A series of recent life challenges and my reaction to them has had me thinking about the mechanisms we employ consciously and too often in emotional reaction to circumstances that frustrate, anger, or annoy us. Note that I did not say, are outside our control. Among the many lies we are guilty of telling ourselves that has to be the biggest whopper. We should know by now that nothing is ever entirely within our control, and what we actually need to control is always within our power, how we react.
Scientists have made enormous strides in understanding how our brains function, which regions control which functions, what parts of that organ are associated with everything from eating to sleep to cognition but we are still far from understanding our minds. Not only do we have a very limited understanding of consciousness, our grasp of emotional response is mired in a murky soup of assertions about affect. As an aside, this is the primary reason I find psycho-social rationalizations about group behavior so suspect. Worse, by the time such observations are abstracted to the level of the average individual they are reduced to caricatures or polemics.
Getting to the root of how and why we behave or if you prefer, react the way we do is a worthy endeavor but I am fairly certain we’ll find it rather useless if we continue to insist on only analyzing large groups of people for insight. If we have learned nothing else it should be clear that most of us, most of the time, are not acting out of deeply held convictions or carefully considered plans much less logic and reason. Rather, we are reacting—that is replaying a learned behavior out of prior experience that has become ingrained through unconscious repetition. When we use the term mob behavior for example, we tend to think of sudden, often violent action by a group of angry people. But in truth mob behavior almost always governs any large group action, it is nothing more or less than group reaction that has not been consciously processed, but triggered by someone or something for whatever purpose they may intend.
Let’s look at the January 6th Insurrection of this year. I have no doubt that some, but likely a relatively smaller number of those who were caught up that day came with premeditated intent to overthrow the government, much less to threaten the lives of members of Congress. I am not in any way exonerating anyone—being there in the first place was exceedingly bad judgement, following the biddings of a sociopathic narcissist even worse, and we are all accountable for our actions, especially when others are urging us to say or do something that on some level we know we should not. That we can so easily find ourselves caught up in a group reaction that we surrender our individual judgement, literally stop thinking and immerse ourselves in the emotion of a crowd is not only possible but at some point in almost everyone’s life is likely to have happened. Fortunately, the outcomes are generally non-violent, and something we hope to have learned to avoid by the time we become adults.
There seems little doubt that those who were assembled at Capitol Hill that day harbored varying degrees of free-floating angst, and emotional immaturity. No one can know the precise reason each and every person gathered there felt as they did, but when people are unhappy or angry it takes very little to urge them on without regard for the consequences. And nothing makes us less happy and more angry than political and religious differences.
Continuing to talk about and characterize those who are sympathetic to the Insurrectionists falls into the trap I spoke about earlier. There is no them—no real group think however much we may try to place everyone who wears a red MAGA hat, a Q Anon badge or for that matter Antifa Tee shirt into some politically invented, media characterized bucket. Only at the individual level do we have any hope of understanding what prompts someone to feel as they do and act as they have.
What filters govern our initial reactions to a given event, what sets us up for reaction? Some triggers are fairly easy to recognize: fear, self-preservation, frustration and so on. Others are less immediately obvious: our need for recognition and approbation, a desire to belong, an unwillingness to accept responsibility or blame. These are just a few examples of the more complex feelings and thoughts we experience everyday. Whether we internalize these feelings guaranteeing they will control our future reactions is entirely governed by two factors: conscious analysis and instilled principles.
If, as maturing beings we are prompted to withhold reaction until we have assessed and come to terms with our underlying feelings and their causes we are fortunate indeed and unusually mature. Be that as it may, we generally inherit our behavioral response from our caregivers and we are highly malleable creatures. Few parents are so well adjusted themselves that they are able to instill in us the discipline to defer judgement. More commonly we have inherited a set of rules—I will call them principles for behavior from influential characters in our life, be they our caregivers or other mentors. This, it should be said is why character is so terribly important in anyone vested with leadership responsibility.
It is tempting to describe these principles as morality, the golden rules, or some other such rubric but that runs the risk of over-simplification. Indeed, we may learn bigotry, hatred, and a host of equally dysfunctional principles from influencers and morality is simply not universal. It’s been my experience that regardless of political or religious persuasion most people can describe some set of principles to which they ascribe, and it is on this common ground that any chance of meaningful dialog might be found. When any conversation is abstracted to motive, assertions about how others think or what they believe, sharp divisions will appear. Such dialog departs from the realm of the known into conjecture and projection--playing out internal bias rather than dealing with a present reality.
I don’t know whether it is possible for us to step back from the hairspring present, whether we can move beyond reaction. But I do believe we must continue to strive for it in our own lives and our interactions with others. More I hope that we can take greater responsibility for instilling in our children a more conscious intent, a willingness to suspend judgement and to refrain from reaction so that we can begin again to see ourselves and others as the oh so frail humans we are.
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