Radical Love for Humanity: Outsmarting Our Tragic Flaw
by Kate Towle
A moral compass, like a sense of humor, is a hallmark of being human. Unlike others in the animal kingdom, we, as Homo sapiens, know that our days are limited. We not only task ourselves with food and shelter; we are unique in attempting to assign meaning to our experiences. Who are we? What motivates us to live as we do?
A world of racial and gender inequities, rattled by climate insecurities and lethal viruses like COVID and HIV-AIDS, feels meaningless at times. A torrent of data vies for our attention. So do humans around us who are in distress—or simply want to be seen. When overwhelmed, our primitive brain, or amygdala, is activated beyond healthy functioning—sometimes several times a day. We then easily lose sight of humanity’s greatest resource—our mind’s rich capacity to honor the human spirit and to interpret our emotions (our human native tongue).
Just when wrapping our arms around our humanity is more important than ever, it is the hardest thing to do. This is one of life’s many contradictions, which we call a paradox. We’re being summoned to stop seeing things in black and white and to embrace the gray areas. It’s a paradox, for instance, that humans are highly vulnerable to infection and social rejection, yet it took relatively few of us, banded together, to design a way to travel to the moon.
As we advance in our awareness, we often err in our understanding of our world, just as we did when we believed the earth was flat. Some of our false notions continue over many generations—such as the devastating meme of race, a belief that there is a gene for physical traits and mental abilities that has historically denied cultural advantages like housing, education, health care, employment and wealth creation to those with more melanin in their genetic makeup.
Our work always begins right where we are. As per the Namibian proverb, “We start where we are, but we don’t stay there,” language and knowledge acquisition are a developmental, skill-based process.
If we have achieved knowing just multiplication and division, we will have to stay with our learning until we get fractions, then algebra, geometry and eventually calculus. Would we tell a student who can't grasp algebra that they're bad? NO. We would understand that they're in a growth process, and we would develop their understanding from where they are.
The same applies to unlearning our biases to grow the wisdom within our intelligence. We can endure the discomfort without the shame that continues the cycle of violence. We stretch ourselves, experiment and stay at it—not as a performance, but as a discipline. We can erase the equation and start over, without erasing the truth of our history or the struggle of individual and collective trauma. Doing this work is an affirmation of our strength—and as actress and LGBTQIA activist Laverne Cox says so beautifully, it "re-centers our nervous system collectively."
For a regenerative narrative that can spring our best human qualities to life, we must ask ourselves: What does it mean to be a good human being? In our evolution beyond the animal kingdom, our internal instincts are highly intelligent and adaptive. We are uniquely wired for human connection. If we watch human adaptation carefully, we see that each of us does whatever we can in the moment to survive—or to protect ourselves from the pain we experience.
We form our choices from the limits of our imagination—from stories we tell ourselves during our human development. We’re born with an inner knowing and instinct for survival, yet we are dependent on parents, systems and even spirituality to make sense of our vast, mysterious world. The humans around us, trying to find their own meaning in an overpowering world, shaped us from their own instincts and from the focus of their internal camera lens.
Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis writes that:
As Kant observed, if we wear blue spectacles, we shall see a blue terrain with only blue choices. This refracting vision, this biasing of our choices, they called the Hamartia, sometimes translated as “the tragic flaw,” or as I would put it the “distorting lens.”[1]
In a cultural context, where we’ve been exposed constantly to narratives that tell us to dislike or denigrate others because of their ethnicity, abilities, age or gender, we’ve already begun to unknowingly transmit harmful patterns. We may internalize that these patterns bolster our own sense of security and power, but that is only in our head. When we detach our confidence from humility—and instead attach it to hubris—we escalate that harm. Unable to generate new narratives of interbeing, shared power and transformation, we will succumb to an inner erosion that will ultimately amplify our shadow and strip us of our moral and personal authority.
Our dominant culture still views expressions of dismay, fear or sadness as a threat to survival. Shouldn’t we be posturing and showing our physical strength and material power to survive? It’s a good question, and yet survival is different from being a good human. Posturing and flashing our muscles may allow short-term escape from tragedy and discomfort, but that is not what allows the human species to survive as a whole. We want our community—those who value what we do—to make it with us, so we don’t have to panic in isolation. For that, we need the skills of mirroring, listening, communication and connection—the instinct for deep bonding that allows us to shepherd the safety and longevity of a group of us. We need the radical act of love.
