The Vulnerable and Courageous Society
I recently read “Atlas of the Heart” by Brené Brown. It’s a good book for anyone looking to expand their emotional vocabulary and deepen the way they relate to others. Brown’s research has been a useful contribution to the academic community (and really anyone who happens to be a human being), and her insights around vulnerability have become world-famous. Those insights are what got my wheels turning today.
She defines vulnerability as “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure,” and tells us in essence that the level of a person’s willingness to open to their vulnerability correlates closely with the level of that person’s happiness in life. She teaches us that we can never get rid of vulnerability – we can either accept the uncertainty and risk in life and meet it with courage and an open heart, or we can close ourselves off, try to control all of things we’re afraid of, numb ourselves, and live severely limited lives.
The more we exhibit courage in the face of life’s uncertainty, the more alive we are. The less, the less.
Each individual person goes on their own journey of courage throughout life. They are faced with countless challenges, risks, fears, and opportunities through which they will build or diminish their courage. A person embarrasses herself displaying a recently learned talent in front of people she’s close with. She’s at a crossroads. She could decide that just because she failed, it doesn’t say anything about her essential self-worth, and that she may try again in the future because she enjoys practicing and sharing that particular skill. She could also decide that the experience was too painful, and she can’t afford to take that risk again, so she will never give herself the opportunity to share that talent with other people from now on. In doing so, she will close down a part of herself in order to avoid that vulnerability.
A person believes deep down (consciously or unconsciously) that he is not very worthy of belonging and love. In most of his endeavors, he can’t stand to make mistakes. Any time he messes up, his fragile sense of self-worth feels threatened. Perfectionism is an archetypal characteristic of a person who is not willing to be courageous in the face of vulnerability. He will spend inordinate amounts of time on his projects. He will delay sharing the products of his efforts over the most minute details. Of course, much of this is in vain, because no project or product will ever be “perfect” – there will always be some flaws, some unaddressed issues, and at least a few people will have feedback about how to improve it.
His hesitance in sharing his ideas and projects costs him in terms of the feedback he could have received. His perfectionism is stunting his growth and learning. His need to make everything as perfect as possible keeps him from sharing and diminishes the contributions he could be making. To the degree he behaves this way, he’s going through life hobbled emotionally and spiritually because of his unwillingness to accept and embrace vulnerability. In his need to control things so tightly, he is greatly limiting his life, and also depriving the world of the unique gifts he has to offer.
At the individual level, the healthy approach to vulnerability comes with understanding that our self-worth is not on the line. This may come through our connection with the Divine (however we understand it), or we may develop it in other ways. Brené Brown calls it “grounded confidence.” While there may be things we want to work on, we accept ourselves the way we are, including our imperfections. The healthy approach comes with the courage to keep exploring life, even though bad things might and probably will happen sooner or later, and we’ll certainly make plenty of mistakes. We stay open-hearted and courageous in the face of uncertainty and risk.
Here's the fascinating thing:
A society also exhibits its own degree of courageousness in its structure. It can either be more courageous or less courageous, and just as with the individual, this feature plays prominently into how happy of a place it is. The structure always follows necessarily from the deeply held beliefs of its people, particularly how they view human nature. The structure can represent a belief system grounded in honoring vulnerability - toward opening to the challenges of life, accepting imperfection, and learning to trust and believe in one another. The structure can also represent a belief system that is closed to vulnerability – toward being intolerant of any imperfection, mistrusting one another, and trying to control others in order to stop them from making mistakes. At the societal level, it’s all about how we face vulnerability together.
How can you tell what kind of society you’re in? The size and influence of a government in a society will tell you how courageous and open-hearted that society is. A society with a large, intrusive government is like a giant person with a massive self-esteem issue.
The government is the agency of coercion, of violence, force. We created it for the purpose of restraining and dissuading violence in our society - a good thing. However, when the government becomes involved in any area of human life outside of punishing violent criminals, you can be sure that we have abandoned trust, courage and open-heartedness in that area of life.
Healthcare. A good example. We look objectively and we see potential improvements: medicine seems too expensive for people with little money. It doesn’t seem like we’re advancing medical technology quickly enough. We don’t think enough people are going to work in healthcare. We don’t believe there are enough great leaders moving the field forward. Emergency room costs seem very high. As we identify these things, we have two basic paths.
First is to work peacefully and cooperatively to improve in the direction of our insights. Perhaps private individuals with plenty of money make charitable donations to hospitals in order to subsidize cheaper medicine for those less fortunate. Perhaps socially-minded people get together and organize peaceful demonstrations to drive change. Great minds who work in other fields may see the urgency of healthcare concerns and turn their minds toward inventing new solutions to solve those problems.
People may organize to boycott certain businesses, and run educational campaigns to raise awareness of the issues they see. We may be angry, even outraged at some of the problems we’re witnessing, yet these peaceful methods all have a common thread. They say: “We believe in ourselves and you. We believe that you can learn from your mistakes and do better, so step up your game.” They are courageous and openhearted ways of facing vulnerability together and bringing out the best in ourselves and one another.
