“The world will ask you who you are,
and if you don't know, the world will tell you.”

Carl Jung

A friend who served in the Peace Corps in Nepal in the 1960s once told me a wonderful story about taking a Nepalese village chief, who’d come to visit my friend in the U.S., on his first-ever ride in an elevator. It was in a multi-level department store, and as the elevator rose it stopped at each floor to reveal the various items on display. 

During the ride my friend noticed that every time the elevator doors opened, the chief would look out in wide-eyed amazement. It turned out the chief hadn’t realized the elevator was moving – he just saw the doors close and open, and every time they did, a new world emerged. He thought it was magic. 

That story made me think about our early human ancestors, the first to navigate life on the other side of the newly-opened door of self-reflective thought. I tried to imagine the impact of that massive disruption to the human psyche, as patterns laid down by eons of biological evolution suddenly receded to make way for a new kind of creature:

Closed door: Survival is guided by instinct.
Open door: Survival is guided by conscious awareness.

Closed door: No questions, no self-doubt.
Open door: Endless questions, endless doubt. 

Closed door: Identity is a given.
Open door: Identity is a quest.

It’s mind-blowing to think about how it would have been to be among the first to step through that door, to suddenly confront an overwhelmingly mysterious and unpredictable world. To have to ask and answer three questions no species before ever had to: Where am I? Who am I? What am I to do?

Humans are tribal creatures, and when we reflect on our earliest beginnings we can see why. There was a lot to being human to figure out, and things would go faster and better if we did it together. So we gathered into tribes, where we learned to share responsibilities. Take on roles. Establish rules. Create customs. In other words, we developed culture. And in the process we gave ourselves a simple context for answering those three questions: 

Where am I? In a tribe. 

Who am I? A member of the tribe. 

What am I to do? Follow the rules of the tribe. 

By many measures the tribal model has been a huge success, and highly elastic – expandable up to the nation-state tribes of today (at least, so far). But it came at a cost. By organizing ourselves into tribes, our individual identity got absorbed into the collective, and suddenly what others thought of us became a vital preoccupation. Should the tribe ever decide we’re unworthy of membership, we might be banished, forced to face the world’s dangers alone – making tribal acceptance a matter of life and death.

Over time, however, this drive for tribal acceptance has mutated from being a means to secure our physical well-being to also securing our psychological well-being, which in our culture can feel under constant threat. Not a day goes by without repeated invitations to compare ourselves to others and to assess whether we’re “measuring up” to society’s standards. Should we find ourselves wanting, our primary options seem to be to either improve our standing through status-minded acquisitions, or to anesthetize the pain of social rejection with drugs, or to join a different tribe altogether – perhaps one that shares our grievances and outsider status. 

While psychologists will tell us that our need for social approval is what “sustains cohesive societies,” it appears the exact opposite is true. If everyone is looking to everyone else for approval — and I mean everyone, even the rich and famous and beautiful – the culture has no center of gravity, no North Star, no transcendent reference point that can guide our individual, and therefore collective, evolution. We become a dis-individuated tribal mass, all trapped in the same crazy hall of mirrors where our perceived self-worth rises and falls based on what everyone else reflects back to us. This is the world of social media writ large. The outcome? A society that’s increasingly fearful, divisive, narcissistic, depressed and anxious.

It’s also a society vulnerable to the psychology of the mob. When our desire for belonging and acceptance overrides the directives of our own inner compass, we become subject to misdirection, manipulation and coercion. Especially by those who have their hands on the levers of power.

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung understood the dangers of this dynamic well. In a book called “The Undiscovered Self,'' written in the aftermath of World War II, he says that when the mass “crushes out the insight and reflection” of the individual, it will necessarily lead to tyranny if ever “the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness.” (Meaning, should it begin to lose its authority.) 

It’s in this “fit of weakness,” he says, that we open the door to a “subversive minority” of individuals who “hold the incendiary torches ready with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, stable stratum of the population.” He then adds, pointedly: “One must not overestimate the thickness of this stratum.” (Italics mine.) 

Clearly, Jung’s warning resonates today. Our institutions, ravaged by a tenacious and deadly virus and overwhelmed by numerous social, political and environmental crises, are indeed in a fit of weakness. The incendiary torches have been lit – at home and abroad –  and the resultant anxiety many of us feel reflects our concerns over whether there’s an “intelligent, stable stratum” thick enough to stop their spread.

A more important concern, however, is whether we know what it means to be part of that stratum. I believe it means having answered our three questions – Where am I? Who am I? What am I to do? – in a context that extends well beyond the tribe. Answers that recognize our common humanity and our inalienable self-worth. Answers that give us the reason and the resolve to listen to and understand the opposing point of view – even if it means the harsh judgment, or even condemnation, of our tribal peers.

This is how the stable stratum is formed. This is how we defuse tensions rather than exacerbate them and reduce the heat of conflict rather than stoke it. This is how receptivity, compassion and moral reasoning – all crucial to our survival yet beyond our reach in times of fear – are brought back within our grasp.

Evolution’s elevator has not been staying still. Doors have been closing and opening all along, each time revealing new insights into the nature of our world as well as ourselves. Most striking: Confirmation from science that reality truly is a single whole, and, though our five senses deny it, we are of that wholeness, inseparable.

If we haven’t kept up with these insights and pondered their implications, now would be a propitious time to do so.