116: How to Rehumanize

Speaker 1: All right. So I don't know if any of this is going to matter. I don't know if it's going to be enough. I don't know if we're going to get out of any of this alive, and I certainly don't believe we're going to fix any of this in time. But I do know this, if I abandon my humanity, if I shut down my grief or outsource my conscience or collapse into comfort or control or convenience, then I'm going to lose something inside myself that I can't get back, and it won't be the world that's lost. It will be me. So I'm not here. I haven't been for the past few weeks to sell you any kind of hope. I'm here for something else. The unglamorous daily practice of trying to stay human and a world that wants us really numb. So welcome to that conversation, how to make love. Now, is that from recipe or from scratch?

Speaker 1: This is how to make love. Wow. Oh gosh, oh my God. A little to the left and faster. A show that tests the edges of what love is, worthiness, empathy, beauty, sex, positive, the borders. It can cross how we do integrity in all of our relationships, and its hidden costs and shadows. In a world where we other people, where we build walls, we just tear down walls, fuck finding it or falling into it. Our future depends on making it. Hey everybody, welcome back to How to Make Love. And today I want to talk about dehumanization and re humanization. What is dehumanization? Well, we know the word. We know the headlines. Gaza genocide, mass incarceration, refugee camps, enslavement. Dehumanization is a systemic stripping of human worth and dignity, and often that's where the definition and the conversation stops. But dehumanization isn't just global, it's domestic. It's not just political, it's cultural.

Speaker 1: And of course, it's also like everything personal and internal. Here are a few examples of institutional dehumanization. So a black child acting out at school is suspended while a white child doing the exact same behavior, exhibiting the same behavior, is struggling emotionally. A trans person seeking medical care is asked for their real name. A disabled person is told to be more independent in a building without ramps. A poor person is criminalized for loitering. While more affluent people drink and eat on the exact same corner. These are examples of the more daily institutional dehumanization that occurs because they reduce a human to the notion of a burden or a flaw or an inconvenience, or they funnel people into different categories. Interpersonal examples of dehumanization might look like when you go someone because the confrontation or the conversation you need to have is too uncomfortable. And when you reduce someone online to just another so-and-so, or write them off entirely, when you assume that you know someone's politics or values or maybe even their traumas just by looking at them when you ask, Hey, what do you do?

Speaker 1: Or What do you do for work without thinking about or first asking something about who are you? How are you, how's your heart? Things like that. These examples aren't about being a bad person, they're just about being unconscious. And the truth is most of us are unconscious. Most of us dehumanize and participate in dehumanization all the time without meaning to. So here's what internalized dehumanization might look like when you override your body's need to rest because you're placing more importance on the work at hand when you silence your anger because you don't want to be experienced as difficult or too much when you smile in a meeting that's really offensive or tearing you apart when you perform gratitude instead of telling the truth about something that's hurting you or something happening in your life when you numb out to get through the day. All of this too are examples of dehumanization.

Speaker 1: It's shutting down our humanity in exchange for being busy or being distracted or being right or being safe. Again, no judgment about any of these. There are a whole bunch of reasons why we might choose any of these behaviors based on our identity, based on circumstances, but it doesn't mean that we're not also eroding at our sense of humanity. And the thing is dehumanization. It often feels safer than the being human option. It's why we all do it. There's a sense of perceived safety in it. So if you feel numb or detached or collapsed, it doesn't mean that you're broken. It doesn't mean you've done anything bad. It just means you're doing what you were trained to do in order to survive. But survival isn't the same thing as wholeness, or living and numbing out isn't the same thing as safety. So what does it mean to rehumanize?

Speaker 1: Well, let me tell you first what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean being nice. It doesn't mean centering yourself at the expense of someone else or in someone else's story. It doesn't mean saying the quote unquote right thing or posting the right thing or having a self-care day and calling it liberation. Humanization tends to be really slow. It's pretty messy, and it's often non-linear. And it means choosing to stay present when everything in you wants to dissociate, it means letting yourself grieve someone else's death instead of just scrolling right past it. It means taking your body really seriously, valuing it as a source of wisdom, honoring the hunger or the rage or the pleasure or the exhaustion, and noticing all of it. It means speaking up when you'd probably rather stay quiet because truth matters more than approval. It means making eye contact with the person who's bagging your groceries and seeing them not as a service, but as a human being.

Speaker 1: It means listening to your kid or your parent or your friend or your partner, not to fix them, but to witness them. And it means refusing to do the things or be in the places that flatten your spirit. So the performance of being fine, I'm fine. I say that all the time, and it's always a performance, the cultural script that tells us that we need to be efficient or polite or productive. Like when we favor those things, the internal whispering that says, don't be too much or don't feel too much, or don't do too much, or don't take up too much space. All of that stuff is really flattening. Re humanization is not about becoming your best self, it's about reclaiming your whole self, even the inconvenient parts, and even in the places and the times where it may not feel super safe. So let's sit with the hard part.