The other path to working on these improvements is to get the government involved. What does it mean for the government to be involved in healthcare? For well over 100 years, the government has been deeply involved in healthcare, and its role is still expanding. Government involvement simply means that we are using violence to try to fix the issues we see. All government action is violence.
Perhaps a law is passed that certain medicine must be sold at a certain price. The owner of a business who violates this law will be thrown into a concrete and metal box, and told when they are allowed to eat and sleep. A law is decreed that no emergency room can turn away any person who needs emergency medical service. Any violator will have their property (their money and life energy) forcefully taken from them, and/or be incarcerated as described above. Or, the government forcefully expropriates the wealth of everyone through taxation and inflation, then uses it to set up a form of universal healthcare, thereby forcing this system on everyone.
All of these violent methods have a common thread. They say: “You are incapable of learning from your mistakes and growing. We cannot trust each other, and we must be forced to do the right thing.” Force is the decision to never give someone the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. It is the ultimate negation of goodwill and trust. It is the denial of the imperfections inherent in society.
You can apply this perspective to any other area where the government has become involved. It’s almost always around issues that we think are “too important” for people to face vulnerability on their own. It’s “too important” to let people go on the organic journey of learning from their mistakes and growing through time. Those are exactly the areas where we need courage and growth the most!!
A society that uses organized violence to solve its problems is like a giant person who cannot tolerate the idea of making any mistake, seeing any imperfection in themselves, or facing up to uncertainty and risk. As soon as we see a bad actor or identify a risk, we move to restrict that area of activity with force. We make a law to prevent what we see as bad.
The problem is that you cannot shut down the bad without shutting down the good. When you use the government, people are forced to do things one way. You might get one particular result that you aim at, but you kill growth, progress, and creativity. There are an infinite number of peaceful solutions to our problems, but force says “you will do it ONE way. According to our law. Creativity, learning and growth are not necessary.”
This comes from the totalitarian mindset that someone (in the government) has attained a perfect knowledge and knows everything there is to know about this and all problems. That, of course, is impossible. However, we are so afraid of the idea of trusting other people and the risk that comes with it, that we would rather pretend the bureaucrat is right, follow this totalitarian path, and use organized violence to restrict peoples’ behavior. We stop growth in the name of fear and control.
We’re just like that perfectionist guy. Because we can’t handle uncertainty, we hold ourselves back constantly out of fear that something might go wrong. Because of our pathological fear, we have to control things so tightly that we end up severely limiting the amount of technical innovation and economic development we experience. Also, every time we use violence, we are teaching people that we cannot face vulnerability together, and that it is not okay for our society to be imperfect. Our society is going through life hobbled economically and spiritually.
Many believe greed is too rampant and must be controlled by a constant influx of new laws. You cannot legislate away greed. Organized violence just stops people from doing what they would otherwise like to do. It doesn’t change anyone. And many greedy activities simply go underground in the face of laws. To work on eroding greed in our society, more individual freedom, more individual responsibility, and less laws are needed.
When government violence is removed, the market force of society can move in. People and businesses who take greedy actions and have an exploitative mindset toward their economic opportunities won’t go unpunished. They will win social alienation for their actions. Others will refuse to deal with them, blacklist them, give them the same bad deals and terms they are dishing out, and call out their underhanded plays for everyone to see.
Laws and violence diminish responsibility by taking away choice. You can only be responsible when you have a choice about how to act. And you can only learn to the degree that you’re responsible for the consequences of your choices. As more and more responsibility is restored, the market will act like the pressure of a black hole closing in around greedy actors; they will be crushed until they learn to modify their behavior.
Of course, this way is far more demanding than the path of government violence. It’s more demanding for everyone. It calls on all people to heighten their awareness of what’s going on around them, continue to learn, and to demand the best from their fellow humans. It calls on all of us to care more about the people around us, and to think more deeply about the kind of world we’re building. No doubt it’s harder and scarier – this is how we grow. No one ever grows without doing hard and scary things. Increasing individual freedom and taking responsibility is the way of courageously facing our collective vulnerability.
In the final analysis, it’s about developing a mindset and a culture that’s much deeper than any one particular issue. Problems will never go away. We solved the problems of humans 200 years ago. Now we have our own. And people 200 years from now will have theirs. Using government violence is an approach of short-term thinking and immediacy, driven by fear. It’s using blunt-force trauma to stamp out imperfection as if we can make all of life’s problems go away once and for all and live without any risk or uncertainty for the rest of time.
This is an inaccurate model of reality. The path is infinite. We will never reach a point in any area of life where we see no further potential improvements. That’s not how reality works. Reality is infinitely deep and mysterious – remember what Mrs. Brown said – you cannot get rid of vulnerability. You can only choose your approach to it, and it’s a matter of degree. The more we choose individual freedom, the more our society will learn and grow with courage in the face of vulnerability.