social hot potato

I feel many humans play social potato. As tribes, we've learned to coordinate, collaborate, and coexist in groups, enhancing our lifestyles and survival as a society. And artifacts have emerged between us that promote the cohesion and the flow within our groups.

Flow of information, flow of emotions. Flow of technology, flow of matter. Flows that spawn collective awareness and collective intent from the many units we embody.

A frequent topic of collective dynamics is the regulation of flows, usually for the sake of stability. Emotional flow, in particular, is visible in the individual, and for instance, a blockage of flow through a human can expand and heat up into anger and frustration. Their potential to explode and damage surrounding humans, physically or emotionally, is often considered detrimental to the stability, the cohesion of a group. Its potential to seep out with searing heat, through untreated leaks and erode its surroundings can gradually repel other humans who avoid damage to themselves.

Other such unstable emotional flow dynamics exist, like depression, or overzeal. Artifact behaviors have arisen that can help regulate these. The poster artifacts I ponder on are "Thank you" and "I'm sorry".

I understand "Thank you" as "Your existence or your actions have, directly or indirectly, helped me feel gladness. I feel gratitude for this."

I understand "I'm sorry" as "I feel regret about some choices I have made, maybe particularly because I perceive that they have, directly or indirectly, helped you feel pain."

They both contain an emotional component and an informational component. The emotions, expressed as stated, are gratitude and regret. In the fuzzy, fluid, partial context of morality, they both offer a shift in status, in the same "direction". Gratitude offers your status to rise, regret offers my status to fall. In either case, the energy transmitted is akin to subservience, a "gift of moral status". Such a gift, I understand, helps the cohesion and stability of a group. It flows moral status from one to another, is a voluntary act of the sayer, and often gladdens the receiver. This particular human relationship has been infused with gladness.

The information that both of them carry feel equivalent to me: They both produce a voluntary acknowledgement of someone's actions, mine or yours, and of the effect that they presumably had on the other. The usual association to the moral concepts of good and bad do not belong to the information being transmitted. They are both, in essence, an acknowledgement of actions or events, and a sharing of how one perceives these to have affected the two parties.

I see both as regulators of emotional flow, stabilisers for social cohesion. And though they likely helped human groups cohere and survive across millennia, panaceas they are not. Frequently are false "thank you"'s and "I'm sorry"'s uttered among us, as obligations, as perfunctoriness, as reflexes deeply learned and barely noticed, barely heard. These tools used in falsehood, willing or not, often preserve the shape, the structure of a social collective. The image remains an inflexible, dry husk, unsupported by the substance, the weave of genuine emotions, of recognition and acknowledgement among us. As such, it becomes dry, brittle, inflexible lest it shatter into coalitions of people, whose emotions could then be harnessed and targeted towards polarization and mutual damage. For now, the husk remains.

These words uttered unwittingly, falsely, perfunctorily; they can leak our energy. In either of these false expressions, the expressed does not match the inner state. And such mismatch is a detriment to our own being, I perceive. Flow (graph?) theory states that inflow equals outflow at any one node.

If I hide some of my true inner state with a "thank you" or an "I'm sorry", there remains something within me that was disallowed from expression. I have felt many such filters in me. And with time, these initially small remnants can gather, coagulate, block, and damage parts of my being.

And if I say it falsely, from obligation or image, I am outflowing something I did not have. False though it may be, the energy to express it, plus the energy to coerce myself into saying it, comes from somewhere. I see it as an energy leak: a reactive behavior in me that causes my awareness, my conscious choice, to lose traction of the moment. A possession or hijacking of my awareness by a part of me. In that moment, my energy does not align with my choice anymore, but with my reaction.

I feel it pertinent to say that raw expression is not necessary for a healthy flow. My body and being are capable of filtering, processing, refining, and transforming: emotions, matter, thoughts, and more. A hidden resentment, for instance, need not be expressed with brooding anger, nor does it need to be defused in an outflow of apology. It can also be cleaned by self into self. The key step to do so is acceptance.

First I notice it exists.

Then I allow it to exist.

Then, if I allow myself to feel it, to dive fully, I feel its pain. Its discomfort. As I feel this, I process it, and come to more fully understand the effects of this resentment, and of its cause, upon my life until then.

As the pains are felt, understood, recognized, and accepted as something that is part of me, they dissolve, leaving relief and sometimes gratitude in its place. More space inside. Cleaned by awareness. This is a task impossible to complete via blame, revenge, or falsehood. Pain asks to be felt.