How Modern Culture Drowns Out Psychology's Important Message

It's a typical Saturday afternoon in the winter of 1974 and my mother, my younger sister and I are wandering the halls of our town's large shopping mall when, seemingly out of nowhere, a classmate from my second-grade class appears. Danny greets me with a warm smile. He shares, "There's this great place in the mall where all the kids go to play. Wanna go with me?"

I feel a joy welling up inside me and look up at my mom with eyes lit by excitement. She gives me a nod, her non-verbal consent, and I excitedly skip through the walkways with Danny, all the while imagining our final destination: A large room filled with children jumping together in ball pits, running and chasing one another, each alive with vitality. But…

When we arrive at our destination, there are instead six pinball machines lining the walls of a narrow arcade. Danny walks over to one of them, puts his quarter in the coin slot, and loses himself in a world of bumpers and targets. He instructs me to find my own pinball machine and do the same.

Here we are, standing side by side but not together, each attempting to earn our own individual high score, a foreshadowing of our upcoming lives in a marketplace culture…

Born for a Village: Humanity as a Relational Construct

For most of humanity's two hundred-thousand-year history on this planet, we were born in a village setting. Anthropologists tell us that, arriving as children into our villages, we were welcomed into the world by adoring eyes and cradled by eager hands. With a chorus of voices, we were guided through the turbulent waters of adolescence. Throughout adulthood, we were taught to engage with one another in the sacred work of connecting with and renewing our planet. (Graeber & Wengrow, 2021)

At the heart of each of these ancient villages, villages that slowly, organically spread across the earth, was an ability to offer the security found in each other's arms. It was the safe haven villagers knew they could turn to, welcomed and comforted, whenever they were frightened, wounded or in danger. It was the secure base villagers felt confident boldly venturing out from, to experience themselves and their world with a sense of vitality and wonder. These were special sorts of places where secure attachments served as jumping off points to experiencing aliveness.

In these ancestral places, members discovered their value through the simplest of acts: They witnessed it in the soothing, intimate gazes of everyone around them. Feeling their own worth and welcome in the world, these villagers lived with the ease that came from knowing they, along with everyone around them, belonged inside the circle of life.

Anthropologists and psychologists alike explain that, because human life began and developed in these villages, we have evolved to experience ourselves as fully human in relationally intimate settings. (Cozolino, 2006)

In other words, humanity has become a relational construct: From the moment we exit our mother's womb, we are ready for an emotional and physical connection to literally awaken us to life. "Our need to be connected doesn't end in infancy," psychologists explain. "It doesn't end in childhood. It will go on and on for the duration of our lives. We will always long for a closeness and an intimacy with each other." (Erskine & Trautmann, 1996)

Beginning in the 1980s, when advancements in neuro-imaging allowed the subfield of neuropsychology to mature, psychologists further explained we are born with neural networks uniquely designed to support and nurture connections with one another. Our brains have been exquisitely shaped over our evolutionary history to want, above all else, an ongoing, intimate exchange with the people around us. We are, quite literally, hard wired for each other. (Siegel, 2003)

We are born for life in a village setting. But…

A Marketplace on a Mission: Life as an Individual Construct

Over the course of the past few thousand years, these villages that had endured almost all of our two hundred thousand year history began to vanish. Some went quietly, most were destroyed violently. Today, they sit on the brink of extinction.

What greets you and I upon our arrival into this world is no longer a village, but rather a monoculture that has quickly spread across the planet like soft butter on hot toast. It is our modern marketplace culture.

This is a culture on a singular mission. It spends one trillion dollars a year on advertising, shouting out just one story. (Jhally, 2017)

This is a story shared so persistently that it has proven itself capable of drowning out what anthropologists and psychologists are telling us. The culture's story undercuts their heartfelt insight that humanity is a relational construct.

Our consumer culture insists we live, instead, by a rigidly individualistic construct. It tells the story where the real heroes are the individual producers/consumers. These everyday heroes don't seek out "transient" safety in the arms of others, but instead "bravely" venture out into the world and make their own security by growing their own private success stories and hoarding the belongings these successes create for them. These modern heroes don't find safety in a "fragile" intimacy born of vulnerability and trust with fellow human beings, but instead "boldly" construct their own safety through the acquisition and expansion of power, property and prestige. This is a dangerous script because it encourages us to sacrifice our genuine longings for relationship at the altar of individual triumph.

Equally damaging is the simple fact that our culture's story begins by telling us heroes aren't bestowed with innate value (a value that can be reflected back to them in the loving eyes of those around them). Instead, cultural heroes go out into the world and prove they are worthy, not once but over and over again. They prove it each day by repeating their mantra of "I will conquer my tasks today." They demonstrate it each month by earning more by themselves and spending more on themselves.

A Dangerous Razor's Edge: Returning Home from the Brink

This cultural push for individual worth and collective value measured by unrestrained growth has us all teetering on a perilous razor's edge. In the words of a familiar proverb, the "chickens" of expansion are coming home to roost, and we are now confronted with the monumental challenges of mass deforestation, loss of biodiversity, ecosystem collapse, excessive waste and carbon emission, and the existential threat of global warming.

Our cultural narrative's lack of balance between personal ambition and collective responsibility has also taken us all into the pits of inequitable wealth distribution. We live in a world suffering persistent poverty, where impoverished regions and populations across the globe bear the brunt of growing resource scarcity of water, food, and living space.

Making matters worse, as we get caught up in a cultural narrative insisting we succeed on our own, we live more and more of our lives alone. We have arrived today in a world collectively languishing in a loneliness epidemic. And we're exhausted. Because it's exhausting keeping up with individual work lives, individual home lives, and individual everything lives.

At last, we find ourselves unable to escape a felt sense that this is not the world we are meant to live in, that we are born for something better. Because, as anthropologists and psychologists have been broadcasting for over a century now, we are.

This ongoing column is founded on the premise that we can (and will) find our way out of a cultural narrative that has left us all in the dark of isolation. We can find our way back, you and I, into the warm glow of mutuality, reclaiming a modern version of the villages long ago lost, building the world we were born for. We will find our way home together…