About Me, You and Them

by Eric S. Meyer, CEO, USALL Systems

 In our everyday lives, we often hear the words “me,” “you” and “them.” Such terms not only imply each person is separate, but reinforce the mentality of person against person. These types of assumptions are dangerous because of the attitudes they embody and manifest in behaviors and actions. Precisely, community is about “us” which includes everyone, while cities today are built upon the notion of small groups, often families or gangs, that comprise micro communities.

 Community has been necessity for humanity to survive for tens of thousands of years. Humans are preprogrammed to get depressed when straying from any life path that does not benefit the community, where that means their tribe, clan, kingdom, or other social structure. Those humans who failed to get depressed from such separation from other humans would die out more rapidly, so that those who were truly successful at producing the most children who in turn had progeny of their own tended to reproduce in greater numbers than those people who were a family in the hills or mountains somewhere living their own life differently.

 Our values in America today are double-standard. We are taught in school to conform and not question authority. In later life, we are taught to be different and try new things. Such double standards are a sign that our values are definable by the social-economic class to which we are told – either by so-called teachers or by the television media -- and we often internalize such propaganda, for better or for worse.

 Community is based on common values and vision, but also on individual focus and hopes. Community, when done right, is about everyone having a part to play in the workings of the entire system, so everyone has a meaningful contribution to the whole. When a person believes they are part of a cohesive group, they can thrive and focus on connecting emotionally with others.

 Cities, or networks of people, are the opposite to community, in that they teach individual values and vision, but shared focus and hopes. With cities, the focus is on making money and having superficial relationships. Hopes, within cities, are geared towards everyone having a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, Tide laundry soap, Colgate toothpaste, an expensive car and house, a gold ring set for husband and wife, with the marriage being setup to make babies, with the husband earning money and the wife caring for the house and children.

 The problem with cities is that values need to be talked about and visions built up by each individual while in dialog with other individuals. The focus of a healthy human being is to struggle towards self-actuation towards reflection and listening, and self-expression through caring and compassionate communication. In other words, cities are built to generate money by exploiting every possible participant.

 Community is about giving, share and protecting common resources, so as to help strive towards nonsustaining and happiness, instead of towards growth and insecurity. Capitalism is based on constant insecurity as a motivation to go to work and keep employed. Happiness is based on lowering the wants for things one does not have and focusing and is based on being creative in how to share resources and contribute one's knowledge and talents to integrate into the fabric of community.

 The idea of crime and punishment is to deprive needs for physical, emotional, spiritual and sexual contact with loved ones, such as family members and significant others, as well as create problems with the need for integration into the community. These two manifest themselves as “touch” and “career.” Every human needs to both be in daily physical contact with someone they care about and to be able to participate within the place they live near (or can commute to by car or bus) in an economic and personal way.

 Personal participation is about letting one's personality, hopes, values, focus and vision reflect unobstructed in everything they do and to affect everybody they come into contact with over their lifetime.  What is means is that contribution is about doing what one wants can enjoys to better the community towards specific goals and directions of abstract journey over the generations.

 Abstract journey is all about where a group of citizens are pulling the fate of everyone in that region along and towards some future reality. This means that if someone is pursuing a particular dream, then they will drag the entire community into that reality, for better or worse. World leaders have strong pull on millions of people's fates, but it is the common individual who, collectively, has supreme influence over the future of the world and upcoming generations.

 It is quite common to accept the illusion as truth that each person is alone and their actions are isolated to themselves, or at least their families and friends. The reality is that every person over their lifetime will tend to influence millions of people on average, perhaps many more. This is because of a simple explanation: that everything anyone does or says or even thinks has the power to influence someone else just a little bit, and the geometry of this is enormous, in that such a mathematical structure every part is invariable linked and connected profoundly to every other part – in this case every human life – with the rest of the world and back again, to approach infinity. Such a loop is quite real, and for someone to claim that all parts of the Universe are connected and influence all other parts may be true, but the previous explication seems to give the entire grandness and complexity more justice.

 When someone says, “me,” what do they mean? It would suggest they are thinking of a disunity between self and friends/family (“us”) and others (“them.”) As argued in this essay, there really is no such thing as distinct “me,” “us,” or “them.” There are only perspectives, and perspectives are often warped and biased, and are in no way, shape or form suitable to prove a theory or reality by themselves alone. Indeed, every human is neither alone nor isolated, but will remain part of a unified system until death, and even then, their actions as values, hopes, focus and visions will live on forever.