
If Your Life Were a Sign, What Would It Say?
One of the things I've thought a lot about over the years is the meaning of meaning. What does it mean to have meaning? It’s not for nothing that psychologist and concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl titled his famous book Man's Search for Meaning. The attempt to grasp and comprehend "the meaning of life" has been one of humanity's perennial philosophical pursuits for as far back as we have records, and likely long before that.
And yet, it seems to me that most people do not have a firm grasp on what meaning is - what it means to have meaning. We all want our lives to have meaning, but what does that even mean? We may have a vague sense, but I don't think most of us, if pressed, could offer a clear answer to that somewhat self-referential question. I know it took me awhile to come up with something,
I would like to propose that to have meaning means to point to something which is outside of oneself. Imagine a sign on the side of a highway. As you approach it, the words on the sign come into focus. They read: "Sign Here." This strange sign would have no meaning as it would point only to itself, indicating nothing more than its own existence. Road signs have meaning because they direct our attention away from themselves, indicating some aspect of the roadway or its surrounding environs. "Exit 2 Miles," "Watch For Ice On Bridge," "Trucks Entering," "Fines Double In Work Zones."
Meaning, then, lies in this: to point at that which is beyond oneself - and specifically at something which is greater than oneself. If you would give your life meaning, therefore, find something greater than yourself and point your life at that.
I would further propose that the mass culture of the US is antithetical to people living meaningful lives in this sense, not only in that it places many on a knife's edge of economic subsistence - making concern for anything else an act of personal risk - but even more importantly by normalizing an extreme form of individualism predicated on materialist consumerism. I believe that our national culture can be summed up by two idioms: "look out for number one," and "whoever dies with the most toys wins." This is the ethos that permeates every part of our society, even our cooperative and solidarity economy efforts, though we rarely state it so bluntly.
Consider the following:
- acting to assist another with no thought for any personal, material benefit for oneself is called "charity" and not "being a respectable human."
- Activist and liberal/left circles are filled with exhortations to engage in "self care" to avoid burnout. We thus turn even our concern for one another's well-being into a personal matter for each to attend to themselves.
- "Community Wealth Building" has become a buzzword in the last few years, but more often than not is used to mean individual people or households increasing their incomes and property ownership, which is not the kind of wealth that is available to the community at large - of course, "individual wealth building for some of the people in this community" doesn't have quite the same ring.
Nothing has brought the twistedness of our society's values home to me more than encounters with people from different cultural backgrounds. When I took my father to Nepal with me, my Nepali friends were both shocked and confused that we made any distinction at all between his money and my money. "Baako paisa timro paisa, hoina?" they asked. "Your father's money is your money, isn't it?" My undergrad economics advisor, a Greek expat, was both shocked and appalled that my parents had given me a small loan to assist with tuition, even going so far as having me sign an agreement to repay it. "You Americans even treat your own family like bankers," was his commentary on the situation, even though I told him they weren't charging me interest. In the US, even our family relations are defined in ways that invisibly reinforce our materialist individualism.
And everything in our culture tells us to look to ourselves for meaning and fulfillment, but this is exactly the wrong place to look for these things. We find so many social pathologies - from loneliness epidemics and "deaths of despair," to political violence matched only by political apathy - because our industrialized, commercialized culture has stripped the meaning from so many people's lives. Many are searching desperately for some kind of meaning anywhere, especially the young, and many more have given up the pursuit all together and resigned themselves to one or another source of distraction or anesthetic.
But this is not the way things have to be. As cooperators we know this: that even in our hyper-individualistic society we can come together and all work to build something that is greater than any of us individually. It may not be easy, and it may not come naturally to us contemporary Americans, but we can do it. Anyone who, like me, has been devouring David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything knows that the past is full of examples of societies - even large complex ones - structuring themselves and their lives in very different ways than our own. And in places like Venezuela and Chiapas, whole communities are right now developing, experimenting with, and living in ways that serve to point people outward - towards their neighbors, their community, and the world around them - thereby filling each life with meaning.
Cooperativism always asks us to look beyond our individual selves, to concern ourselves with benefiting every member of our co-op, as well as the communities our co-ops inhabit. This is why, once bitten by the cooperative bug, it is so hard for most of us to leave it behind - it gives our work lives meaning in a way that most other pursuits in our atomized, hyper-individualized society rarely do. It feels good - and meaningful - to be working not only for your own benefit, but for the benefit of others. And yet, there is much work still to be done in our movement. Some scrape by while others pad their personal coffers, some glory in a regular salary while others hope to get enough work to make next month's rent. If we had true solidarity within our movement this would not be the case - it could not be the case. And it is not some act of charity or martydom on behalf of the better off among us that I am suggesting here, but rather a push towards meaning for everyone.
The Original American Values
There's probably never been a finer point put on critiques of 'Western' societies, than those by a Wendat man of the 17th century, one Kandiaronk - possibly the greatest rhetorician of his, or any other, era. Here is what he had to say about European societies, after having traveled to France as a spokesperson for his people:
"I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake."
"Do you seriously imagine that I would be happy to live like one of the inhabitants of Paris, to take two hours every morning just to put on my shirt and make-up, to bow and scrape before every obnoxious galoot I meet on the street who happened to have been born with an inheritance? Do you really imagine I could carry a purse full of coins and not immediately hand them over to people who are hungry; that I would carry a sword but not immediately draw it on the first band of thugs I see rounding up the destitute to press them into naval service?"
These are the words of someone whose society did not encourage self-centeredness or acquisitive materialist individualism and who, as a result, was appalled by the societies of Europe, where the vast majority of the population was forced to follow the orders of their higher-ups in order to receive their daily bread. The French, he said, were a society of slaves and paupers. One Catholic priest wrote of the people living in what is now Nova Scotia, the Mi'kmaq:
"[T]hey say,“you are always fighting and quarreling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbor.” They are saying these and like things continually."
Another priest, around 1628, wrote of the Wendat, Kandiaronk's people:
"They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought that this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely."
These voices from the past are speaking to us today as much as they are speaking to the Europeans of the 1600s. If anyone is prepared to hear the message they are bearing down these long centuries, it should be us: cooperators. It may be beyond our power to remake all of society in such a mold, but we should nonetheless be letting our own lives and organizations and movements be inspired and informed by it.
Others have come before us, and they have shown us how a society not based on materialist individualism and personal bank accounts can function. They point the way not only to the mindset that created an actually existing "solidarity economy," but also to a method of finding meaning in our personal lives. My hope for this new year is that we that we apply that method, more than we ever have before, and that we remember as we do that we are not creating something new in our efforts to build a solidarity economy, but rather reclaiming and relearning the wisdom of those who have gone before us.
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