of human civ­i­liza­tion. Was it the advent of tools and cook­ing uten­sils, the rise of weapons for bet­ter hunt­ing, or the devel­op­ment of reli­gious or spir­i­tu­al objects? 

Mead explained that the first evi­dence of civ­i­liza­tion was a 15,000 years old frac­tured femur, the longest bone in the human body. The par­tic­u­lar bone found at Mead’s archae­o­log­i­cal site had been bro­ken, but it had also healed.

This mat­ters because 15,000 years ago, a bro­ken leg would have meant cer­tain death. If you could not walk to the riv­er to drink, hunt for food, or run from preda­tors, you would die. 

This healed femur is evi­dence that some­one helped the injured human instead of aban­don­ing the “weak link” to the ele­ments. It is con­fir­ma­tion that humans were bio­log­i­cal­ly cre­at­ed to seek rela­tion­ships with others.

We are designed for connection. 

Examples abound in very lit­er­al ways. Did you know that emo­tion­al tears con­tain more pro­tein than non-emo­tion­al tears (say, from chop­ping an onion)? When you cry for emo­tion­al rea­sons, the tears roll down your face more slow­ly, increas­ing the chance they’ll be seen and solic­it care.

Our skin con­tains spe­cial recep­tor cells (called CT fibers) that respond only to pleas­ant touch, like when some­one rubs cir­cles on your back. These recep­tors stim­u­late the insu­lar cor­tex, a brain part respon­si­ble for help­ing us process emo­tions and helps facil­i­tate bonding.

When two peo­ple inter­act in a mean­ing­ful way, their heart rhythms, brain wave activ­i­ty, and hor­mone release become matched. It’s called biobe­hav­ioral synchrony.

What I’m say­ing is this: humans have sur­vived for thou­sands of years because we con­nect­ed, com­mu­ni­cat­ed, and coop­er­at­ed with each other. 

So how has pol­i­tics divid­ed our nation so deeply? Why did gun sales surge dur­ing covid? Why is there so much vit­ri­ol and hate mak­ing the rounds on social media?

We are designed to look out for one anoth­er, but there’s a wrin­kle in that sys­tem. We only con­nect, com­mu­ni­cate, and coöper­ate when we feel safe. While our cur­rent exis­tence might seem vast­ly dif­fer­ent than that of our ances­tors, our ner­vous sys­tem hasn’t changed at all. It’s basi­cal­ly a bina­ry sys­tem with two options: I feel safe and/or I do not feel safe. 

Our bio­log­i­cal imper­a­tive to con­nect and care for each oth­er only hap­pens when we feel safe. And many of us do not feel safe these days. 

The young wor­ry about school debt, astro­nom­i­cal rent prices, and ter­ri­ble health care coverage. 

The poor wor­ry about buy­ing gro­ceries, pay­ing the mort­gage, or get­ting sick. 

Women wor­ry about their repro­duc­tive rights. 

Blacks wor­ry that they might get hurt, incar­cer­at­ed, or killed sim­ply because they are black. 

The LGBTQ com­mu­ni­ty wor­ries about the same thing.

Anyone not iden­ti­fy­ing as a Christian Nationalist wor­ries about their reli­gious rights being stripped away.

And the 1% wor­ry they will lose their immense pow­er and mon­ey, so they con­tin­ue to enforce poli­cies that keep the “oth­ers” scared and marginalized.

And the fear cycle con­tin­ues. The more we believe that resources are scarce, the more scared we feel, which leads us to act­ing self­ish, oppor­tunis­tic, and thought­less. Remember how Mead spoke about the first civ­i­liza­tion? The word civ­il lit­er­al­ly means relat­ing to the cit­i­zen in rela­tion to the com­mon­wealth and his/her fel­low cit­i­zens. By def­i­n­i­tion, you can’t have a civ­i­liza­tion with­out oth­er peo­ple. And there is noth­ing civ­il about look­ing out sole­ly for one’s own interests.

When we remem­ber that we were cre­at­ed to con­nect, col­lab­o­rate, and com­mu­ni­cate, we act in ways that ben­e­fit the we instead of just the me.

Think on this before you cast your bal­lot this November.