This
article is going to deal with what I perceive to be an important apparent
paradox in human nature. It is only by
having a rich deep subject self-awareness that one can follow through on and
keep one’s commitments to other people in the external world . I am using commitment in the widest sense of
the word. When you tell someone you will
call them back, that is a commitment. If
you are reviewing someone’s job application, there is an implicit commitment,
or at least there used to be, to inform the applicant not only if he is
accepted, but also if he is rejected.
And if a person is accepted for a job, both employee and employer have
implicit commitments to each other with regard to work goals and the work
situation in general. Ideally, when two
people get married, they have a commitment to stay together for life. Of course, things don’t always work out that
way. People also have implicit
commitments to their children and to their parents and to other members of
their family. And people have implicit
commitments to their communities and to their countries.
But
somehow today, people are becoming less able and less predisposed to keep their
commitments. People don’t return calls
as much, after they say they will.
People simply don’t follow through as much on the things they say they
will do for others. Employers almost
never send rejection letters to job applicants, leaving the applicants to
wonder much longer than they should as to whether or not they got the job. Once in a job, there is much less commitment
from both employer and employee.
Employers are much more likely to lay off workers, and workers are much
more likely to quit. And as for
marriage, we all know the divorce rate is much higher than it used to be. And families are more fragmented than
ever. And within our global community,
patriotism is out in a lot of places. So
is there a pattern here, or am I imagining things.
A
person can only make and keep commitments, if he can make and preserve
imprints. To do the latter, a person
needs a field of experience with organic surfaces. Those organic surfaces act as templates, so
that people can bond. In bonding, a
person is in a situation where he can make and preserve and receive imprints,
and, by extension, make and keep and accept commitments. In order to have contact with organic
surfaces, a person has to be living at that time in primary experience such
that he has direct sensory contact with his world. Screens whether from movie, television,
computer, tablet, or smartphone mediate contact with a person’s world. As has been pointed out in previous articles,
screens are vacuum environments filled with defined discrete digital stimuli
and totally void of organic, blendable continual stimuli. The latter are the fundamental components of
primary organic experience, components that create the foundation for bonding
and committing with other human beings.
When
one’s primary field of experience is screens, bonding with other humans is
impeded. One of the interesting traits
of mediated screen experience is that it is so easy for a person to disconnect
from the two-dimensional images of humans with which one is connecting. One can easily walk out of a movie theater,
if one doesn’t like a movie and connect with the characters. One can simply turn off a television program,
and, in so doing, turn off the people who are on it. One can refuse to send back a response to an
e-mail one has received, and one can delete the sender from one’s e-mail
address contacts and from Facebook and LinkedIn and any other social network on
which he is connected to the person. And
one can disconnect from a phone call or not answer a text message and delete
the person from his phone contacts. It
is so easy to cut off connection with a person in a screen experience.
But
I’d like to suggest here that all these disconnections, all these deletions,
have a profound connection to a person’s inner life. Because, when one is deleting so many figures
from an external screen, one is also deleting these figures from his mind,
configured as an internal screen. To be
able to delete easily, one must not have a mind that acts easily as an organic
surface capable of easily receiving organic imprints that are then
preserved. Today, the internalized
images of people are configured in a human mind as free-floating figures in the
experiential vacuum of a mental screen that is analogous to the physical
screens of consumer technology. Without
strong internalized emotional grounding to hold them in the mind, the figures
of people are easily disconnected and deleted.
And
by configuring the mind as a screen, one becomes ungrounded from oneself, one
becomes numb to oneself, one becomes disconnected from oneself. In making it easy to delete other people
within various contexts from one’s mind, one also makes it easy to delete
oneself. One develops a shallow
commitment to oneself, a shallow experience of oneself, a shallow awareness of
oneself.
It
is only by having a deep awareness of self, which involves an awareness of
one’s own needs for grounding as a human being, that one can extend this
awareness to the people around him and treat them as he would want to be
treated. But if one has become a robot
with a fragmented pixilated sense of self with little self fragments floating
around on the vacuum of an internalized screen, it becomes difficult to
recognize the humanity of others. And
also keep the ongoing big commitment of organic bonding to another person as
well as the smaller more specific commitments of doing specific tasks to which
one has obligated himself to another person.
But
we live at a time when people are living in the vacuum base of modern
technological environments and in the internalized vacuum of their minds as
reflections of their experience with their external environments. And as people are always on their televisions,
their smartphones, their computers or their MP3’s, they spend very little time
by themselves revitalizing themselves in reverie.
It
is when one is spending time by oneself in reverie that one becomes more deeply
immersed in subjective awareness. One experiences himself in all of his organic
coherence and in the midst of a lot of organic blendable continual stimuli. And when there is continuity of self, there
develops a blending between words and action, a continuity of a person’s
presentation in the external world. So
when a person becomes emotionally connected to another individual, a family, a
community or a country, he stays connected.
And
this is how a human society can function properly and perpetuate itself. Whether or not there is immortality after
death, there are the surrogate immortalities that come from the organic
imprints we leave directly and indirectly on other people – the memories we
leave with other people, all the things we have done that affect them, the
special imprints like planting a tree, having a baby, writing a book, creating
a company. And the way we are most
likely to leave positive imprints is through keeping the commitments that we
subjectively agree to make.
(c) 2014 Laurence Mesirow
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