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“You-do-you” – the social weed-killer poisoning everyone

“You-do-you” – the social weed-killer poisoning everyone

Steve McAlpine

By Steve McAlpine (adapted by Alasdair Belling from ‘Social Weed Killer’ on the Delorean Philosophy podcast)

Beware the ‘Social Weed-killer’

30 per cent of all Australians live alone. There’s deep loneliness in our culture at the time we’re saying self-expression ad “you-do-you” is the path to authenticity.

Recently I sprayed all of my indoor plants with non-selective plant killer.

Now we have a lot of indoor plants, sometimes I think too many. They range from hardy ficus trees, thickened and gnarly after ten years of growth, through to delicate necklace trailers that look like they would keel over in a puff of wind.

Or a few squirts of weed killer.

I didn’t mean to do it. It wasn’t some act of vengeance towards my wife or a nihilistic decision made in the throes of self-loathing. It was a genuine mistake. It was in fact the opposite of what I was intending to do. I reached high into the laundry cabinet to grab the brown bottle of liquid feeder.

Which was sitting next to the other brown bottle of plant killer.

I congratulated myself on not getting any of the brown, fishy-smelling organic mixes on the white walls behind the plants – and come to think of it, the smell wasn’t too bad this time. I finished the plants, then stepped back and looked at the bottle.

Cue shock. Cue self-loathing. Cue a minor panic attack.

My wife Jill was sitting ten feet away in her office, working. I screamed silently, looking vainly for some non-toxic soil to throw on my head in penance.

My first thought was to feign surprise in five days’ time when everything started wilting. My second thought was telling Jill, via phone, after signing up for the witness relocation program. My third thought was to fess up and tell Jill right away.

I told Jill. She cried. She pointed out that the replacement value was somewhere in the vicinity of 2000 dollars.

I have to say though, she went too far. She anthropomorphised her favourite fiddle leaf tree to the point where I felt she was about to put out a dinner setting for it!

In her eyes, I had committed first-degree herbicide. I planned to plead guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Something had to be done – and soon, if we were to save the plants.

The irony though – what I thought was helping the plants flourish was exactly what would make them fade. What I assumed would make them grow, was going to make them wither.

Oh, the humanity! 

Now, what if we were to make the same mistake with something more important than plants? With us for example – or with our whole society?

What if the ideas or values we feed ourselves with, all designed to help us flourish and grow are actually making us fade and wither? What if, in our search to figure out how best to move forward, we’re taking a huge step backwards?

Can I suggest that’s exactly what we’re doing in our modern commitment to the “you do you” culture that our Western society is marinaded in?

The technical term is expressive individualism – the almost sacred right of every person to find out what aids their flourishing, even if doing so comes at the expense of other people.

It’s an ideal seemingly full of promise and personal growth, built on the philosophical assumptions of the past couple of hundred years, in which communities – particularly family and faith communities – are viewed as restrictive and damaging to individual flourishing.

French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously said that man was born free, but everywhere finds himself in chains. In other words, the things that wither us are those things imposed upon us by our society. Throw those chains off and you’ll grow to be the you that you were truly destined to be.

Now you may not be able to quote Rousseau, but no doubt you’ve sung along to a Disney number, in which you’re urged to follow your heart. High culture, low culture, pop culture, we’re marinaded in this idea, spraying this product into our social and spiritual ecosystem for some time now.

To deny it, or insist that we should out of any sense of duty, discipline or nobility, maintain relationships and remain within networks that we struggle with or that bear a high emotional cost, is viewed as less than authentic. And authenticity – the search for personal self-actualisation – is the proof that we are actually flourishing in our modern society

Now a caveat: This is not a restriction on breaking away from a truly toxic situation. But it is to say that you might want to look more closely at the bottle before you spray this social weedkiller too liberally.

Here’s what’s interesting. The evidence over the past forty years is that “project self”, i.e. the “you do you” individual program, is actually showing signs of withering us more than helping us thrive.

Simply put, the evidence is pointing in the other direction.

Loneliness is so endemic that the UK Parliament recently established a government department to deal with it. 

Robert Puttnam’s seminal 2000 work, ‘Bowling Alone’, was the first real take on what has now spread across the West. Puttnam noticed that men, rather than joining ten-pin bowling teams, were increasingly bowling alone (you guessed it). Even a trip to the bowling alley had become a single-person activity.  Puttnam asked the question: What’s going on in Western society?

The subtitle of Puttnam’s book is instructive: ‘The Collapse and Revival of American Community’The loss of community – be it religious, family, sports, civic, or other, has taken hold of not just America, but the broader West. 

I frequently work with churches, and the complaint is that church volunteerism has taken a dive.

I tell churches not to worry – or at least not to worry more than any other organisation out there, because volunteerism is at an all-time low across the board.

