Community Matters

The dialectic is the heart of healthy relating. Two or more people, on purpose, open to influence, pursuing deeper truths collaboratively are engaging in the dialectic.

• Optimal qualities of healthy relating are warmth, firmness, flexibility, and resolve.
• Superior parenting is warm, firm, and flexible.
• Superior leadership is warm, firm, flexible, positive, and resolved.
• Superior lovers use their capacities to be warm, firm, and flexible through their masculine and feminine sexual essences to maximize polarity and love.

All this shows up in relationships, which shape us as we shape them.

We are conditioned by the groups and cultures we’re immersed in. Culture matters! Yes, we are born unique people, but we always in intimate contact with people and cultures. Even when we feel isolated and alone, we are being shaped by our experience of people and the world.

The last two years I’ve been talking a lot about the genetic roots of personality and behavior, excited by mind-blowing twin-research studies I’d never before seen. The fact that personality is 75% heritable and personality disorders are 80% plus heritable forced me into major paradigm shifts in understanding psychopathology and psychotherapy. Still, relationships, environments, cultures, and life conditions matter! A hundred years of social research and all of human history reveal endless adaptations people have made to different social environments.

In this blog, I want to shift from how we are programmed as individuals to how we are programmed by groups.

Community matters

We humans are ultra social! We crave belonging to groups and to feel like we fit in. This is true at a couples’ level, family level, institutional level, cultural level, and spiritual level. We suffer when we feel isolated or abandoned. We relax when we feel accepted.

The masculine in us us craves deep soul’s purpose and existential meaning, while the feminine in us craves love, expression, and joyful community

It’s good to know our different selves, our core values, and how we want to show up in the world.

Deep soul’s purpose and existential meaning, love through the body and joyful community are all enacted through the countless beliefs, programs, histories, limits, and demands of groups. In these groups the relationships are better or worse, helping us thrive or holding us down.

The pair bond and family unit are the basis of all human institutions, with growth hierarchies or dominator hierarchies throughout. 

These relationships are patterned from the pair bond and the human family system embedded in cultures. Human groups spontaneously generate patterns that determine how people think/fee/behave/relate – all fractals in the evolution of consciousness.

These patterns are evident in every human institution and community, and are intensely influenced by how secure, democratic, or threatened members feel. The life conditions of the culture determine the health, safety, and unity of the members. It matters whether there are enough resources, subjective fairness, and safety for members – optimal life conditions. It matters whether the populace feels insecure, angry, frightened, or cynical – conditions that make people sick and violent. As Don Beck and Chris Cohen say in Spiral Dynamics, life conditions determine worldviews.

Human communities naturally form hierarchies, and they fall into either more dominator hierarchies, or more growth hierarchies.

Dominator hierarchies

Dominator hierarchies involve leaders who enforce compliance with threats, force, and psychological manipulation. A dictatorship is the most obvious example. A ruler intimidates others to comply with his or her desires and demands, and fear is a major motivator. Dominator cultures warp individuals into exclusion and violence. They colonize individual morality by offering inclusion at the cost of submitting moral choices to leaders, and willingness to attack others. Mass formation psychoses are dominator hierarchies writ large.

Psychologists, looking for the origins of authoritarianism and violence have conducted ingenious studies of people being influenced to be cruel in artificially constructed dominator hierarchies. The Zimbardo Stanford Prison studies and the Milgram obedience-to-authority studies are posterchildren for this kind of Lord of the Flies tooth-and-claw research into the destructive shadow of humanity.

Growth hierarchies

Growth hierarchies involve leaders who respect individuals’ feelings, wants, and rights, and look for collaborative/communicative solutions to the inevitable problems that arise in human groups. Growth hierarchies don’t just feel better to participants, they are healthier and have happier members than dominator hierarchies, which begs the question, “How do we craft and maintain cultures/environments to help us and others thrive in growth hierarchies?

First, what do growth hierarchies look like?

Kurt Lewin’s studies on democratic vs authoritarian groups show democratic groups to be more collaborative, respectful, and successful than authoritarian groups or groups with disengaged leaders. He did these studies in the late 1930s with groups of boys.

Geoffrey Cohen’s studies on bullying, and prejudice showed those behaviors significantly reduced by respectful dialectics and shared purpose facilitated by compassionate and firm leaders encouraging kids (especially popular kids) to take stands for kindness and respect. He also demonstrated how structuring cooperation and mutual support enhanced learning in a form of teaching called “Jigsaw teaching,” where kids have to help each other learn to do well.

Diana Blumberg Baumrind’s studies on authoritative parenting (applicable to managers, partners, and friends) showed authoritative parenting to be healthier and more enjoyable than authoritarian, permissive, or neglectful/uninvolved parenting. In huge, well-constructed studies, Baumrind and others demonstrated again and again that parents high in firmness and warmth created family systems where everyone tended to do well. Authoritative parents are high on both firmness (insisting on respectful and caring behavior) and warmth (empathic, caring, and patient).

Later in her career, Baumrind determined that the absolute gold standard of authoritative parenting is harmonious parenting – parents with high warmth, moderate control, and high tolerance or flexibility. This “harmonious” (or non-intrusive) style responds sensitively to context (e.g., knowing when to let minor misbehavior go).

As is apparent to anyone who’s ever taught school, led a group, or run a business, the principles of authoritative parenting are central to all human groups. The authoritative, harmonious parenting style supports thriving groups.

What’s clear from diverse forms of social and neurobiological research is that people operating with interest, kindness, openness to influence, empathy, and resolve to make things better (the dialectic) are better parents, leaders, lovers, and friends.