Systematizing and Losing Humanity

M. Scott Peck, in his book The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace discusses the stages of community as being 1) Pseudocommunity 2) Chaos 3) Emptiness and 4) Community. The transition from Pseudocommunity to Chaos is inevitable whenever differences begin to arise in the community. He says that one of the common problems that emerges from Chaos is the suggestion from some to fix the community's disagreements by retreating into organization.

"It is true that organizing is a solution to chaos. Indeed, that is the primary reason for organization: to minimize chaos. The trouble is, however, that organization and community are also incompatible. Committees and chairpeople do not a community make. I am not implying that it is impossible...[for] some organization to have a degree of community within itself. I am not an anarchist. But an organization is able to nurture a measure of community within itself only to the extent that it is willing to risk or tolerate a certain lack of structure." The Different Drum, page 93.

Although I believe I must metaphorize Peck's analysis to make it fit into the subject of my thoughts today, I think in a certain sense individual's function in something of their own intrapersonal community. We go along through life, in its various aspects, content pretending that our methods work, in spite of not having given much thought to them, until at some point an event occurs in our lives when we sit up and realize that we have been thrown, usually involuntarily, into a state of chaos. Oftentimes, in response to this chaos, our immediate reaction is to begin creating systems, and blacks and whites. We think that if we implement policies, we can escape from the chaos and prevent the mistakes that took us there.

The problem with this approach (and I know, because I am a fanatic for systems and love to architect complex systems with an almost infinite number of conditional statements to trigger particular reactions, solving for every permutation, iteration, and contingency) is that if these systems involve people, then we have depersonalized, and consequentially, dehumanized everybody involved, including ourselves.

I have recently been particularly proud of myself for deciding to create a rather elaborate and robust system for staving off mistakes I have recently made, and the consequences of which I have recently endured, and almost as soon as the system was implemented, I was forced to come to the stark and horrifying realization that the system had a tremendous flaw: it was dehumanizing. I think at a subconscious level, I had bargained with myself to be satisfied with a distinction between depersonalization and dehumanization, where in fact it was a distinction without a difference. This came crashing down on me today, as I realized that in my effort to thrust myself into one of life's most treacherous endeavors, where one risks most the possibility of experiencing pain, that in an effort to avoid such pain, I had compromised my humanity and the humanity of other people, objectifying them as mere cogs in what I had previously thought was my ingenious and almost fool-proof system. The only fool was myself.

The system I had conjured was an overcorrection for past mistakes. I'm sure others will share similar recollections of early teenage driving lessons: I would be driving along, and get a little too far to the ditch and would jerk the steering wheel to the left, startling everybody riding with me, and most likely the oncoming traffic. Quite frequently the overcorrection is worse than the original error itself. It is not, however, a lesson against correction, merely the exaggerated form of it, and for those of you who know me most intimately, you will know that my penchant, in times of error, is toward overcorrection.

I had to do a gut check today, because I have struggled for so long against the natural inclination of humans to objectify other humans, and I realized I was doing it again. Perhaps worst of all, I was not even doing it out of flippancy or lack of care; rather, I was doing it with a certain sort of subconscious intentionality with the purpose of avoiding pain. Pain avoidance is not the goal or the purpose of life. Nay, I believe it is impossible to truly live without experiencing pain, and it is most certainly impossible to grow. But how unfair was it of me to project my potential pain onto others as actual, present pain, simply to eliminate the risk that I might have to experience it myself?

It just shows that as soon as I think I've made a lot of progress, I realize that I, like everybody else in this world, still have a lot of growing up to do.