As an experiment, I recently shared a 50-minute video of two ER physicians / immunologists who have been on the front lines battling COVID. They offered up loads of data demonstrating that, regardless of where you look in the world, COVID mortality rates are pretty much in line with the seasonal flu. Are the doctors right? Who knows? Time – and more data – will tell.
And while I found the doctors’ talk interesting – especially the part about billions of human immune systems being voluntarily shut down and scrubbed clean only to reemerge later this year extra-vulnerable not just to COVID but the flu and other invisible invaders – mostly I was curious about the response to my post. Experience told me that while many might comment, few if any would actually take the time to watch and any comments would be in keeping with existing beliefs.
That’s precisely what happened. The very same souls who have spent countless hours reading, watching, and listening to stories on COVID that marry up with their beliefs, refused to expose themselves to 50 minutes of a position that ran counter to their own.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the human species.
Me: The Common Denominator
My little social media experiment wasn’t entirely incidental. I’m doing work right now with a highly respected and experienced clinical psychologist who has spent the past decade providing leadership training and development to Fortune 500 leaders. One of his tools is a 360-degree assessment. For those unfamiliar, a 360 not only surveys the leader, it also takes into consideration the perspective of peers, bosses, subordinates, customers, you name it.
The reason why 360s and other peer review tools are effective is that others often know us much better than we know ourselves. Our peers experience us as we are out here in the real world while we are busy operating from an internal narrative that often doesn’t jibe with what’s actually happening. It’s why the muscle-bound man or the emaciated woman can gaze into a mirror and see ‘skinny/fat’ while the rest of us see body dysmorphia.
My client says he regularly has to stifle a chuckle when the results of the 360 assessment come back and the leader in question asks, “How could all these people be so wrong about me?”
Years ago, when my father’s third wife had given him the boot and he hadn’t yet stumbled onto wife #4 (who would be 40 years his junior), my dad asked, in all sincerity, “How do I keep getting involved with all these fucked-up women?” To which I blurted, “Dad, who is the common denominator in this picture?”
You and I are the common denominator to our lives.
And because so few of us question the cavalcade of thoughts materializing in consciousness, we treat them as gospel – the Gospel of Me. These ideas we hold about ourselves are sacred and woe to those who challenge them.
We use nifty little tools like Confirmation Bias to cherry-pick information that fits our picture of ourselves and our world. And even when the other guy has overwhelming evidence that shows just how out to lunch we are, we employ another tool known as The Backfire Effect to dig deeper into our beliefs.
Crazy, right? No. Human.
A Process of Unbecoming
Actually, it has nothing to do with being human. Just as Wei Wu Wei explained that “there’s no such thing as a dog,” there’s also no such thing as a human.
We weren’t born human – nor Christian, female, Democrat, homosexual, Slovakian, black – we were taught these things.
Since then we’ve spent our lives carrying around these labels and adding to them and defending them from the challenges or abuses of others. Just look at how we obsess endlessly about skin color, religious belief, nationality. None of these actually exist outside the human experience. And, again, the human experience is itself an invention.
Even in our quest for God or truth, we undertake the journey already burdened by our own baggage. Or as Wei Wu Wei put it:
Every time we happen on a statement or sentiment that fits in with our conditioned notions we adopt it, perhaps with enthusiasm, at the same time ignoring, as though they did not exist, the statements or sentiments which either we did not like or did not understand. And every time we re-read the Masters or the sutras we seize upon further chosen morsels, as our own jig-saw puzzle builds up within us, until we have a personal patchwork that corresponds with nothing on Earth that could matter in the least.
The question seems to boil down to this: do we burn through our lives reinforcing and defending stories that were never ours to begin with, or do we start to peel away the labels, to question the whole me thing, and beneath it all find the peace that for so long has eluded us?
For me, the slowest of learners, that question was at last answered when it became clear that my story – in fact, every human story I came across – was a source not of inner peace and contentment, but of angst, agitation, anxiety.
