Being Strangers & The Will to be Known Inside Capitalism
The mortifying ordeal of being perceived, or the emotional death sentence of performing a distortion of your aliveness?
Choices, choices.
This writing emerges from some combination of Keir Starmer showing himself this week, the training I'm doing with Nora Bateson, years of my coaching work and a million other things I'm not noticing.
Naomi Klein writes about how conspiracy theorists get the feelings right and the facts wrong- through this lens, Starmer is a conspiracy theorist. (Of course not really because he knows he's lying). But the feeling resonates- an island of strangers. Not because of immigrants, but because of Capitalism and the ways we learn to stay (almost) alive within it.
Messy, sticky, awkward, inconvenient, organic, dynamic, excruciating, ecstatic aliveness?
Or ordered, managed, cold, deadened, linear, predictable functionality?
Inside the hostility of the death cult of Capitalism, a place where one must "earn a living", being known as the creatures we are carries psychological risk- for some of us much more than others, for all of us to some extent.
Since birth (perhaps even before?) we've been noticing. We've been collating a bank of data that answers some question like, "who do I need to pretend to be in each context in order to get my (material, social, emotional, psychological) needs met?"
Don't get me wrong- this is not a call for consistency, quite the opposite. Anyone who has spent any time with me knows one of my fave affirmations: consistency is a scam.
Neither is this an ode to "authenticity"- what is that? What do we mean when we speak of it? How might we imagine we could locate such a version of ourselves within decades of adaptations?
Are we *really* who we've learned to be, or who we might otherwise have been outside of these systems? Or neither, or both?
As I've sat with Nora Bateson and so many other thoughtful humans over the last few weeks, I've encountered some challenge around the concept of 'unlearning'. It's language I've certainly used, and yes- I can see how it can be useful. And yet. What would this be like? Does this ever truly occur? How could we wholly unlearn biases, protective mechanisms or modifications when we are barely noticing what we are noticing? When this conditioning has been through decades of metabolising, when it lives within our guts?
The fantasy of some kind of mechanistic reset is appealing- delete the undesirable, restore factory settings, a clean (!) start.
And yet, would we be ready to meet this moment, would the desire for difference exist without the experience of who we've become so far?
To work in the 'self-development' arena is to wrestle with the relentless reinforcement of the sense that the mind, and therefore the human(oid) can (and should!) be reset. And within this culture, a hierarchy of mindsets that match the demands of neoliberalism, or pretend to effectively oppose them with individual 'solutions' to systemic problems.
Being available to be known in our wholeness represents a rejection of the bleaching of our vitality. It strikes me that otherwise, we risk becoming as much like AI as Starmer is becoming like Farage.
Being known- in our imperfection, in our inconsistency, in our aliveness, is a kind of intimacy that many of us have learned to reject in our daily lives, for understandable reasons. And yet, being known is a portal to belonging---> to wholeness ---> to more liveable lives for all. The more we understand about one another's contexts, one another's stories, the more we accept the reality of our intra-relation, the less we are able to tolerate one another's suffering in the systems.
Most of us are familiar with this double bind- I wish to be witnessed, known, appreciated, I wish to belong. And if I reveal myself, I risk rejection, so I will conceal and contort myself and remain lonely, isolated, misunderstood on my own terms.
How willing are you to be known? To yourself and to others?
How might you expand your capacity for this?
A better question might be, how do we create the conditions for one another to expand the capacity to do this? How do we fertilise these shared possibilities? How do we tend them?
For starters, I find myself thinking of
making generous assumptions,
holding one another in unconditional positive regard (as best we can in our own humanness),
noticing and rejecting the notion of hierarchies as often as possible
sharing our stories
Last weekend, I was shaking with laughter for half an hour, tears streaming down my cheeks, reading the comments on this TikTok where someone asked, "tell me about a time you seriously misread social cues and made it weird." There is something so wildly warm happening in this comment section as people empathise, resonate, are grateful to have been so amused. There's so much relief there.
Humans being known whilst being human *even though* we are not really allowed.
If you might like to reclaim a sense of kinship in your life, or understand more about the relationship between Capitalism and intimacy, I really recommend the book Radical Intimacy by Sophie K. Rosa.
If you might like to explore what it means to be alive in a polycrisis in a complex world, I really recommend Nora Bateson's book, Combining. You can also listen to her warmth on many brilliant podcasts, including this one.
This post was shared as one of my ‘Keri’s Musings’ Sunday emails. They vary in content, length and intensity. If you’d like to receive them, you can sign up here.
