BREAKING BONDS
by
ROBERT J. LEWIS
___________________________________
If it
hasn’t yet happened on your watch, you can be sure it will,
and very likely on multiple occasions; and depending on the thinness
or thickness of your one and only epidermis, you’ll never
be quite the same.
It’s
more likely to occur when circumstance finds you outside your
comfort zone, while travelling for example, on a business trip,
or in any environment that puts you in contact with people you
don’t or hardly know. You are particularly vulnerable if
you are alone and lonely, and looking to satisfy the basic human
need of connecting with another human being.
The modus
operandi is almost embarrassingly predictable. A polite stranger
finds a pretext to offer assistance or requires it himself, which
leads to a casual exchange of nothing of importance before the
smooth operator (code for ingratiating interloper, usually male)
begins to inquire about your situation, what brings you to his
neck of the woods, what you do in life; and over the course of
perhaps several hours the seeds of a relationship begin to grow
roots, as you happily preside over the gradual satisfying of your
hunger to bond with another human being. During the initial getting–to-know-you
period, you are alert and sensitive to the multitude of signs
and signals that are being sent out and received, wanting to be
sure that before you commit emotionally, the bonding process is
two-way, that you are both on the same page as it concerns the
critical developmental stage.
When
you rudely discover that the preternaturally considerate and obliging
stranger is not and was never interested in entering into any
kind of personal relationship, but was exploiting your vulnerability
to bond in order to extract a favour (usually sexual or business
related), you are hurt and disappointed in both the outcome and
yourself for not identifying the correct signals. If this is already
a repeat of past experience, it might be the back breaker that
makes you decide that enough is enough, that in order to guard
against future unwanted manipulation-exploitation of your highly
valued feelings, from this day on you will command yourself, against
your better nature, to be reflexively suspicious of any encounter
with seemingly well-intended strangers, doubting your ability
to distinguish between the actor and the authentic person –
a sad state of affairs that forces you to suppress the most basic
of human emotions – the DNA-driven desire (need) to bond.
Existential
philosophy begins with the pre-supposition that being is being-in-the-world
with-others.
The singer/poet
Leonard Cohen writes, “there are children in the morning,
they are leaning out for love, they will lean that way forever.”
For our entire lives we are those children leaning out for love
and affection, and when we discover we have been tricked and sold
again, it’s as if the most precious part of us has been
ripped out of our being and left for dying.
In the
existential after-math of the meltdown, we become equal opportunity
prosecutors. We accuse ourselves for failing to properly assess
the true nature of the encounter, of failing to sniff out the
deliberate dissimulation, and we are quick to lock up for life
the conniving perpetrator in the Despicable Human Being category
for having exploited our goodness, our adult innocence for a selfish
end.
Oscar
Wilde, for whom the ends – beauty and pleasure -- justify
the means in his most famous creation, Dorian Gray, dryly notes:
“What people call insincerity is simply a method by which
we can multiply our personalities,” We at once chuckle and
cringe at the witticism because it forces us to concede that the
truth that inheres in the general category of these one-sided,
life-altering encounters, upon closer inspection, is more nuanced
than the straight forward good and evil, right and wrong binaries
-- in especially the daily conduct of our lives in a mostly unjust,
iniquitous world – but for the privileged few.
If we
are to lay bare the truth of the encounter in all its facets,
the first among the concessions we begrudgingly make to the person
who has taken advantage of our naiveté is to allow for
his highly probably material want. In the many economically disadvantaged
regions of the world, the offending party is merely one of among
the faceless multitudes unable to provide the basic necessities
of life for his immediate family. How should we judge the man
whose well has dried up and an arbitrary contract (a border on
a map) prevents him from accessing a nearby source of water? The
man who carries in his thoughts the suffering of his family for
lack of food and shelter will of necessity shrink to a vanishing
point the sum of his moral convictions and the laws of the land
into one clear objective: to get from one day to the next. He
will be judged by those in his care and will judge himself on
his performance. And it’s all one and the same whether he
finds temporary work, becomes a thief or a confidence man to make
the frazzled ends of his life meet not at the end of the rainbow
but in the deep of the hole where the circumstance of his birth
-- climate and politics -- has deposited him. Meanwhile, on the
other side of the Dow Industrial, where our halcyon days over
the course of a lifetime are exponentially easier than his, we
will surely grant that if the shoe were on the other foot we would
walk the same path.
.
However, experience also informs us that not every confidence
man is cut from the same coarse cloth, and our reaction will vary
accordingly. We should not be expected to look past the snake
charmer whose narrow purpose is to entice us to visit his carpet
shop, jewelry outlet, or 5-star resto, who is already rich and
wants to get richer, who enjoys exploiting the emotional vulnerability
of others to satisfy an incontinent lust for power and control?
Of these types, there is only one proper response: to know them
by their category in order to sidestep them before they attempt
to step down on us.
The more
difficult challenge is to identify those persons in whom poorly
understood, vague promptings are operating, such that the offender,
after the fact, is at once baffled and shamed by his own uncharacteristically
opprobrious conduct. A man, heir to a colonial past, may unwittingly
prey on another’s emotional vulnerability to right (code
for avenge) perceived historical wrongs as part of an obscure
healing process. An adult serial abuser may be unaware of being
abused as a child and the vicious circle in which he is ensnared
– often for life. In these cases, the child is indeed the
“father of the man” but whose childhood has been stolen.
There
comes a time in life when most of us learn that life isn’t
fair, and that far too many people are hurting in the world. An
arguably significant percentage of us are subconsciously driven
to hurt back, which is why, the instinct notwithstanding, suffering
the effects of an accumulation of negative encounters, we find
ourselves reflexively refusing our predisposition to bond.
It is
only very recent in human history that we find ourselves in the
conduct of our daily lives embedded in the midst of strangers,
whose pasts and predilections are completely unknown. When we
were living in tribes, and later hamlets and small villages, everyone
was known to everyone else. The notion of preying on someone’s
bonding instincts for personal gain didn’t exist as we know
it in our time. If today, bonding with strangers is an occupational
hazard, it is because the risks of a negative outcome are more
likely than the rewards. The frigid demeanor we project to the
world, the carapace the history of our negative experiences makes
us grow is a cynical reminder that the heart is too fragile a
thing to subject to a roll of the dice.
What
all emotionally exploitive relationships share are the gains and
losses to be accounted for and the hard lessons to be learned.
The fraudster or confidence man who is caught in the act rudely
learns that he must improve his performance if he wishes to procure
the advantage he seeks, while the victim will be more circumspect
and judicious in all future encounters with strangers.
The big
loser is the bonding process itself that is left dangling over
an existential void, while the legions of the disabused swell
their ranks. How many of us count among the jaded-for-lifers,
of necessity having to restrict our circle of contacts to only
those we know and trust. How do we resolve the dichotomy that
obliges us to suppress the best and most beautiful part of ourselves
in order to be ourselves?
If the
iniquitous distribution of the world’s wealth is to an uncertain
extent responsible for producing the mindset that says exploiting
someone’s predisposition to bond is fair game in an unfair
world, we may one day decide that a more equitable sharing of
our material advantage is the best way to save the world from
the growing cynicism that prevails in our encounters with “the
other.”
