being good // following // looking to the past

Hope you don’t mind a screenshot

So that post I wrote yesterday that I didn’t like enough to publish — it was about leadership, and how we need it more than ever yet resist it more than ever, perhaps because what leaders do is coerce cooperation, a tough gig when ‘following’ threatens our dignity in this individualist paradigm.

Any attempt to coordinate vision can smell like manipulation, condescension, corruption — and, I’m not exempting myself; I tend toward cynicism, too — anyway, I stand by the observation but it didn’t feel ready to share.

Then today I was reflecting on the hypnosis session I received this weekend, how my unconscious told me that my path to shedding self-sabotage is to fully embrace a feeling I’ve been fighting because it seems antisocial. I won’t get into those details here (too much juice!! we’d all drown!!), but it brought up something I believe relates to our crisis of leadership ::: that in my lifetime, morality has basically inverted.

Being good / responsible used to mean, you put the tribe before yourself. Now we say we owe it to ourselves to put ourselves first, and that’s what’s best for everyone.

There’s even an iconic clip of the original Oprah Winfrey Show, where she has a guest insisting moms put themselves first in order to pour from a full cup, and the studio audience full-on revolts. I think that was from the early ‘90s, and while it was certainly not the beginning of the me-first zeitgeist (especially if we take a broad view of feminist or democratic history), it may have been the pop culture tipping point.

I do struggle with this.

I’m not sure if it’s my nature (I had a self-sacrificing disposition in my family of origin since my earliest memories), my nurture (being raised as a Mormon I was taught to center service, and especially as a female the only option to flex was to have the fewest needs), or if I just err toward centering the tribe because that’s what feels safest for my own self-interest.

And then, there are movements — movements I’ve found very compelling — that try to find balance between these mindsets. Yet I notice that overall, if only aesthetically, they seem to want to roll back time to an idealized past. A back-to-the-land logic that can border on toxic nostalgia. And hey, I’d be making a fool of myself if I couldn’t admit that Hybrasil House & basically everything I do is rooted in that energy. I do believe we’ve strayed too far from the communal accountability and ‘honest work’ that simpler living insists upon.

But, today as I was sorting through which books I want to keep for our library and which I’m willing to put out for our yard sale, I wondered if maybe I need to surrender to the era I’m actually in.

Individualism … it may be icky, but it’s what we’re doing.

And anyone who knows my past — in particular my very public romp through polyamorous advocacy — might snort at that, as I seem long since fully ‘in’ on doing whatever tf I want, society be damned. But actually, even that exploration of alternative family structures was itself an attempt to facilitate deeper investment & minimal stress among isolated households. In other words, to rekindle the village.

So, I realize I’m getting a bit in my head here (which is rarely helpful yet oh so inevitable, especially whilst blogging), but I do wonder if my hardcore resistance to a worldview I perceive as antisocial, is itself antisocial, given that this is now the dominant worldview.

Where do we go from here?

It’s possible we’re between worlds, between ways of being — sure feels like it — meaning we won’t be going backwards like the eco-utopian Neo-pagan prophets proclaim, but we are also at the limit of what this era can accomplish.

Maybe it’s time for being what I see as hearth-centric, which centers neither the personal ego nor the generic masses, but the household itself. Defining family not by bloodline but by who shares air under a roof, who makes meals together, who toils beside each other to maintain that specific swatch of time-space.

A really microcosmic unit of village, as the new standard of “self”.