It is the supreme paradox: to listen better, stay on a path to growth and heal our own wounds, we must stay present to the wounds of others. When we witness aggression and the distress it overlays, it’s time to listen and learn as if our life depended on it—because it does. It never works to counter aggression with our own—it only escalates the cycle of violence. It can offer us an incentive to find our own space for healing and clarity. The same holds for witnessing the pain of our BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) friends living in a culture steeped in white dominance.
We believe that people who harm others have no compassion. While narcissism is on the rise, the real challenge is the dynamic of dissociation, an involuntary disconnection from one’s sense of self and sensory experiences. When this happens, a person is not conscious of their psychological protections. When events causing physical, emotional, spiritual and psychological harm are repeated and prolonged in our childhood, we will form a pattern of behaviors that dull or block our senses. It’s as if we swallowed so much food that it makes us choke and cough it back up. We literally cannot digest our experience. The more our distressing experiences multiply, the more we will dissociate as a means of survival. Here’s the danger: what has helped us survive and repress our distress (whether it be by overwork, gambling, media addiction, drugs, sexual abuse, stealing or violence) becomes its own threat to our survival. It is rare to reverse this cycle on our own. Not until we run into serious problems--whether at work, with our loved ones, in our health or with the law—will we begin the heart-wrenching process of surfacing the pain we had to push deep inside.
When we see these behaviors, it’s a cue that someone is covering deep internal distress. When someone is deep into dissociation, they may be unable to see or hear us. They may also activate our own emotional shields, which can escalate their defenses. We can get through to them only when they have recovered their sensory experience and sense of self.
The Buddhist sage Atisha recommended a prayer upon encountering those who mess with our minds: “When I see beings of a negative disposition, or those oppressed by negativity or pain may I, as if finding a treasure, consider them precious.”
What’s happening now in our culture is that too many of us are dissociating from the pain from patterns we’ve internalized that violate the dignity of Black and Brown people. We need to detox.
If you’re a white person with no experience of racial discrimination, but you were regularly beaten by your father, experiences that remind you of that shame and humiliation will trigger your shadow behavior. If you’re a Black person who was not beaten at home, but who has been the target of micro-aggressions at school and in the workplace, your repressed pain will be evoked in new scenarios where you are disrespected. The pain that surfaces for a white person is painful; however, it is not layered over complex intergenerational trauma—or chronic exposure to multiple traumatic events, from being denied access to wealth, housing, education, healthcare, transportation, employment, and even cultural events of beauty.
Mahmoud el-Kati, writer and interpreter of the African American experience, says, “Race is an illusion, but racism is a reality.” He defines racism as power plus prejudice. Patterns that uphold racial superiority for whites have become the collective memory of our culture. Yet, we forget how these patterns have played out historically: millions of acres of land were given to white families under federal homestead laws from 1860 into the 1930’s[2]; access to libraries, schools and health services for people of color was denied, leading to a serious deficit in wealth and opportunities for Black and Indigenous people. When Black people did achieve affluence—such as in Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood District in 1921—domestic white terrorism reared its ugly head to destroy any progress made. Until we give this egregious history context, little that transpires in our country will make sense. Unlearning these ingrained patterns, which are like a train defaulting to a regular set of tracks, will take time and a steadfast commitment to creating a more equitable society.
For group consciousness to evolve, that group must be able to boost the capacity of the group members most resistant to that consciousness. In the same way, our well-being is no more evolved than wherever our neglect of ourselves keeps our holistic health from moving forward.
We have all been formed within a culture that has prioritized advantages for white people since twenty slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. We have been conditioned to imprint patterns that favor being white, even as there is no gene for race, and we still can’t easily identify someone’s ethnicity. If you’re white, is it any wonder that you’re called racist? You’ll have any number of responses, which might include “I’m the least racist person I know,” or “I love everyone—I just don’t see color.” You might internalize that you don’t want to be called out, so you’re going to step up the ways in which you show up in solidarity with people of color and culture. But will you actually admit that we are racist—and in fact, deeply flawed? How could we not be?
