The Gist 21: On Human Bondage

A weekly roundup from Gestalt Media

With interviews officially concluded for round one, this week has been about bringing this project to life. With our amazing DP Josh Lively, we’ve been hard at work (re: having so much fun) shooting the cut scenes for the interview portions of season 1. This is such an opportunity to let creativity have its way, and I think we’ve come up with some very interesting imagery that gives Self-Scare the kind of ambiance it needs to really shine. It’s going to be something special.

We’re also working on the representation and distribution angle, financials for the coming year, a publication partner, and so much more. The size of this project has defied all expectations, and I’m determined, excited, and honored to see it through. Everything else at Gestalt Media is in the background while we give Self-Scare: Why We Love Horror the attention it deserves. That in mind, let’s turn our attention to more current matters: Thanksgiving

Civil-Ware

Depicted in classrooms, television, and Hallmark movies as a memorial of the 1621 Harvest Celebration between the Wampanoag people and Plymouth settlers, while this is true, as far as that the event did occur, scholars have shown that it was largely forgotten. It was resurrected, as is often the case, by a journalist with an understanding of the social atmosphere of the time and the power of storytelling. That narrative, of peace and goodwill among peoples objectively different from one another, was a highly effective work of propaganda that might just heal the wounds of a fledgling nation.

Sarah Josepha Hale lobbied for the creation of a national Thanksgiving. Heather Cox Richardson has done a wonderful piece on this, so there’s no need to continue further on that line. I encourage you to read her work today and every day, for her contributions to our society in this political climate are immeasurable.

In short, the story of Thanksgiving deals not with the Plymouth Harvest, a moment of relief after a harsh winter in which, in order to secure a military alliance with the more powerful British, the Wampanoag provided guidance that prevented early settlers from dying as their crops failed in the harsh winter. Instead, it deals with a modern problem. The racist factions of the Southern States, driven by greed and arrogance that placed profit over people and self over shared humanity, had driven our country to the brink of destruction. Recognizing the precarious position our newly unified nation found itself in as old wounds refused to heal, Lincoln declared three days of Thanksgiving, first in Apr. 1862, then Aug. 1863, then Nov. of 1863. The final proclamation set Thanksgiving to be observed on the last Thursday in November, declared in October 1864. The feast we share today derives from this moment, when a country divided sought to find a way forward, using the tools mankind has implemented since time immemorial: Community and bonding.

Homosapiens and Homocide

We’ve discussed Robin Dunbar’s groundbreaking work on social groups. There is something buried deep in here about who we are fundamentally. We are social creatures, not by nature but by necessity. We have a universal need for connection based on a form of self-domestication that is unique to our species. Former Surgeon General to the United States Vivek H. Murthy says that loneliness appeared as the most frequent and debilitating co-morbidity beside alcohol use, drug abuse, obesity, and tobacco-related illness and death. That loneliness itself was the epidemic that was driving up the rates of death among patients across the US, while reports from other countries confirmed these findings. Our desire for community and relationships is not only a deeply felt urge, but “Human relationship is as essential to our well-being as food and water. Just as hunger and thirst are our body’s ways of telling us we need to eat and drink, loneliness is the natural signal that reminds us when we need to connect with other people.”

But why?

That’s a deep question, but one reason is the desire for survival. Humans, early humans that first separated from other near-human species, understood the benefits of communities to protect against outside threats, but we discovered something else along the way: social groups protected our mental states as well. They kept us grounded, reinforced positive behaviors, and provided support during times of trauma. Was this a coincidence, a consequence of social grouping’s effect on our brain structure, an inescapable truth built into our DNA and expressed through generational genetic mutations? We’ll deal with that later, but for now…the truth is humans need each other. The other fact is that we really, really don’t like that. As we sit around the dinner table today, communing with our families or chosen families or a single loved one, we’ll be familiar with the concept of exactly how much stress other humans cause. And if we’re alone, we can easily understand what role community plays in our sense of self and well-being.

