Tom Guarriello explores Gemeinschaftsgefühl, the German concept of fellow feeling that binds humans together evolutionarily. During COVID-19, when physical togetherness is impossible, he argues the internet lets us maintain that shared bond and calls on people to stay home, create, and hold onto empathy for the reunions ahead.
Well, hi, it's Tom. Who? Yes, that's right, it's Tom. I haven't been here for a while, but I thought maybe at a moment like this it might not be a bad idea to just say a little something about where we are. We. There's that word, we. You know, the idea of community has always been important to me. It's been something that I saw as a strong potential for the internet many years ago, which was why I thought that YouTube was going to be transformative in human history. And it turns out it has been transformative. Not in all the ways I had anticipated, but certainly it's been transformative. And here we are now at another moment in history. Not that we haven't had events like the coronavirus pandemic before in human history, we have. But we haven't had an event like this one in the kind of context that we have now. That context is this context, the context of being able to be with one another at a distance. In fact, the only way that we can be with one another now is at a distance. And so I, you know, I thought, uh, just a couple of thoughts about this idea of community and we. You know, being with one another has been the greatest strength of our species. If it weren't for our ability to cooperate and collaborate with one another, our species would not have achieved the incredible things that we've achieved, starting with moving from being individual foragers to becoming bands of hunter-gatherers and communities of, uh, agricultural, um, sharers of tasks and of food and of life. And so that deep collaborative sense of our ability to be with one another productively is way down deep in our biological and sociological history, our heritage. And that ability depends upon our ability to be with one another in a way that is based upon not simply our own individual survival, but on our— what a psychologist that I have a great deal of respect for, Alfred Adler, what he called, a German word, Gemeinschaftsgefühl. Leave it to the Germans, right? Gemeinschaftsgefühl. What does that mean? It means fellow feeling. Fellow feeling. This sense of having a common bond with others in community. And it's that fellow feeling that has been with us ever since our ancestors started to produce together the things that they needed to survive, and that we're using to produce these kinds of, of moments of being with one another in a, a way of reaching out and expressing our regard for one another, our collective empathy for one another. And you see it in all the things that we're producing now online in the midst of this horrible crisis. People yearning to be with one another and to express that desire to reach out and make one another laugh and make one another cry and express that sense of we, of us. And I— and of course we have sub-us's and sub-we's that we've created, and some of those sub-us's and some we's are antagonistic toward one another. We believe that we're divided and that those divisions are justified, and they are the stuff of victories and defeats. And I certainly am not going to contest that. That's what we do. We divide into tribes, and those tribes are, are not always of like minds with one another. But beneath all of that tribal differentiation, distinction, sometimes disdain, beneath all of that is that fellow feeling, that Gemeinschaftsgefühl, that sense of being with others that is vital to our to our lives individually and collectively. And so this idea about, well, I maybe am not going to get this disease, and so I'm going to go on doing whatever I want to do, you know, to hell with old people like this old creep, what do I care? That idea, uh, uh, that's a, that's a relatively new idea. In our history as a species. The older idea is that we in this little circle need one another in order to survive, in order to thrive, in order to experience that sense of collective well-being that has been at the roots of our civilization. So Stay home. You hear it over and over and over again, but I just wanted to add one more old guy voice to the chorus. Stay home. Watch TV. Make videos. Make music. Make love to the people that you are in contact with. Be a member of the broader community. This broader tribe that, uh, that we've created with one another. In not a very long time, maybe a month, maybe two, we're going to be able to be with one another again physically. We're going to be able to do the things that we are used to doing, and When we are able to do that again, then we're going to be able to express this wanting to be with one another in the ways that we're used to. We'll have— I know we're going to have celebrations, we're going to have parties, we're going to have parades. There are going to be all manner of expressions of the relief that we're going to experience when we're finally able to feel safe being with one another. Let's keep those moments, the promise of those moments in mind as the reward that we're going to have for not being with one another now, for, for keeping away from one another so that we don't lead to suffering for our fellow beings. And that's really all about what I wanted to say. Just that, you know, let's trust on our ancient heritage, the mechanisms that we've brought down with us from the beginning of history. Let's trust those to get us through this short period of time so that we can get back then to being with one another in those more comfortable, more celebratory, more joyful ways that we all look forward to. Um, in the very near future. All right, that's about it. Good to see you again. See you out there.
