Michael Lerner
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...Egoism emerged as a mass ideology because the fundamental
humanity of people was
already being denied. Using the rhetoric of community and
solidarity, land-owning
ruling classes in feudal societies traditionally dominated the
lives and fortunes of
everyone. It was this misappropriation of human ideals to cloak
domination that led
the masses of the oppressed to look with hope towards the
worldview being articulated
by the rising class of traders and moneylenders who talked about
individual fulfillment
and an end to subordination of individual needs to the alleged
higher goals of the
community. This same dynamic has been repeated in the past two hundred years in the sphere of personal life. While the new ruling class rejected the right of larger communities to impose their wills on individuals, they often believed that the key unit of individual survival was the family. Yet within families they recreated the very dynamics of domination that this bourgeoisie had theoretically rejected in the larger community. In families, the women and children were to subordinate their needs to the needs of "the family" and were to give primacy to creating loving households. But the "needs" of the families were defined by the fathers, the patriarchs who were supposed to be the best "guardians" of the interests of all the others. No wonder that women and children rebelled against this reality, identifying instead with various strains of egoistic ideology that asserted the primacy of individuals' rights above the needs of the community. If patriarchy was the reality of community, then down with community! People were right to reject the older forms of community because they were pseudo-communities that masked domination. But they mistakenly brought the glorification of autonomous individuals and their needs into a new ideology, which has created an equally oppressive new reality. The call to return to community and to loving relationships flows from the essence of our being -- and it challenges the theories of selfishness and the psychologies of individualism that predominate today. But it is not a call to return to the oppressive communities and families of the past, whose togetherness was phony because it was based on fundamental inequalities of power and respect. Instead, our common humanity requires the development of new communities and new forms of loving relationships that are inherently equal in power and respect. This is the positive side of the effort to support people to feel strong and independent. Loving relationships can only work if they are conceived as the expressions of people who can acknowledge the places in which they are weak, people who can accept that "no man is an island," people who do not feel that they are any less full because they need and want each other, people who feel they can be most fulfilled when the others around them are also fulfilled.. |
