The Company We Keep

Fiction can become truth, can't it?  Nearly any statement, however absurd, can acquire an aura of gravitas if it is repeated often enough.  I have seen this first hand, and lived to tell about it, but it was touch and go for awhile.

Remember your Psychology 101?  You don't?  Why not?  It had some good stuff.  Some of the good stuff was Martin Seligman's experiment on creating learned helplessness in dogs, whereby after they repeatedly had been unable to escape a shock, they "gave up" and did not attempt to escape further shocks, even when there was no impediment to them leaving.  The dogs were not able to recognize when the situation changed, and "I'm helpless" became their truth.  On a slight tangent, the opposite also is true, at least for frogs.  I'm told that a frog can be boiled to death in an open pan of water if the heat is turned up in small enough increments.  The frog "adjusts" to the change in the water temperature, until it is too late.  In this case, the frog does not recognize that the situation has changed, and "I'm ok" becomes its truth.

What about people?  I'm not talking about shocking or boiling them, but everyone hears from grade school on to be nice to others and to not be mean, because "It will damage their self esteem."  I personally loathe that phrase and will never use it, partially because the people who DO use it never can define what they mean by "self esteem" and partially because it is possible to damage a person's self concept in the other direction, so that s/he has an artificially inflated sense of competence.  I digress.  The good and kind thing to do is to encourage people to be the best they can be, so that encouragement becomes truth, and people believe that they can at least attempt difficult things.  None of us can become  "anything", as we are told in the early grades, but all of us are capable of more than we think we are.

Why is the company we keep important?  We were raised to think it was a matter of reputation, and it is that, but it's more.  The company we keep is important, because their truth becomes our truth.  If a constant message is "You are powerless to improve your situation", that becomes true.  If a constant message is "No matter how hard you work, your efforts will be either misguided or insufficient", that becomes true.  The truly unfortunate outcome is when people begin to generalize these statements and apply them to ALL aspects of their lives.  "You are powerless to improve your situation" in a particular work setting mutates into "I am powerless to break free from this situation, because I am powerless across the board."  The statement "No matter how hard you work, your efforts will be either misguided or insufficient" becomes "The amount of effort I put into my work has no bearing on any possible rewards, so I might as well dial back my effort in all situations."  These overgeneralizations are spirit breakers that feed a downward spiral of complaining, which leads to feelings of dispiritedness, which lead to more complaining.  Nothing positive is possible, and that's the "truth".

I subscribed to that alternate truth for years, and completely bought the fiction that I was incapable of doing anything other than what I was doing, that this was the best I could hope for, and that the situation I was in was better than nothing.  All of these were untrue, but as I listen to my friends and former coworkers talk to me and to each other about their work and their futures, I hear these themes recycled over and over as truth, and there is a dreariness to the conversations that keep looping back on themselves.  "I'm ok, I just have to hang in there, there is nothing else I can do" they say, either not realizing that the water is coming to a boil around them, or realizing it but no longer looking to escape. The company we keep IS important, so very important.  Our truth is shaped by them.