Speaker 1: What if it doesn't work? What if the world doesn't wake up? What if we do all these vulnerable things? We make all these difficult choices. We do all this stuff to try to stay more human, and it doesn't fix anything. Not only is that possible, it might be the most honest thing that we could actually say in this conversation. Culture that we live in, the one that rewards cruelty and extraction and speed and performance and disposability and obedience. It isn't crumbling, it's consolidating. It's getting faster and sharper and smarter and more profitable and more seductive and more efficient. And if you want to survive inside it, there are certainly easier ways to do that and safer, easier and safer ways to do that than trying to be more human. If you want to be rewarded professionally, socially, financially, there are certainly going to be easier paths than honesty or vulnerability or softness or grief or integrity.

Speaker 1: And again, I'm not judging. You can optimize, you can hustle, you can harden. You can say the quote unquote right words online. You can keep your head down, you can smile, you can keep producing, and no one's going to stop you. In fact, culturally, you'll probably be rewarded for that in a lot of different ways through promotions or whatever it might be. So yeah, this work, it doesn't always lead to reward. It often does not lead to reward. It certainly doesn't lead to safety or approval or even peace of mind. Sometimes it really, really hurts. Sometimes it is isolating. Sometimes it puts you face to face with things you would really rather not see in the world and inside yourself. So why bother? Why keep feeling when numbness is certainly easier? Why speak out when silence is going to protect you? Why stay present when disconnection is certainly more efficient and often more palatable?

Speaker 1: Here's the only answer I can sincerely offer. I don't want to become the kind of person that makes dehumanization any easier in the world, and certainly not in myself. I don't want to trade my conscience for my comfort. I don't want to survive by figuring out how to become smaller or harder or emptier or more palatable to other people. I don't want to wake up one day or reach the end of my life and realize that I haven't felt anything real in years, or that I don't recognize myself even if nothing changes, even if I'm one person among billions, and even if it's already too late, which it might be, I still want to know that I tried my hardest to stay human, that I didn't abandon the part of me that aches for connection. Because even if humanity is stripped out of everything around us, it doesn't mean we have to give up our own humanity.

Speaker 1: And it doesn't mean we have to stop seeing the humanity of those around us. What's happening right now in our world is not just policy, it's not just corruption. It's not just partisanship. In some ways, it's a sort of spiritual collapse. It's this collective trauma response that looks like apathy, hyper productivity, righteous detachment, pointed and weaponized anger at different groups of people, endless scrolling and numbing and sort of growing indifference or comfort with the level of cruelty and violence that's happening in the world. And I worry that if we don't reclaim our humanity now, we might forget what it even feels like. We might build movements that replicate the harm that we're trying to dismantle. We will burn out our organizers and silence our artists and outsource our conscience to whatever's trending or whoever's paying the bill. We could lose the one thing that gives liberation.

Speaker 1: Its meaning Relationship and relationship can only exist between humans, not between cogs or projections or avatars. Humans, which requires that we learn to rehumanize in a world of dehumanization. We've got to learn the skills and the ways to engender more humanity, to make situations more human, to reclaim what is being lost as a skill and as a practice and as a commitment. So here are five examples of humanization processes. They're not to make you better. They're not to make you more woke. They are to make you more real and they're difficult. So the first suggestion is to notice one place that you've numbed out. And I don't want you to change it, I just want you to name it. Maybe it's in the news, maybe it's in your marriage, maybe it's in your own body. Maybe it's a particular part of your body. Naming is the beginning of remembering.

Speaker 1: So all this is about is acknowledging what we've lost to numbness. So just gently name it without judgment and acknowledge it. Another way to rehumanize is to witness someone today without trying to fix or save or solve them. Just hold space. Ask, what do you need or how are you? And don't rush to fill in that space. Don't fill any silence. Just witness and extend care without trying to solve or fix. A third way to rehumanize is to interrupt one of your performances. So say one thing you weren't supposed to stay, refuse one false smile. Let one mask drop. Give one real answer, whatever it is, see if you can do this like once a day, interrupt one performance once a day and just observe the impact that it has around you. The fourth suggestion is to name one way that you have benefited from or currently benefit from dehumanization.

Speaker 1: Maybe you get a pass or a promotion or a special platform. I don't want you to justify it. I don't want you to explain it. I just want you to bear witness to it and let the discomfort of that do its work. And the last suggestion I have for daily ways that we can all work to rehumanize, I want you to tend to something real, not for an output or not for credit. It could be a plant, it could be a person, it could be a pain, it could be a poem, anything that roots you in being not in producing. And I just want you to lovingly tend to it. Now, it took me a couple of minutes to rattle off all of these things, but the truth is these are complex, rigorous, lifelong practices, and they're uncomfortable. So you might be shooing them as like, that's too simple or that's not enough, or whatever.

Speaker 1: And I just want you to notice the ways that you might be buffering against trying to do any of these things and get curious about what you might be protecting within yourself. Here's what I'm going to leave you with. I personally don't have much in the way of hope right now about our humanity, but I have a nervous system that still feels I have a body that experiences heartbreak and still aches for liberation for all of us. I have a mouth that wants to name what's sacred and holy, and I have a heart that's really tender. And if you're hearing this, if you're listening to this, you do too. So start there, come back to that. Reclaim that not because it's useful, not because it's easy, not because it's going to save the day, but because it's yours. And when the world is burning, somebody has to stay human. So let it be you. Let it be us. I'll see you next month, my friends. Until then, may you make gobs of love and work to rehumanize yourself first and foremost. Bye for now.