A common parlor game asks: “If a genie were to grant you 3 wishes, what would they be?” A typical answer might be to have more money, more authority, or just more stuff. Or else more charitably, one might wish for world peace or an end to world hunger. Typically, our answer comes out of our personal sense of scarcity or limitations—what is overwhelmingly lacking in our life? What makes us feel powerless and afraid.
As a primitive psychological state, this sense of Scarcity quite often overshadows our life story, defining the dominant or privileged narratives that make up our identity. On the other hand, Sufficiency, as a counter story to Scarcity, is a sense that comes from a mature developmental resolve that we are empowered to engage our needs and problems competently and constructively. To find an authentic answer to our need for safety, we must look beneath the narrative of "Scarcity and Sufficiency"—to examine what it is that makes us afraid, or to feel vulnerable.
Archetypally, vulnerability in story and life has often been symbolized by nakedness. In the biblical myth of Adam and Eve, eating the fruit of morality did not, in fact, make them naked. It merely made them aware of their vulnerability, inspiring fear that some imagined adversary might harm them, which then drives them into hiding. Within the Scarcity narrative, vulnerability is intolerable. It constitutes an existential threat that drives us to protect ourselves from whatever dark forces lurk in the shadowy recesses of society, nature, and our souls. The transformative dynamic at the heart of the biblical mythology is the personal power to let go of our fear of imperfection, insufficiency, or failure—to accept our own vulnerability as we accept the vulnerability of others—which then draws us into community, to find support and safety in the diversity of the common good. Over the course of history, this capacity for humans to cooperate and work together has been essential to our survival. Contrary to the modern libertarian ethic, rugged individualists rarely survived alone against the world.
Socially, however, fear can spur us inward into an exclusionary moral dynamic of ”us vs them"—founded in political and religious institutions and hierarchies overseen by authorities and systems of control. It is often cultivated by a deep-felt sense of victimhood—that there are strange or foreign powers opposing, attacking, or diminishing us in some way. As long as one is captive to this dynamic of fear and victimization, there is no real path to authentic or mature realization of love for one's fellow man. A prosocial morality founded on an inclusive communal relationship—a "universal human family"—is broken down by fear,; dividing us into cliques, tribes, and warring factions. This is the paradox of the religious traditions that idealize "love" while tearing down our sense of personal power that is necessary to love and accept one another in all our perceived differences, imperfections, and vulnerability.
Psychologically, humans are by nature storytellers. We transform our experiences into intrinsic narratives that identify who we are. The psyche can be imagined as a stage upon which these identity stories are triggered by new events and reenacted. Many times, our fears cause us to privilege certain conservative narratives that hold us captive to repeat the same stories over and over, like familiar spirits that haunt our souls, unable to move on. We become our disabilities, never able to progress, to find our intrinsic power, to become mature human beings in all our potential to love and relate to one another.
The construction of the psychological narrative, or storytelling, is the fabric that knits us together—the collected stories, built upon a lifetime of experiences, that define our identity. This, then, is the power of narrative, as we shift from an identity of scarcity to sufficiency, to realize that we need one another to be sufficient. Community is the responsibility to support one another-—reaching out to others in need, and then allowing them to support us in our own limitations. Acceptance of our own vulnerability, letting go of our fear, is the foundation of mutuality and community—being empowered to love one another.