What calls us to work toward anti-racism—or what we might call racial sobriety? It’s the same reason we want to recover from the dissociation of adultism, sexism, transphobia and other forces of oppression. Biases that dehumanize others spring from our own internal self-dehumanizing instincts. They are toxins we take in from the racism cocktail that atrophy our muscles of humanity. Truly owning our power means we must love ourselves and believe we have the strength for lifting and learning. Loving ourselves in this way is radical.
There is no perfect anti-racist, and it’s not an identity we can give ourselves. Perfectionism itself is a tool of the oppressor. To counter that, we need to develop a learning mind (and organizations), where we understand that we will be making mistakes and that each one we make offers an opportunity for learning and growth. As Marc Ian Barasch wrote in The Compassionate Life: Walking the Path of Kindness:
Martin Luther King used to portray his racist adversaries as broken people, living in spiritual exile, in need of forgiveness only the oppressed could grant them. He inspired among his followers a paradoxical sense of empowerment: It was only they, the victims, who could heal the damaged souls of their enemies by moving them to mercy and leading them out of hatred’s wilderness.[3]
Unless they have had strong spiritual training, our nonwhite friends and community members are not going to indulge our need to belong. We’ve yet to indulge theirs. It’s on us to dive deep into our limbic system and discover what lurks there.
It’s in our own best interest to expand our clan. In the book Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100, author Marta Zaraska writes that “studies show that building a strong support network of family and friends lowers mortality risk by 45 percent.” Regular exercise lowers our mortality risk by 23 to 33 percent (12 percent less); and eating six or more servings of fruits and vegetables per day can cut mortality risk by roughly 26 percent.[4]
Our bodies are brilliant. They’ve given us mirror neurons, effective “smart cells” for survival that fire when someone near us feels an emotion, permitting us to feel that emotion too. However, this breaks down when the emotions we witness “flood” us.
In the 2002 book Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, the authors describe our limbic reaction to contempt:
John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington, uses the term ‘flooding’ to describe the intensity of the fight-or-flight reaction that such an extreme message of contempt can trigger: Heart rate can leap up to 20 to 30 beats per minute in a single heartbeat, accompanied by an overwhelming feeling of distress. When flooded, a person can neither hear what is said without distortion, nor respond with clarity; thinking becomes muddled and the most ready responses are primitive ones—anything that will end the encounter quickly. As a result, people will often tune out (or ‘stonewall’) the other person by putting either an emotional or physical distance between them.[5]
A famous experiment by Dr. Edward Tronick in 2009, called The Still Face Experiment, shows what happens when a mother effectively mirrors the emotions of her baby and then abruptly stops and simply stares at her baby. The baby tries many ways to get her mother’s attention until she is overwhelmed, slumping in her chair. When the baby breaks down in tears, the mother immediately begins to soothe her. Many babies have parents who are unable to mirror them, because their own caregivers could not stay present to them and stomach any sadness or despair.
With no caregivers to reflect her emotions back to her—which helps her regulate them—a baby will either learn to lodge her emotions in her body or learn to continually escalate them to finally be seen. The more she flattens or amplifies her emotions, the more she will lose her ability to make sense of life around her. She will lose the capacity to effectively mirror those around her—and those beyond her community sphere.
Consider this a human natural disaster—closed off from our true nature, we come to our community from a position of need, rather than bringing emotional strength that extends beyond our own physical survival. At that point, we’re out for our own survival, acting from the primitive part of our brain, the amygdala—with no lens or capacity to look up and see what’s happening to those around us—and what might happen to our descendants.
On the program On Being, British philosopher Alain de Botton describes our human sensitivity to the cues of those around us:
I think if we just try and explore the word “political,” “political” really means “outside of private space.” And we’re highly socialized creatures who really take our cues from what is going on around us. And if we see an atmosphere of short tempers, of selfishness, etc., that will bolster those capacities within ourselves. If we see charity being exercised, if we see good humor, if we see forgiveness on display, again, it will lend support to those sides of ourselves. And we need to take care what we’re exposing ourselves to because too much exposure to the opposite of love makes us into very hostile and angry people.[6]
Each time a person of color experiences a comment, behavior or policy that does not see them, or does, and treats them as inferior, they experience a micro-aggression. Their mirror neurons internalize such treatment as disrespect—feelings that can escalate to a limbic reaction of distress. Those of us who have benefited greatly from whiteness—and have been seen and honored in history, the media, and positions of power and leadership—are being called to mirror, witness and hold the emotions that BIPOC people experience. As white people, it’s our turn to be flooded, as we build our own capacity for growth.