The pandemic didn’t help. If you weren’t part of what I call “a thick, rich community” going into it, then you won’t have been able to draw from the bank what you hadn’t put in.

During long lockdowns, we had to lean on things already established. And if they weren’t established, then we found to our cost that the chains we mostly found ourselves in were the isolating and atomising chains of what Rousseau claimed to be freedom.

I belong to a running club. Running can be a lonely sport – and indeed that’s one of the reasons I like it. I can get up at 5 am and run with the sound of my thoughts, my footsteps and my breathing. But Saturday runs are long runs, and they’re slower and with other people.

On one of those Saturday runs (after yet another lockdown had ended), one of my friends remarked that she and her husband had struggled with loneliness and isolation – and being 10 thousand miles from her family did not help!

And then she said something interesting, interesting at least for an Irish lapsed Catholic: “I kinda envy you people in the church because you’ve got people around you who will care for you in times like this.”

It made me realise I took that church community for granted a little bit. I just assumed everyone had communities like that: communities that helped feed you, move house, or visit you when you were sick.

I’ll never forget the day my dad died because it was the day we had to move from our house of nearly twenty years. A dozen men from church turned up that hot, tearful summer morning, cars and trailers in tow, and did everything for us. That one day is indelibly etched on my mind. I cried tears of grief and thankfulness all at the same time.

They did it all for the price of nothing. They did it because that’s what communities do for each other. Communities that are built on something more than the ‘me-project”.

Turns out we’re not just bowling alone. We’re living alone, travelling alone, having sex alone, grieving alone, and dying alone.  I’ll never forget the dementia-ridden men and women in my dad’s care facility who never saw a visitor in the five years my father was in there. 

The online world is promising a new type of community – a virtual one.  Immersive experiences that make you feel like you are right there. In actual fact, you’re sitting in your bedroom, alone. Mooted as a form of connectivity, we’re finding that technology can’t rise above our commitment to radical individualism.  But technology isn’t to blame for the loneliness epidemic, it’s simply shown it up on a high-speed connection and fast-tracking the problem.

Virtual Reality promises us a world – or worlds – in which we can be anything we wish to be. The biggest danger of these promising new worlds though? Sexual harassment, bullying and trolling. If all we’re getting is everyone being the unfettered expression of who they want to be – to the detriment of others- no wonder people want to be alone.

Puttnam does offer something more though. The subtitle of his book is about community revival too.

There’s hope for true flourishing – if we do some systemic root and branch work, and admit we might have grabbed the wrong bottle.

Perhaps the first green shoots will be bowling teams again. Or perhaps it will be community groups looking at new ways to do group housing at a time when individual dwellings are out of the reach of many young families. 

And what we call mediating institutions: those mini forms of self-government that sit between the individual and our actual governments. Attending to things like community groups, healthy and broad family networks, and volunteer organisations, these are the flora and fauna that spring from the soil of a healthy ecosystem.

Radical re-growth

So back to my plants.  What did I do? And how – if at all – are they going? I raced off to the local Bunnings Garden Centre and bought ten large bags of potting mix.  Then one by one, I stripped all the soil from every plant, washed them down carefully, and re-potted every last one of them.

And then waited. And waited. And so far, that systemic change seems to have worked! The shock of the new was almost as much of a shock as the poison, but radical root-and-branch reform seems to have been just what the doctor ordered. In fact, it was such a radical intervention, even the fiddle leaf tree looks a deeper green than ever. No withering so far.  Flourishing looks odds on.

And maybe that’s the solution to our social withering as well, some radical scrubbing, starting at a grassroots level. Minor acts of community kindness and involvement, eventually building into something that grows tall and strong over time.

Perhaps not opting out at the first sign of hardship will help, or avoiding tricky conversations the first time you run across someone and don’t agree with them. The tricky thing about community is that it can’t just be built upon a common goal, it must be built upon a common foundation: a conviction that being together is good and in and of itself.

Goals spring from community life, they don’t merely drive it, because when we’re doing things together, goals form that we would never have envisaged by ourselves. And for sure, it’s a risk, but the risks – and the actual outcomes of radical individualism – are not leading to the flourishing we’ve been promised.

From my own experience, being part of a church community based around the person of Jesus – who was the most authentic person ever to live – is critical.

Just the fact that Jesus said it was better – more self-profitable actually – to give rather than to receive, plus his observation that self-denial is the key to life – self-denial in the service of others – should give us pause for thought.

A community of other-person servers sounds like it offers the kind of social safety net many people in our increasingly isolated society are craving. And it’s got to come with dollops of forgiveness and patience.

Whatever it is, it’s probably time to check the label before you start spraying the plants. If we project this “you do you” strategy, we’re going to see a further withering of our social capital in the coming decades. It might be time to do some radical repair work and do our part to ensure we’re part of what we hope will be a flourishing community.

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