I spent the morning writing down all of the unwritten social
rules I could think of. You know, the rules that govern the way everybody
behaves in social situations; the rules that determine how (and on whom) they invest
their time, attention, and heart. Most people don’t have to try and write these
rules down to discover them, but I’m an idiot when it comes to these sorts of
things, so I do. Basically, the rules I came up with could be fairly effectively
summarized in the following way:
·
You have limited time, attention, and love to
spend; so be careful who and on whom you spend it
As soon as I wrote this down I knew I was onto something
bigger – a theory of social behavior! The statement I just made sounded like
basic principles of economics: in a world of infinite wants and needs but
finite resources (in a word: scarcity), how do you invest the resources you have
to acquire the most economic goods and services possible? In short, economics
is about maximizing welfare in a context of scarcity.
My theory for social situations is analogous. I call it the
theory of the social economy, and it revolves around the answer to the
following question:
·
In a world of infinite social wants and needs,
how do you invest your finite social capital (time, attention, love, etc) so as
to achieve the maximal social welfare?
We human beings have a default mode of social interaction:
we’re trying to maximize our social wealth – just like in the real economy,
where we’re trying to maximize our economic wealth. Some of us are more
ruthless about it than others, but we all would like to be wealthier. In other
words, in social contexts as in the money economy, people rarely give freely;
most of the time interactions are characterized by reciprocity: the exchange of
goods and services of roughly equal value.
This realization provided the beginnings of an answer to my
continual social bafflement. Isn’t friendship grand? Then why isn’t everyone
looking to be friends with everyone? Why do we form a few strategic friendships
and then settle down into relative inactivity and ignore the plethora of
opportunities to strike epic friendships that wander past us every day?
I realized that we aren’t usually thinking about social
interaction that way; we’re too preoccupied with our needs to be much concerned
with mere wants. And we are too terrified of scarcity (the fear that there won’t
be enough to even meet our needs, let alone our wants) to think of social
situations that way.
As human beings, what we are after most of all is a
knowledge of our worth; how meaningful, how important are we? And what we need
most is to know that we are worth something. In fact, we are desperate to
discover that we are worth a lot. But because our worth as intelligences, as
individuals, as human beings, is
intangible and resists direct measurement we settle for measuring the next closest
thing: what is our worth to others? For instance, we often ask ourselves: does
anyone care about me? how much do people want to be with me? How
cool/important/beautiful/wonderful are the people who want to be with me? In
other words, we use our social wealth – the sum total of all the social goods
and services our social capital can buy – as a measure of our worth. Hence the
enormous drive within each of us to get wealthier and, therefore, the need to
take care how (and on whom) we invest our scarce social capital. There’s only
so many hours in a day, and only so many friends you can manage at a time; and
at the end of each day, they are the
ones you will rely on to provide a strong measure of what you’re worth.
This realization explains a lot. It explains why we are so
desperate for friendship. It explains why so often those who are most desperate
for friends aren’t offering to be
good friends, they just want to have them.
(Not that I despise such people – on the contrary, I have often been such a
person.) It explains why we are so careful and selective in how we choose to
spend our social capital; invest it poorly and your intrinsic worth as an
individual declines!
Except that it doesn’t. The only thing declining in such
circumstances is your perception of
your worth – your measurement of it. But social wealth was never more than a
proxy for personal worth. And the truth is, a person’s social wealth is a
terrible proxy for her worth as an individual.
If so, then the question (one of the most fundamental
questions of human existence) remains: how can you know your own worth? After
all, we’re all desperate to know.
The answer this question is the first step in establishing
an entirely new theory for human social interaction; God’s way is built on a
surprising yet simple truth: we have infinite worth.
Now at this point a lot of you are probably rolling your
eyes and thinking, “this is soooo tacky. Why should I believe that all of the
people on this planet – many of whom are bona fide assholes – have an enormous
(let alone infinite) worth?” I’ll
agree with you that it isn’t obvious from daily observations of human behavior.
