What does it all mean?
And what if it doesn't mean what you think it means...
What does it all mean?
This is not a question offered to encourage navel-gazing. It’s not some philosophical thought experiment, either. Reflecting on what something means, in our own lives and the larger world, and to what extent we are responsible for what it means, brings us smack up against some crucial questions about truth and how we operationalize our integrity.
Recently, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Zeynep Tufecki on how the U.S. government’s lies leading up to the first Gulf War in the 1990s, and again following the attacks of 9/11, are affecting the public’s response to information about the current war between Israel and Hamas. Those wars cost countless lives (American and exponentially more those of Iraqi and Afghani civilians) and proved to be both ill-conceived and unsuccessful in eradicating terrorism, their stated goal. There are clear arguments to be made that they have fed increasing amounts of extremism across the globe.
When considering responsibility for the bombing of a hospital in Gaza and the potential number of civilians killed in the blast, Tufecki argues that this documented history of “fabricating or exaggerating atrocities” to “influence the calculus of what the public will accept” regarding civilian casualties has “deeply and indelibly damaged the standing and credibility of the United States and its allies.” In the wake of unknowns, as a result, we don’t know who to trust. Instead, we ascribe both meaning and responsibility based on our own biases.
In a related NYT opinion piece a few days later, Thomas Friedman highlighted the choices of the Indian government in response to a terror attack by Pakistani Islamic jihadists in 2008. Unlike what is happening in Gaza and Israel now, then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh didn’t choose to retaliate militarily against Pakistan as a whole. Instead, he chose legal, diplomatic, and covert means to pursue the perpetrators. That choice allowed the world’s focus to remain on the horror of the original attacks and enforcing consequences on the Pakistani Army, which was complicit in them, rather than an ensuing war being characterized as “just another Pakistani-Indian dust-up.” Moreover, it prevented the Pakistani public from uniting behind the army as opposed to the civilian government and protected the Indian economy.
By considering soberly the narrative that would be built in the wake of the attack, the Indian government took effective control of what the attack meant, for India, Pakistan, and the world.
If the Israel-Hamas war feels too emotionally fraught to consider in relationship to what it all means, then instead let me offer you a recent article in Scientific American that debunks the theory that in early human societies, men were hunters and women were gatherers. That theory, which was originally presented in 1968 in a collection of scholarly papers called Man the Hunter, “holds that human ancestors had a division of labor, rooted in biological differences between males and females, in which males evolved to hunt and provide, and females tended to children and domestic duties. It assumes that males are physically superior to females and that pregnancy and child-rearing reduce or eliminate a female's ability to hunt.”
The authors show that even accounting for the quantity of information we had then compared to now, the theory doesn’t hold up. Its proponents and the researchers who supported its development “ignored evidence, sometimes in their own data, that countered their suppositions.” Their presumptions of male superiority prevented them from actually seeing the truth regarding human history. Instead, they gave a larger, entirely fictional social narrative about what it means to be a man or a woman scientific justification, allowing it to persist in myriad ways.
That false narrative shows up today in debates about gender, women’s and trans people’s participation in sport, the portrayal of women in the media, and public policy regarding childcare and family leave. What meaning we make out of the facts of life, in other words, has wide-ranging implications that deserve consideration.
But how does this meaning-making play out in our personal lives?
In her most recent Dear Sugar newsletter, author Cheryl Strayed answered letters from two women who had experienced terrible upheavals in their lives.
Both women were racked with horrible, lingering guilt. One, for circumstances that were entirely out of her control. The other for hurt she had caused for which she’d already received forgiveness. Strayed walked them through separating the story of what happened from the story they were telling about themselves in the wake of what happened. “[Y]our suffering,” Strayed wrote, “doesn’t come from actually being guilty. The bad things you did or caused aren’t what’s weighing you down. It’s the false narratives that you’ve clung to that are making you feel as if you’re collapsing beneath their burden.”
We are storytellers as a species, and the function of our stories is, more often than not, to make meaning of what is happening around us. Every mythological system back to the beginning of human existence, including all three of the Abrahamic traditions implicated in the current war in the Middle East, is simply an attempt to take the world as it presents itself and build a system of meaning to explain it. Every nation is also built on a story about who the people are in that country and how they came to be that, which says as much about the meaning that country makes of itself as the facts of the story. The United States has a mythology that ascribes meaning to our lives as Americans. So does Israel. And so does Palestine.
We also build personal mythologies in response to our lives, through which we assign meaning to events. But just like the Man the Hunter theorists and Strayed’s letter writers, and most people in the initial wake of the hospital bombing in Gaza, we often let what we’ve decided history means dictate the choices we make moving forward. Instead of taking a breath and thinking, like the Indian government in 2008, about what meaning we want to make out of what has happened.
I’m far from immune to this tendency. Right now, I’m working on a piece for paid subscribers about Internal Family Systems and the question of what “part” of us is ambitious. Uncovering memories to explain when and how various parts of me were born with particular stories about achievement and expectation, I had to insert myself into scenes from middle and high school. The stories are well-worn and familiar to me, and I found myself reciting them reflexively. And then this happened. And then she said X. And then I said Y.
Then two things occurred to me. One, whatever part of me emerged in response to those events was, quite literally, a child, with the developmental capacities of a child to understand and ascribe meaning to what was happening. Two, I’m no longer a child. (I know! Crazy. But you try reinterpreting stories you’ve been telling since you were a kid. You’ll see how rote they often are and how “true” they feel.) I can’t change the things that happened, but I can reinterpret the meaning of what happened based on my understanding of the world now. And I can decide what meaning I want to make of them moving forward.
This isn’t some sort of New Age, The Secret sort of manifestation gospel. As in, I’m just going to put this out in the Universe and it will come to me. But you can shift your life and the world around you based on what you believe about yourself and other people. There is such a thing as a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is how low expectations often create children who don’t succeed and how a belief that we are worthless guides us to relationships with people who treat us like we’re worthless. Why wouldn’t the meaning we ascribe to events work the same way? It sure seems to be working for racism and patriarchy.
It is nearly impossible to make meaning out of what is happening in the moment— in our own lives or on a world scale. We’re too wrapped up in our reflexive emotional responses, which themselves emerge out of the stories we’ve told ourselves up to that point— juvenile, flawed, partial, imperfect, or righteous as they may be. The best we can do is slow down, breathe, wait to collect all the facts, and check the veracity of our sources. We can also reflect on what we think things mean, and entertain (even for a moment) that they could mean something entirely different.
In that magical space of unknowing, we open up the space to discern what we want the story to be moving forward and what action brings the meaning at the heart of that aspirational story out into the world. Will things always mean what we want them to mean? No. Even the most ideal vision runs into that persistent, pesky problem that we can’t control other people, and that the meaning they make of things is theirs to discern. But being open to collaborative meaning-making helps.
I’m working for it all to mean that love endures and peace is possible, even in the face of violence, cruelty, vengeance, and suffering. Every day, in small and large ways, I’m living into that possibility, making the life I can touch mean that to the best of my ability. That’s how my integrity comes to life.
This was the read I needed this morning—thank you, friend. In the current confusing state of…everything…I am going to join you in believing the story of hope and peace into the world.
Such a wise piece. And I found it optimistic. We don't just need to accept the stories we've been told and the mess we're in. We can change the story. Thank you!