09/28/2024
Structural Belonging
If you have read anything I have written over the last decade, you know that I think belonging is essential. I think it is the most important human need. I would even call it “a theory of everything.” If Maslow had done his research more thoroughly, he would have put it at the bottom of his hierarchy of needs rather than the middle. The human brain, heart, and body are motivated and synchronized by belonging because, they still remember the long hunter-gatherer part of our story, where we would have starved or been eaten by predators if we were disconnected from our group. Exile and solitary confinement are still (IMO) the most torturous human punishments—even worse than death. In our individual shared stories, we are born unformed and helpless. The majority of our brain development happens in a social environment. Our neural pathways are built by our experiences of receiving food, shelter, mobility, comfort, and care through our intimate connections with people who are paying attention to our needs.
For any of this to make sense, we need to think of belonging as a structure, a way people are interconnected that makes us collectively and individually whole. We can think of it as social integrity. Such a structure becomes more integrated and, therefore, stronger when the three key components are optimally organized.
Identity: all people understand their own and others unique identities
Output: all people are able to express the unique output of their identities in ways that benefit their interdependent connections
Input: all people get their universal human needs met in a way that optimizes the output of their identity.
Identity does not mean style, choice of interests, affiliations, or personality. Those are among the many ways identity is expressed. There is a deeper, more essential, intrinsic and unchanging identity that each of us comes into the world with. It can be understood and articulated, we can grow in it, and it is absolutely unique.
Output is not necessarily production and it often has little to do with the role we fulfill to get money. Every human contributes an energetic source of power to the vitality of their relationships. It comes from their essential identity like pumping blood comes from a heart.
Input refers to our needs, the resources each of us require in order to be and do most effectively. We have most of these needs in common though we all experience them differently.
This last element may be western culture’s greatest weakness and why our social structure is currently so dis-integrated. We are weak because we compete with each other instead of care for each other. This is true at the individual, relational, organizational, communal, and systemic levels.
When individuals, families, organizations, communities, and systems do not attend to wholeness, they start breaking (dis-integrating). Breaking looks like mental, emotional, and behavioral issues. It looks like rising rates of su***de, violence, addiction, consumerism, and homelessness. It is generational separation, contempt for different perspectives, and dangerous unbalancing. We compete for dominance. We extract selfishly from each other without regard for the damage it does to both the extractor and the extracted. We exploit for gain without concern for who or what we are exploiting. We hoard, cloister, exclude, and hand out labels.
Attending to wholeness is the intention and act of maintaining integrity by connecting all the pieces in a way that recognizes their identity, output, and input requirements. It is not trying to make everyone the same. It is not equality. The very nature of wholeness requires many different differences and a constant exchange between them. This exchange is not unique to humans. It shows up between identities of all kinds and at every scale in the universe. Within the nucleus of an atom, the different identities of protons and neutrons are both held together and kept separate by the strongest known force in the universe. This is truly a building block of reality. To be whole and healthy, we need both individuality and togetherness. They are cooperating rather than competing.
The fundamentalness of this non-dual reality shows up in the structure and organization of every “thing,” every where, and at every scale. Atoms cooperate with other atoms to form molecules. Molecules cooperate with other molecules to form innumerable substances. Cells cooperate to form organs. Organs cooperate to form organic systems. Organic systems cooperate to form organisms. Organisms cooperate to form ecosystems. On and on it goes all the way to galaxies. Every thing functions in cooperation according to intrinsic identity. Each identity offers its unique resource of energy, strength, perspective, and capacity based on how well its intrinsic needs are met. Plants, trees, and animals flourish differently in rainforests than in deserts or oceans or on top of mountains.
Belonging, then, is not a feeling. The experience of belonging may produce feelings as a byproduct, and so will a lack of it. But belonging itself is a fundamental reality. It is how things fit and function together. It is fundamental, like gravity. Everything is subject to gravity but we do not confuse gravity with the feeling of heaviness or the sensation of being rooted to the earth. We assume the value of its presence and unconsciously appreciate that our cars, carpets, building, BBQs, plants, and produce are not floating around randomly.
The difference between gravity and belonging, though, is that we participate in belonging. Humans have agency. We are active and should be conscious participants in building and maintaining an integrated social structure that is in cooperation with every other thing and system we are connected to and dependent on (which is all of them). This truth is both damning and hopeful. Our current lack of social integrity is our own fault. We are not experiencing belonging to whatever degree we have failed to build it. Considering the state of our society right now, we have work to do together.
If we rebuild belonging, will start seeing reductions in all the negative behaviors and outcomes we so desperately want to heal. If we turn our attention to it collectively, if we are unified and treat the integrity of our social structure and our belonging as if it really is our most fundamental need and the foundation of our wholeness, we will heal ourselves in dramatic ways.
To be clear, belonging does not erase the damage of the adversity we have faced individually or collectively. It does not eliminate the trauma we have experienced when we have been separated by abuse, neglect, dysfunction, racism, misogyny, institutional failure, religious shaming, corrupt leadership, poverty, and addiction. Building belonging cultivates the spaces and the capacity to hold that damage, heal it, and transform it into wisdom and strength.
This is my mission. To try. To influence people toward belonging. To work on learning how to build it. To bring people together in intentional ways to recognize and articulate individual and group identity, output, and inputs. I want to be part of a courageous army of people who believe that everyone is seeking belonging, regardless of their flawed approach. I want to be part of a movement that calls out identity, holds each other accountable for being their truest selves, and works to care for each other’s needs.
My belief in belonging as a fundamental reality, my desire to see our social structure organized with integrity, my hope in the possibility of all people fitting together according to who they are, what they offer, and what they need… it drives me. It wakes me up early in the morning and distracts me from the base and the mundane.
I would love to expand the conversation and explore together how this could work and how we could do it together—no matter how different our perspectives may be.
