At least half of my motivation for writing weekly blog posts is to develop my voice as a writer, with a plan of writing a book. The working title of the book is, 100% Mixed. The general premise is based on my own mixed heritage. My mother is an Ashkenazi Jew with ancestry from the countries of Georgia, Germany, and England, my father is Japanese, first generation. Add to that being a gay, anti-Zionist Jew who’s a honey vegan, former dancer/artist, current wellness entrepreneur and the mixedness continues! To complete the half of what I’m speaking about in terms of writing blogs, the other half is to share more about my thoughts which are completely 100% mixed! 😀
From this base of an identity where I’ve always explained myself as half this or part that, former this or future that, I’ve come to appreciate the wholeness that I am right in this moment. This reflection extends to all of us who share multiple roles, positions, identities, ethnicities, relationships, etc. In other words, we are all 100% mixed in some way! And rather than focus on the parts, what if we focus on the self that is whole? Rather than spend time comparing our differences within ourselves and outside of ourselves, what if we spent more time on understanding our similarities and even our sameness? But would that create problems similar to our world today where many folks feel unseen and unheard, being lumped into one category that dismisses our unique qualities? It’s complicated but it’s also a story of different perspectives that I’m excited to develop in 100% Mixed. Presales start on… just kidding. But stay tuned!
I held a story most of my life that focused on myself as halves – half Japanese and half White. The one aspect of me that didn’t half myself, was that I considered myself all Jewish since having a Jewish mother means you’re Jewish. I’m completely Jewish, not half. Being one of the “chosen people” created its own issue as it made for not only having pride as a full Jew, but a subtle sense of superiority over non-Jews. A Jewish mom means I’m Jewish, 100%. I never thought of myself as half Jewish. In comparison to those with a Jewish father, some in the Jewish community wouldn’t consider these kids as full or “real” Jews. While I did appreciate this sense of power being given to mothers, I did and do see the structural harm this can create.
Comparing how I was different from most everyone else I knew was natural for me, rarely finding anyone else like me. I even felt very different from my brother who shares the same parental genes. As often happens in pairs of siblings, our contrasts were more noticeable than our similarities as kids. I see now that I didn’t have enough support or influence around me to think of how we actually are all connected, all people, until later in life. It was truly revelational when I leaned more into that story of commonality and realized I felt more at peace in the world versus up against the world. But it’s a both/and story here, not negating the individual. It’s finding a way to honor the natural variety as part of the whole rather than a survival need to seek sameness. It’s welcoming the abundance of life’s expression with curiosity versus othering one another that we don’t have reference to or direct experience with.
And as a specific and recent example, the stories that have been working hard to keep the divisions strong between Jews and Palestinians are part of a pattern. And a pattern of patterns where othering generated enough dehumanization, that erasure of a people and culture became natural and even as simplified as squashing anything that felt like an annoyance to dominant belief. It has certainly been by educational default that didn’t propel me to question a narrative that erased a people. A narrative that followed the way so much of what I now see is how general systems of supremacy and hierarchy function. These systems of domination entrench our psyches in such a way that my own perpetuation of never feeling whole was predictable and designed in a way. So long as we all feel separate not equal, our survival instincts will allow for the ‘us versus them’ mindset. And that traps the mind so the concept of a unified people seems naive.
What is hitting me now more than ever, is that all of this is based on the expert design of storymaking. So many of the stories we have are beautiful and inspiring. But then, there are many that are overtly or secretly divisive. And this is not to start a conversation of good and bad per se; I fully understand there is no way out of this comparative way as we persist in a world of duality – right/wrong, this/that, you/me, inside/outside, near/far, here/there. We have a form, a body and that creates the hard rule that there is a sense of self and a sense of the other. But what I’ve learned to build into this equation, is the understanding that we are also able to identify our shared experience so much, that we no longer see an ‘us and a them’ as opposites, but as allies, and even one day, as each other. What if we spent more time on THAT story? I’m pretty sure that your mind is saying that that story isn’t a realistic one. Ask yourself why? Is the thought against this possibility part of the collective reason why it’s not a possibility?
Is this story not popular because we have been told the ‘us vs them’ story for so long? And to believe anything else wouldn’t be safe? It hasn’t been so for indigenous people who welcomed others with kindness onto a land that rather than feeling they owned, they stewarded. That kindness was seen as a weakness and allowed the newly landed people (aka settler colonizers) to take advantage of them. So kindness and compassion were seen as expressions of weakness.
I’m not sure if there’s a chance to return our nature to one of care for each other equally. So we may be bound in this thinking. The practice I’m building is to welcome deeper understanding of our current stage of humanity rather than burning myself out and being frustrated that it’s not changing sooner. It’s why I send a message out through Mukunda Studio – Empower the Movers of Human Kindness. I want to highlight that for myself and all who enter. I see the challenge of living from kindness in myself and even in the people I know around me! We have a ways to go to truly recognize our potential as loving and kind beings not just to some and not just some of the time, but always. Rather than be a relational culture based on profit and loss, we could be a caring culture based on support and service that understands disparities are inevitable in this evolving world but they can lessen as we evolve away from structural harms.
