My summer reading list this year includes titles such as, Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides by Geoffrey L. Cohen, and Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki. I’m off on this tangent in part because I’m tired of studying for my riding instructor test, but also because I want to understand how we became a society that can be persuaded, divided, and controlled by lies.
One theory posits that survival is more important than the truth, and survival for homo sapiens long depended on belonging to a tribe. How does that work? Welp, back in the day, 20-40,000 years ago, we depended on our tribe for safety. Hunting big game with one spear was a losing proposition. Expecting everybody to make their own spears, when Ogette was incredibly good at it, was perilously inefficient. We survived by virtue of cooperation and belonging, and we are still wired for that model.
Whether we crossed the river above or below the tree last year truly did not matter anywhere near as much as staying on good terms with the women who made the rafts. Be willing to let the truth slide–we did cross above, despite what Og says–and you won’t be left to entertain the lions on the wrong shore.
When we experience social rejection, our cortisol levels spike, we are more likely to view ourselves negatively, we are more prone to aggression and poor decision-making. Rejection shows up in the brain in the same place as physical pain, and people made to feel rejected are easily manipulated.
And yet, when I write Lord Julian’s tales, he almost always at some point faces a critical rejection–from friends or family who doubt him, or from somebody who’d only recently turned to him as a desperate last resort. They hit him where he’s already bruised–in his sense of belonging–and his job is to ignore the blow and keep searching for the truth.
And because I am the queen of my writing desk, Julian’s willingness to stand alone in the hope of discovering the truth always results in freedom for a formerly oppressed party and some self-affirmation for Julian. Neener-neener!
I think we need our Lord Julians every bit as much as we need our tribe. We need the people who aren’t willing to lie for the sake of popularity or likes if the lie is a substantial moral compromise. Crossing the river at the wrong point can, some years, get us all killed.
And I do know this: When I see somebody stand up, speak truth to power, and brave the lions, that person has earned my respect and trust. Those are the kind of people I want to belong to. They won’t tell me that huge sleeping cat with all the fangs and claws is a puppy, and he’d love for me to pet him. But a tribe made up of moral invertebrates bound together by lies might convince me of such an outlandish and dangerous falsehood.
When have you seen somebody speak out for unpopular truth? Might have been a character in a book, might have been back in fifth grade. Might have been you in your last HOA meeting…
Hi Grace!
My brain is not braining right now
So I’m just here to say hello and to wish you a good week
Cheers.
Since I am on mailing lists for newsletters trying to get people to even see the truth, it happens a lot for me. I am personally a loner by nature but I can give my money to those who have the ability to get out there. I do wish it could be me but I know myself well enough after all these years to know it won’t be. I can sign petitions but I cannot even make myself make the phone calls to my reps. But I see the people on the news who are speaking out and it makes my heart glad.
The other thing that makes my heart glad is your writing. Since the first book of yours I read (The Traitor–way to start with a little feel-good tale), I have appreciated your ability to make the uncomfortable appealing. You write your characters so well that I can cringe for them and their circumstances, but I know they will be all right. That gives me hope and that’s part of why I read.
The visual that always comes to mind is the man who stood with his shopping in front of a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square.
Well, I feel that we in the USA are in a world of hurt, and I’m not sure how or when we will recover from all the damage done. I don’t think the real damage has really hit most of us yet, but it’s coming. We have lost so many allies.
Reading good books – like yours – helps me to get through each day. I appreciate you and your work more than I can say.
I’m not a speaker-out of difficult truths even if I feel them deeply, but I greatly admire people who stand up for their beliefs.
Thank your for writing characters who do, Grace.
What popped into my head was owning up to mistakes and apologizing if necessary along with adjusting and correcting as needed. I was in a situation at work for awhile where I realized at some point that I was alone in my willingness to own my errors and apologize as needed. The correcting and adjusting was more prevalent but the owning responsibility when confronted was almost only me. I realized that it was part of the “corporate structure” to duck or deny responsibility when called on the carpet. Even though I realized I was kind of alone, I decided I would rather be me.
I’ve been my whole life under psychic attacks due precisely to what I could call “being the Lord Julian of my world”.
I remember being a girl and thinking that all the girls -and boys- had the same intention as myself, that was being the I that I was and that that was the main purpose of growing up: discovering oneself. The adults were, as I saw it, excluded from this “future” or potential by their own volition because all of them had that strange quality of being immersed in a fictional reality and pretending that the lies they were adhering to were truths. Granted,I had a clear perception of when somebody was lying or looking the other way but I have always been an introvert person, so I didn’t voice it very loudly. I simply got away from the main action.
So you can imagine that I was in for a gigantic disillusionment. That strange world of lies and pretending that the king is not naked was the R-E-A-L world and I had to get accustomed to it and to manage living in it at the best of my abilities.
The men and women that have given humanitiy the breakthroughs that have improved life on the planet at so many levels have always been, in their lifetimes, despised, ostracized, ridiculed and more by the sheeple. And instead of turning against them, they went on their studies, their investigations, their writings, finding support in the deep sense of Self that is the common trait in all of them.
Some years ago, when visiting New York, I saw this ad sticked on a cab door: “X – a patisserie – , the best of NY… Two thousand flies cannot be wrong!”
The truth makes people very uncomfortable. The past couple days, we’ve seen journalists lose jobs over speaking truth. (No wonder Lord Julian has problems)
It’s so disturbing, even horrifying, to see how many people are willing to participate in lies. But in what feels like a very dark time, I see regular demonstrations of courage and speaking out – ordinary people -whistleblowers of all stripes who are willing to say, “that’s not true, and I can’t go along with it anymore.” People who protest about being fired for false reasons (or none at all). People who show up to protest inhumane actions against their vulnerable neighbors. I join these protests sometimes, although not as often as I should. I’ve recently heard resistance compared to a chorus of singers – everyone needs to pause to take a breath, but as long as some people continue to sing, the song is clear and uninterrupted.
Lions are beasts of the wild. They can be kept nearby but only by an enclosure separating them from you once they are no longer a cute little cub. They definitely are not pets. Many people have mistakenly thought that and have suffered grave consequences.