It certainly isn’t obvious from an
examination of human history. But let me say this: God loves you. With his whole soul. You are his precious child, and you
are worth more than this entire universe to him; and nothing you do – nor anything
anyone else does – can ever diminish your worth in his eyes. Not one bit.
How do I know this? Personal experience; revelation;
intuition; knowledge from before that burns in me, despite the veil. Yes, at
some level it is a matter of faith. Or if you can arrive at the same conclusion
via another route, whatever you do believe in this. You are worthy of all the
love in the world and more.
If the world’s way of social interaction is the theory of
the social economy, God’s way is the theory of the wholehearted life. Here is
rule number one:
1.
When it comes to how much you’re worth: don’t
doubt it. In fact, don’t even think
about it. You are worthy to hang out with anyone; to be anyone’s friend; to be
a part of every social circle. If
someone excludes you – or no one invites you – this says absolutely nothing
about what you’re worth. Don’t doubt it – don’t even think about it! Just
assume you have infinite worth and are infinitely loved, and act as if that were
the case at all times. Because it is!
Where does rule number one put us? In a whole new place, vis-à-vis
the social economy model. Compared to the latter, we are so free! Thanks to the
infinite plenty of God’s love and our own infinite worth, we are freed from the
constraints of maximizing social welfare through careful, shrewd investment of
social capital. In short, we don’t have to worry about ourselves anymore; and
as a result are free to base our investment choices on our social wants (not
needs!) and the needs and wants of others.
Which brings me to rule number two of the wholehearted
theory:
2.
Give generously of your time, attention, and
love to everyone who wanders into your life.
It’s as simple as that. When in social situations, don’t be
someone you’re not; don’t think about you. Be genuine and full of love. Take
every opportunity to share with the people you know how much you love them, how
incredibly awesome they are, and how much they mean to you. And take every
opportunity to get to know someone new. In so doing, you will also be letting
them know how much God loves them, and helping to build their faith in the
greatest truth of all.
This paradigm is so massively superior to the social economy
theory of social situations, it’s simply stunning. In the wholehearted theory,
there are no hidden motives; there are no politics, no maneuvering. People are
completely free to be who they really are – free from the fear of rejection and
scarcity – and give according to their unique gifts. This is the paradigm on
which social interactions (and society writ large) in Zion are based.
I experimented on this one Sunday, and it completely changed
everything (for that one day, at least. You’d be surprised how hard it is to
maintain action according to this paradigm from day to day). My congregation is
comprised entirely of young, talented, single 20-somethings. And the mode of
social interaction is the “mingle” – a sort of free-form ‘go up and talk to
whoever you want/whoever will talk to you’ situation with dozens to hundreds of
people standing around chatting. It’s pretty much a waking nightmare for me.
This past Sunday, though, I began by firmly believing that I
was good enough for any of those people; and not in an arrogant sort of way,
but in a ‘God thinks I’m epically awesome, so if anyone here doesn’t think so,
it’s because they just don’t know me yet’ sort of way. I refused to think further
about my worth, to question it, or to try and evaluate it based on how my
social interactions were going. In fact, I refused to let myself think about me
and how I was doing at all! I just smiled, basked in the happy light of God’s
love for me as an individual, and focused on rule number two: go make someone
else feel loved too.
It changed everything. I talked to girls who wouldn’t give
me the time of day before. I went straight up to them (without having to summon
any courage either!) and asked them how they were doing; listened to them; told
them how glad I was to hear they were doing well. They seemed pleasantly
surprised – shocked, even – at the change they could feel in me. And I met some new people too –
several, in fact! I noticed that people responded more warmly, seemed more
excited to be talking to me, and more eager to meet me than on usual Sundays at
church.
I am struck – as I so often have been of late – by the
incredible power of the principles of Zion. By the way they transform life from
a self-focused affair to one based on the welfare of others; how they transform
community and society into a cause worth living for; and how they change life
from a dreary daily search for meaning and fulfilment to a light-infused,
collective journey towards God.