As I dive in to understand how a system can win a narrative game, I understand even more how stories can become so dominating with a power and might that feels stronger than steel. Certainly stories can uplift and make dreams a reality. But they can also build a convincing enough narrative where killing people is a necessary part of creating safety and security, hoping to disguise a genocide in plain site. Something that recently shocked me yet also helped piece together more awareness of how skillful and clever our government is, was learning that the US Department of Defense works with storymaking. They work with experts to understand the power of story and how to direct the public with crafted stories. Now, much of this is reported as such for the sake of keeping steadiness and calm amongst a society. If people really knew what was going on…. (conspiracy theories abound!!) Tempering what is known and not known, how something is perceived and accepted, allows for a certain direction of things. It can, of course, move towards a good direction for keeping the status quo, or it can move towards the not so good. And of course, status quo is what might be a perceived state of balance, but almost always equals someone taking advantage of a system based in inequality.
From The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) – an independent research and development agency within the U.S. Department of War (DoW)
“Why do people accept and act on certain kinds of information while dismissing others? Why are some narrative themes successful at building support for terrorism? What role can narratives play in causing—and helping to treat—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)? These questions deal with the role narratives play in human psychology and sociology, and their answers have strategic implications for defense missions.”
“Narratives may consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, and influence group distinctions. To determine their influence on cognitive functions requires a working theory of narratives, an understanding of what role they play in security contexts, and an examination of how to systematically analyze narratives and their psychological and neurobiological impact.” – darpa.mil
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Storytelling is one of the oldest methods of communicating for humans and our survival has been dependent on it. Stories connect us and have the power to help develop empathy and meaning. They offer windows into a different time and help us learn lessons simply by being able to imagine. Stories can help unify people with a sense of common mission and values. They can be designed in such a way that our nervous systems even feel the power just by hearing the words. Whether it’s a scary story or one that empowers our community to feel safe, words can become shields or swords.
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Dr. Brian Boyd
Minds work by pattern recognition. They can handle information in real time only by seeing it in terms of patterns and patterns of patterns. The more flexible the species’ behavior and the more flexible its interaction with other species, the more important it is to know the patterns in settings, environment, weather, kinds, animals and plants, situations, events, and characters. Humans especially need to learn that the patterns of different kinds of situations and consequences, the more precise the better, and the patterns of different personalities.
Individuals learn by themselves, by acting and provoking reactions, and by doing and by assessing the success of what they’ve done. In social species, they also learn by watching one another. In all species that can communicate well, individuals can also learn what lies beyond what they can sense for themselves yet species other than ours seem limited to communicating about the here and now.
And we’re ultraflexibe. Unlike other species, we depend for our special success, not on some kind of physical advantage, but on our social advantages; our sharing and command of information, our cognitive niche. For those reasons because we’re so social, so flexible and so reliant on information, because human survival came to depend less on individual behavior and more on collective cooperation, we invented language as a way of communicating what’s beyond our own immediate perception and beyond the here and now, as a way of instructing our imaginations in the terms proposed by the linguist Danierl Dor. As Dor writes, first, we invented language, then language changed us. Not least because there’s a positive feedback loop connecting our ultra-sociality and our ultra-flexibility and language. We almost certainly invented language out of the mimetic proto-language, pointing, gestures, miming, facial expressions and vocal sound.
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This makes me think of how AI is advancing into our lives and consciousness as a sort of new language. It’s been invented as a resource for us to use, but it will surely change us. And like language, it can support our healthy evolution towards universal connection, or it can be manipulated and strategically designed to diminish our natural instincts.
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Through language and through story, we not only learn about the world, we also learn what others see and understand and what others don’t see and don’t understand. Therefore, what and how much we sometimes might be at risk of not seeing and not understanding. We realize in a newly vivid and uniquely human way, what we might not know, what we can’t explain. Because we know it’s possible to make deadly mistakes by not knowing the real situation, we try to cover or leap over those gaps in our knowledge. We confabulate. Our minds generate stories to bridge gaps, even without our realizing it. (See blog that speaks of cognitive shortcuts).
We overextend agency. It’s safer to suppose a bush is than the other way around. Because we know events can happen through unseen causes like desires and intentions, and because we’re fascinated by agents with exceptional powers; exceptional humans or animals that can do what we can’t, it’s very easy for human minds to have developed imagination through language and through stories, true ones, as well as false ones to suppose unseen agents with powers beyond the human, behind unexplained events. Therefore, to concoct spirits and gods that coalesce into religious stories. Humans tend to believe religious stories because they cover gaps of information we don’t like to have to face. They provide a reassurance, apparently deeper knowledge behind the scenes, explanations to answer our “why” questions. Because they tend to embody norms that help us act together, that help bind communities. Communities that cohere better are likely to out compete other communities that cohere as well.
Stories need not be true to be of benefit. If they are memorable and engage the emotions and inspire confidence and motivate beneficial behavior, they’ll thrive and help us thrive. That’s especially true up to a point of religious stories. That’s usually up to the point where they clash with other people’s religious stories.
Dr. Brian Boyd
UCTV: Speaking at “The Role of Myth in Anthropogeny – A Carta Public Symposium” 7/2023
Transcribed from the text on screen.
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Where does this story end? All we know is that the story of our physical bodies will one day end, and possibly the memory of us will continue on as a story in this material plane. But this is just part of the story and it will change as we deepen our understanding of what it means to be here. Thanks for reading this mix of thoughts here as I work to develop my story. By you reading this, it lives and is shared and I’m grateful if you’ve made it this far! May all of our stories continue to mix together with all the colors, forms and concepts that create the most dynamic and rich landscape. May the canvas be as big and expansive as the mind can imagine so there’s room for all. It’s a story of real possibility of everything becoming beautifully 100% mixed and celebrated.
Let’s stay connected,
Marc