We Could Be Heroes

It’s too in-depth for this article, but bonding relies on a shared experience. Shared ideas and agreement on those ideas, emotions, or concepts provide the glue that keeps us from killing each other. These are core tenets of community. It creates a safety in “Us vs Them”. Our community is stronger than the danger of the world and whatever ‘others’ there may be. Those same chemical reactions that release oxytocin and serotonin, and the ever-elusive dopamine, ease tension within those social groups. They signal our brain to stop, put down the carving knife…you would miss this person if they were gone. A huge problem there is that we are also a narrative species. We tell ourselves stories in which we are the main character and the hero of our own journey. These narratives, built on the same bonding techniques of song, speech, and sharing ‘truths’, build up what becomes our internal worldview. Without it, we lack direction, purpose, and meaning. Things that humans crave. So what happens when someone else’s narrative concludes a personal moral that places them as a hero in a tale that we view as antithetical to our own? In simple terms, what if someone else’s worldview doesn’t match our own? What if it’s threatening or derogatory to ours? What happens when we see an enemy or an existential threat across the table?

Dunbar’s research reveals the level of stress that humans can endure, lacking a measure to mitigate it, before we begin to literally kill each other as a recourse. We kinda hate being around other people unless there is a strong social bonding experience to temper those urges. Sports, romantic love, shared interests, all are big sources of this bonding, but one of the strongest…is food.

Eat Your Heart Out

As a culture, humans have been traditionally combative, but one of the things we very early agreed upon was…food. It’s kind of a big deal. The entire origin of language, standing erect, facial expressions, and hand gestures, all of it has strong roots in the desire to attain and consume food. It’s a core human need. As hunters, we are very effective. The evolution from prey to predator is nothing short of prodigious and the subject of countless works. But attaining food is also very difficult and consumes a massive amount of resources. Humans are persistent hunters (tracking prey and wearing it down - much like your cousin who corners you and talks about crypto and AI for HOURS on end). It’s an exhausting practice. A solo persistence hunter is, evolutionarily speaking, not very effective. It’s much smarter to group together and share the bounty of larger, slower animals than it is to chase smaller, faster ones. This instinct, cooperation for the common good, is the very BEDROCK of human social structure, and it drives nearly all of our advanced evolutionary traits. We are hard-wired to work together, even though we hate it, and that wiring is the result of (among other things) our desire for food. Around the fire/table/etc. We are equals, each sharing in our collective efforts to sustain our collective survival. All of our learned behaviors? Storytelling, singing, religion, morality, and ethics? They serve the purpose of keeping us alive in a world where it just makes more sense to work together.

Steve is an asshole, and his perspective on human rights is abhorrent. In less civilized times, he would have been murdered and his corpse tossed outside the camp to prevent attracting wolves. Because Steve’s views are detrimental to the well-being of the community. And the community sustains us, it protects us. But we can’t kill Steve, even though we kinda want to, because homicide, turns out, is also detrimental to the community. So we ostracize Steve. We exclude him from our daily activities, and we punish him in the way humans have learned, democratically. The dominant social belief in human cultures becomes the law of the group. It is free from objectivity and moral absolutism. Whatever the group holds true, becomes true. This is particularly distressing when large groups begin to rise with counterintuitive ideals that threaten the communal well-being. It conflicts with our social order of preserving the community above all and embracing family units, because bonding is essential. This splintering of ideals is particularly triggering to the human homicide reflex, so that urge to stab Steve with a salad fork is completely natural.

Communal Living

This is a rather long-winded way of saying that Thanksgiving and other meal-centered bonding rituals are our species’ way of correcting the natural urges that live inside us. It is our method of reinforcing the bonds that keep us safe and of battling the crippling effects that a lack of socializing can have on our physical and mental health. But it is not without its hurdles. We are not social because we want to be. We’re social because we need each other. And we’re all trying to learn how to deal with that. So, during this time, I hope everyone can find a tribe that aligns with their personal narrative, reinforces their sense of well-being, and encourages bonding with our fellow humans, whom we rely on for our survival. As for cousin Steve, we can’t strangle him with the turkey truss, but we can remember that the community is what matters, and what we do to protect the well-being of other humans is the most important thing of all.

“One of the marvelous things about community is that it enables us to welcome and help one another in ways we couldn’t otherwise.” —Jean Vanier