Late-Night Thoughts: The Lovers and the Interdependent Self

Hmmm. Are my thoughts coherent enough to write into a blog post? We’re going to find out together.

I have a few different topics swirling around in my mind, all of which are loosely related. For one, I’ve been thinking a lot about community and what it means to be in community. I’m living in a new place looking to build up new social connections, and because of that I’m thinking a lot about what community looks like, why it matters, and how to create it.

Second, I’ve been thinking about the magical notion of interdependence. Magic (and magical religions like Wicca) relies on an assumption that everything in the universe is connected. Everything relates to everything else—and because of that, magicians have this idea that you can affect X by acting on Y, because there is some deep indelible connection between them. Those who take a spirit-heavy view of the world (the kind of view that practitioners often call animistic, although that’s a complicated term and I don’t always love it for a couple of reasons) would say that the universe is full of persons—and that every interaction we have with the world around us is a way of building or sustaining an interpersonal relationship, even though not all of the persons involved are living humans. The relationship I have to my home, to the land I live on, to my car, and so on: these are all forms of relationship. No one exists in isolation; rather, we are all constantly in relationship with others, and we all constantly depend on others for our existence and survival.

This leads into yet another topic that’s been on my mind lately, which is the delicate balance between the self and the group. If all of us exist in relationship to each other and there’s this sense of group belonging underlying who we are (that is to say, “I” am best understood as part of a larger whole), how much room does that leave for the individual? Or does the self give way entirely to the other?

The basic worldview of the dominant culture in the United States is fundamentally individualistic. We treat the basic social unit as the individual, the me, and we see society as the interaction of a whole lot of mes who are jostling with each other to get their own way. Sometimes, those private interests aren’t incompatible (yay!), but the basic assumption in American culture is that conflict and competition between individual wants/needs are inevitable (and, implicitly, good).

And that view just seems so deeply and grossly myopic to me. The assumption that we are all separate, all isolated from each other, all mes fighting for domination in a Hobbesian state of nature—as opposed to the idea that each of us is fundamentally part of an us. That the basic unit is the group, and that we are working together collectively and collaboratively as parts of a larger whole.*

But this view, itself, still needs to be drilled down on. It’s very appealing to talk about the virtues of collectivism, to prioritize we over I—but if we’re too flat-footed about that approach, it can also cause serious problems. The prioritization of a collective (especially an idealized and imagined one) can come at the expense of the individual, and then very bad things happen. At the extreme, you get fascism. Even in less extreme cases, this kind of attitude can easily lead to justifying the mistreatment and marginalization of minorities, the idea that the rights of the few are unimportant in comparison with the will of the many. And it can have troublesome implications for things like disability rights: if the community is the only important thing, then people who aren’t able to participate in the community in expected ways get treated as villains and outcasts.

And then there’s yet another thought circling around in my head (I promise, it all feels related to me): The nature of love. I spend a lot of time thinking about a philosophical definition of love, because I think this word is so complicated and so easily weaponized to mean bad things. For one thing, I think notions of love (especially of romantic love) get tangled up easily in our popular imagination with notions of possession; the dominant narrative is that if I love you, you belong to me in some way and I have certain kinds of claims over you.** And love also gets tangled up in a sort of paternalism that feels really uncomfortable to me: If I love you, I want what’s best for you, but sometimes what’s best for you isn’t what you want. In some cases, this seems healthy or even necessary; friends staging an intervention for someone struggling with addiction are expressing love in a way that is likely to raise anger and make the person in question feel like their autonomy is not being respected. In other cases, it seems blatantly awful; there is something clearly wrong with someone usurping a life-altering decision from me because they think they know what’s best for me better than I do. But that kind of thing happens all the time, and gets justified as love.

The Lovers

So I have all of these thoughts swirling around my head, and they all feel related in some way. They’re all about how we establish a symbiosis between the part and the whole, the me and the us, the self and the collective. Because I think both of those things are valuable in their own right. We need to live in a world that respects individuals and grants people (including, in that “animistic” sense, people who aren’t living humans) autonomy over themselves. But likewise, we need to live in a world that respects community and collective cooperation.

I think that a problem arises when we treat either of these things as more fundamental than the other. If we treat community as merely a group of mes, we miss out on something fundamental about community: That it is greater than the sum of its parts, and that the needs of the community are in many cases different (and differently valuable) than the needs of any of its individual members. But likewise, I think there’s a problem if we treat individuals as merely the building blocks that make up community. If we eliminate people’s individual identities and treat them as nothing more than the components that make up the whole, we stop valuing the well-being of the people who actually inhabit the community. That attitude leads to treating people as disposable in a way that I just don’t like.

So how do we maintain that symbiosis? How do we keep the healthy balance between I and we, treating both things as fundamentally valuable without falling into the trap of making one subordinate to the other?

I don’t know. If I did know, I’d have solved all of humanity’s problems, and wouldn’t that be great? But it’s something on my mind of late.

Specifically, all of these circling thoughts have centered on one card in the Tarot deck: The Lovers. This is the only two-bodied card, the only member of the Major Arcana that depicts people in community with each other rather than just one individual personality or force. The Lovers is a complicated card and represents a whole range of themes: romantic love, partnership, indecision, the tension between head and heart, balance, equality, and partnership. It’s all of these things at once, and even though it’s the most famous card in the deck, I think it’s really underrated as one of the hardest to pin down.

In this case, the thing about the Lovers that draws my attention is that it shows people learning how to be with each other. Whether you’re taking a RWS-style Lovers card (with only a man and a woman) or a TdM-style one (with a man choosing between two potential prospects), the card shows people in relation to each other. And above them there is an angel, representing the higher force that unites them. There is me, there is you, and between us there is this third thing that is greater than us both. And somehow, in navigating a relationship with each other, we have to learn how to honor all three of those.

I don’t really have a punch line for this post. I don’t have a concrete place that I’m going. I’m just tumbling some thoughts around and seeing how they bounce off of each other. This thing feels important, the relationship between the individual and the collective. It feels like the heart of ethics in many ways: In any relationship, we need to act in ways that honor your needs as an individual, my needs as an individual, and our needs as a collective; that’s true for one-on-one relationships as well as for, like, national governments. It just happens to be much harder when we scale it up, because there are more individuals involved (who at least have contradictory wants and who potentially do have contradictory needs) and because the needs of the collective become more obscure and harder to identify. But it really does seem to me that the goal of right behavior is to maintain that homeostatic balance of individuals and the group they make up. Doing that successfully, I think, is what counts as love.

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*Side note: The major flaws of second-wave feminism have been thoroughly discussed, most notably the ways that its most prominent voices were white and middle-class and the movement often didn’t make room for the intersection of sexism with other axes of oppression. That said, one thing I deeply admire about the second wave is that I think it was fundamentally collectivist in its approach. It saw social problems as needing to be overcome with community and a radical transformation of our social structures. It treated injustice as a systemic issue rather than a set of obstacles for isolated individuals to overcome on their own. I think that attitude was really valuable.

**This is a baffling and horrifying concept to me, but I have a couple of friends who unwaveringly advocate for it. So it’s not just some fringe thing I can attribute to Christian fundamentalism or whatever; it’s something that even people I respect and admire think about love.