Sensei, writer and Buddhist angel Kyodo williams calls this radical dharma, which she defines as:
insurgence rooted in love, and all that love of self and other implies. It takes self-liberation to its necessary end by moving beyond personal transformation to transcend dominant social norms and deliver us into collective freedom.[7]
Being human, with brains formed for both connection and deep cognitive reasoning, we are capable of more than we can imagine. We have been wired to feel great empathy. While we’ve indulged our fears and our base animal impulses throughout history—subjugating one another to brutal treatment and turning a blind eye to suffering—there have been many instances where we have cast our collective vote to extend the ripples and muscles of humanity. The Freedom Riders, white and Black, put their lives on the line, enduring beatings and firebombs, to stand up against injustices in interstate travel. Frederick Douglass applied his courage as an abolitionist, while also supporting Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was credited with initiating the women’s suffrage movement in the United States. One of the most stunning acts of compassion occurred during a right-wing No-To-Marxism rally in Berkeley, California when a right-wing protester fell and was being beaten by left-wing anti-fascist protesters. Al Letson, host of the investigative radio program Reveal, jumped on top of the guy to protect him because, he said, he didn’t want anyone to get hurt.
We can find brave, self-reflective teachers to learn with, who can help us find the path to our inner source of wisdom, our internal locus of knowing. Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos wrote a couplet to address his literary community for their negativity toward his poetry as a gay man:
what didn’t you do to bury me
but you forgot that I was a seed[8]
We’ve been buried by our tragic flaw, and yet we are seeding a new world. It is not a world of shrinking away, but one of stretching—to face the truth of our reality, bravely name the emotions that surface in us, sit with them as they inform us, then take bold, compassionate action to ignite our future. In other words, we need to own our inner authority. It’s the part of us that is able to pay attention, notice when our protections self-sabotage, and understand their deeper questions. We will inevitably short-change ourselves—or over-function—as we sort through the voices and examples of the people from whom we’ve imprinted. Yet we will act from a place of resilience, internalizing that we are not what happens to us. Our stories are uniquely ours.
To quote psychoanalyst James Hollis, “a potentate in his palace, a tyrant in his tower, is nothing compared to the higher state of the humbled who, at last, has come to right relationship to the gods.”
[1] Hollis, James. Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times. Sounds True, 2020.
[2] Feagin, Joe R. The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing. Routledge, 2020.
[3] Barasch, Marc. The Compassionate Life: Walking the Path of Kindness. Accessible Publishing Systems PTY, Ltd., 2010.
[4] Zaraska, Marta. Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100. Robinson, 2020.
[5] Goleman, Daniel, et al. Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.
[6] “Alain de Botton: The True Hard Work of Love and Relationships.” The On Being Project, 11 Feb. 2021, https://onbeing.org/programs/alain-de-botton-the-true-hard-work-of-love-and-relationships/.
[7] Syedullah, Jasmine; williams, Rev. angel Kyodo; Owens, Lama Rod. Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation. READHOWYOUWANT, 2017.
[8] Xiao, An. “On the Origins of ‘They Tried to Bury Us, They Didn't Know We Were Seeds.’” Hyperallergic, 3 July 2018, https://hyperallergic.com/449930/on-the-origins-of-they-tried-to-bury-us-they-didnt-know-we-were-seeds/.
Bibliography
“Alain de Botton: The True Hard Work of Love and Relationships.” The On Being Project, 11 Feb. 2021, https://onbeing.org/programs/alain-de-botton-the-true-hard-work-of-love-and-relationships/.
Barasch, Marc Ian. The Compassionate Life: Walking the Path of Kindness. Accessible Publishing Systems PTY, Ltd., 2010.
El-Kati, Mahmoud. The Myth of Race/The Reality of Racism: Critical Essays. Papyrus Publishing, Inc., 2014.
Feagin, Joe R. The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing. Routledge, 2020.
Goleman, Daniel, et al. Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.
Hollis, James. Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times. Sounds True, 2020.
Zaraska, Marta. Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100. Robinson, 2020.