The Gist 33: Breaking the Social Contract pt. 3

Where Do We Go From Here?

Today, we’re going to approach the final section of this series on social groups and societal collapse. We’ll talk about healing the wounds of a damaged culture, and we’ll look at how our narrative traditions have shown us the way out of this over and over again.

Shared Purpose

I’m not going to drag this out. Let’s just get to the point. A societal fracture is caused by groups that, having grown too large to support a legitimate social bond, begin to microorganize into clannish organizations that provide a more personal connection. These groups very often will have vastly different moral and ethical codes, causing conflict in the greater community. This is a well-researched and perhaps slightly scientific-sounding truth.

To put it simply: In a world full of millions of other people, it’s very, very easy to feel alone. We battle that feeling by finding smaller groups we can feel important/valuable/loved in. When those micro groups reinforce behavior that the greater community would ostracize, this adhesion to splinter groups can become extremely dangerous to the individual and the greater community alike.

Reframe

So what does that mean for moving forward? Perhaps counterintuitively, the answer to splintered purpose is to provide a localized, unifying purpose. I will provide an anecdotal story to highlight this.

I live in one of the communities hardest hit by Hurricane Helene in 2024. For three days following the impact, we were completely cut off from the rest of the world. Our local officials were woefully unprepared, incompetent, and absorbed in partisanship (because they weren’t isolated - this is important). No one knew if help was coming, if it was coming, when…or even what it might look like. Our bridge was destroyed. We were literally an island left to ourselves for the immediate future. So what happened? Human nature. This isn’t a feel-good story. Several people died. Some homes were looted, and this is important because there is no one answer that solves our human nature; it’s an approach and mindset. However, for the vast majority of our neighbors, survival was the story at hand, and the grudges we carried got put to the side.

There was a long-standing grudge in my neighborhood for wrongs that occurred decades ago. It drove a wedge between the new residents who moved in and us. The storm forced us into a place where we had to communicate in order to coordinate survival efforts. It revealed something critical; We had erected walls based on property lines, and no one was willing to cross them in the name of human decency. What we ended up with was six new friends and an understanding that it was really only one person who had started this entire silent feud. One person’s greed had separated an entire neighborhood for decades.

In the rest of the community? There was a strong distrust and growing hatred based on political lines. There is an enormous church at the end of the road that had defiantly refused COVID restrictions; there were staunch conservatives, religious reclusives who rejected everyone, and progressive leftists who railed against both ideologies. We did not forget these ideas. That’s critical. We remembered who we were looking at, then we said, “How can I help?” I see you, I know who you are. I know that in another situation you might want to see me dead, but in this moment…right now…we have a shared goal, and we’re going to focus on that.

That church? It did nothing to help anyone. The doors stayed locked. The politicians who weren’t stranded heralded the preacher of that church as a hero…one who abandoned his flock during a crisis.

Neighbors from the other side of the destroyed bridge came down in droves, a swift water team from NY brought rafts and ferried people across, ATVs lined up one by one to drive people, sometimes through fields and over rubble to town to try and reach loved ones or go to shelters. For a moment, we just forgot everything else and saw each other as humans in an emergency. Did it change hearts? Once the crisis ended, people went back to who they were. Our county voted red a month after the storm, largely on the belief that it was their political party that had provided for them, despite evidence to the contrary. That belief is hard to shake. But recently, two years later, one of those neighbors. One who had been the most pivotal in helping everyone else came to a friend of mine, an extremely progressive political personality in this area, and said: “Don’t tell anyone, but I think my politics are changing…”

"So, let us not be blind to our differences—but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal." - John F. Kennedy

I said it wasn’t a feel-good story, but at its heart, there is the difficult answer that should give us all hope. Where does it begin once we’ve gotten this far? We have to find a commonality. We have to find a point of shared humanity that can begin the de-escalation process. People don’t change overnight, and some won’t. They just won’t, but the vast majority of people who have been attracted to micro groups that shun and even seek harm on the greater community need an off-ramp back into shared responsibility and cooperation. Which brings us to the second part of the scenario…

Horders

I spoke to friends of George Romero and asked if he had intended the shambling hordes of zombies to represent a shared ideology from the perspective of a person not within that cultish mindset. If these friends are to be believed, not in the first film beyond rampant consumerism but by the second, Romero had understood that you had to destroy the brain because that’s where the idea lives, and it was the idea, the infectiousness of the idea that was dangerous.

Looking at the national level, it can seem impossible to tackle a problem as big as brewing civil war that has taken over our headlines, but the solution doesn’t exist at the national level; it is the exact opposite. It seems impossible to resist the horde. In our survival stories, The Walking Dead, Dawn of the Dead, World War Z, Warm Bodies, Shaun of the Dead, in every single story, we see a failure of governments to protect the people. These stories seem absolutely determined to remind us that survival occurs on a localized level. It emerges from a return to shared ownership of the tribe’s best interests. It’s our instinct to return to the small when the global community has gotten out of hand. How is this different from tribalism? The group is always constructed of members who previously could not co-exist, united by the singular goal of resisting this social virus that destroyed their world. It’s about resetting our personal understanding of taking an active role in our communal survival.

"If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner." - Nelson Mandela

We must, if we hope to repair this rift, start and focus locally. Our communities need us. We have direct personal connections with our neighbors, and we have the most influence in our local communities. The work is not easy. Most of the time, it will look like we’re doing nothing in comparison to the wave of awful that comes from the outside, but our efforts are watered down at that level. It requires everyone to focus on where their influence is most strongly felt and carries the most weight. For most of us, that’s local. What it looks like depends on the strengths of the individual. Some are organizers, some are storytellers, some are hard workers, some are philosophers, and each one plays a role.

We’ve Been Here Before

This is a small space to unpack a large and complicated conversation, but I think we can see over and over that this concept of localized resistance and the gradual erosion of hostilities has been passed down in our narratives for generations. I think two films show angles at this that are interesting. The Mist & The Thing.

The Mist shows us tribalism in the most precise possible way. The religious, dominant-focused force and the socially focused, human-centered approach. In the middle are countless people pulled between these forces. It highlights how some will never choose community. Some people will not rejoin once they’ve been given the option to reject social cooperation for condemnation and righteousness. But time and time again, people who don’t like each other, people with direct grudges and opposing viewpoints, were able to put aside those rifts, temporarily, and work together on micro goals. Horror is a worst-case scenario machine, so this goes horribly, horribly bad when people abandon this teamwork concept, but the seed is there. The warning in that collapse is the point.

The Thing shows us what happens when we don’t work together. Again, horror’s role is to show us what not to do, and by that example, few stories drive home what happens when a social group turns on itself, refusing trust and choosing isolationism. Again, the parasite can easily be framed as an ideology, something that makes a person somehow no longer a ‘person’. Someone outside of the social group, and when that invisible difference is potentially fatal to the social order, it can quickly destabilize and ultimately destroy society altogether, including the infected person.

"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This concept, as I’ve said, is very difficult to write about in such a small space, but the gist comes down to this: We repair the rifts in our society by establishing a new, highly localized common bond. It will not be easy. As a trans person, I am extremely aware that interacting with some people in my community could result in my death, and I choose my interactions based on common sense towards safety and the effect of my actions. Some fights are not mine; they belong to people better positioned and better adapted to that interaction. But some are. I can choose my places to work in my local community and begin to focus on turning hearts back to our shared humanity. Sometimes that’s nothing more than being seen in public, being a positive, helpful presence where it’s safe to do so. Some days I don’t have it in me. I just don’t, and that’s ok. Some people will refuse, even get angry at the idea of letting go of that hate; it defines them, it reassures them, but wounds begin and fester on a highly personalized level, and they must be healed there as well. All of our current science shows that this polarization is a direct result of the loss of the common bond we feel in an increasingly digitally connected world. Those same studies show the only way to repair that is to reinforce the bond, reestablish community, and provide an alternative to the reclusive, isolated micro-groups that have flourished in its presence. We need to create a new micro-group, a local community that is welcoming and community-focused, that reprograms the fear-based rhetoric of the hate groups.

“If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them... But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.” (Luke 6:32, 35) - Jesus of Nazareth

The Gist:

We have to begin doing the opposite of what got us here. We have to seek commonality and commit ourselves to the difficult task of slowly repairing the wounds that have driven us apart.

Next week: We’ll be showing the first five minutes of the Self-Scare documentary. I’m so excited to share this with everyone!

“Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased. This is a law eternal.” (Dhammapada). - The Buddha