Why Are We a Humorless Society Now?

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Feb 22, 2023, 1:30:46 PM2/22/23
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Why Are We a Humorless Society Now?

The thing that scares me the most about the trajectory our society is on right now is our intolerance for humor. Here’s why. When people you are close to, people who you will give a great amount of grace to, who you genuinely care about tell an indelicate joke, you forgive. You might shake your head and sigh, maybe a visible eye-roll, but you forgive. You secretly still kinda crack a smile. Why? Because you know that person’s heart. You give that person the benefit of the doubt.

The reason why we do not show grace in response to off-color humor nowadays is because we do not feel close to the people telling those jokes. We don’t sincerely care about them. Also, our hearts are smaller than they were before (that’s how I feel at least), and there isn’t room for grace. A collective lack of humor in society reveals so many things… bad things.

And that scares me. It’s scary that we don’t have the emotional intelligence for nuance, that we can’t discern the difference between something that is actually offensive because it comes from malicious intent and something that is a joke, a form of social communication to show that we are close enough to each other to tell this joke.

I include sarcasm here, too, by the way. So it’s not just about jokes but also sarcasm as a vehicle for humor as a vehicle for social communication.

See. You know why a joke (or a sarcastic remark) is funny? The content is only a fraction to what makes it funny. It’s the person that makes it funny, the mutually understood relationship between the person telling the joke and the person hearing it. It’s all of the unspoken and implied and shared cultural knowledge that makes it funny. It’s the preexisting intimacy.

The reason you don’t find a joke funny is because there is no preexisting intimacy, there is no shared and implied cultural knowledge, and because you don’t hold any genuine care for the person telling the joke.

You know why dad jokes, as bad as they are content-wise, are hilarious? Because Dad is telling the jokes. Dad jokes remind us of parental love.

On the other hand, let’s be clear here, I’m not criticizing those who are not laughing. That’s also why all this is so scary to me.

See, we only laugh when we feel safe. The fact that things are not funny anymore means people don’t feel safe. Psychological scientists and researchers have consistently found that laughter is a social cue that communicates safety and mutual trust. (Won’t cite a bunch of academic journals like I’m some pseudo-academic, but they’re all easily google-able, promise.)

It’s also a cue of levels of personal security. When you feel safe and secure in your social positioning, an off-color joke is hilarious. But when you do not feel safe and secure in your social positioning, an off-color joke can come across as a threat to that safety and security.

So actually, it makes a lot of sense why and how an off-color joke might not be funny to someone.

And that scares me. What have we done wrong systemically as a society? Why don’t people feel safe and secure?

You know what makes a joke really funny? It speaks truthfully to a tragedy that we’ve healed from. A joke about a tragedy is *not* funny when we have not yet healed (or where, at least, the healing process has not yet begun).

A humorless society means a group of people have collectively endured tragedy and they have not been given the spiritual (or sociopolitical) medicine needed for healing.

You know why when it comes to love and romance, most people prefer partners with a sense of humor? It’s because on a subconscious level we understand that a strong sense of humor is the sign of someone emotionally strong, secure in their social positioning, and confident. What we’re actually looking for is someone who is emotionally strong and confident. Jokes help to reveal that character trait.

The reason why we gravitate toward someone with the same sense of humor is because shared sense of humor is an accurate indicator of shared values. But it doesn’t just have to be shared values; it can just be empathy. If you empathize, truly empathize, with someone else’s values, then you can still find their sense of humor funny.

So the humorless society we now find on the social online network we primarily live on indicates to me a lack of genuine empathy for one another’s values.

For the last decade, year after year I am pushed more and more toward being humorless and sanitizing everything I share on social media. I’m totally not blaming anyone for not finding something funny. As a collective we are so wounded. As individuals so many of us feel unseen, and certain jokes or sarcastic commentaries make us feel even more unseen. For a joke (or sarcasm) to be funny, preexisting trust is required, and so a humorless society is an indicator that there is no preexisting mutual trust.

Social media has forced many of us to realize just how much of communication is in body language, in our aura, and an energy exchange that can only happen in-person. I’ve been finding that 10 out of 10 exchanges in-person, no matter how sarcastic I am, is conveyed as intended, but I try the same thing online as a tweet and it’s more miss than hit. And I get it (I think)—it’s because what we float out there onto social media gets received with no context. Again, it just reaffirms how necessary in-person exchange is.

There’s another thing about humor that’s important. Humor (jokes or sarcasm) is a way for us to express our personal pain. It is a way to test out whether the two people who are in the exchange can, in fact, deepen this relationship to be even more truthful and vulnerable. It’s a litmus test. And when we fail each other—when we cannot laugh at one another’s jokes—the one who attempted the joke receives the message, “No, I cannot be truthful and vulnerable with you. I cannot trust you.” Because when you didn’t get the joke, you said to that person, “I don’t trust you.” That’s the part we overlook about humor. Humor requires trust.

Sarcastic humor is an expression from someone who so desperately wishes to be understood but is afraid to be vulnerable, and so sarcasm is a front. And you have to “get” the sarcasm to demonstrate to that person that you understand them. Only then will the sarcasm dissipate and true vulnerability—emotional intimacy—show itself. If you can’t even pass that first test of “getting” their sarcasm, then you’ll never “get” them.

We are creating a social environment where even people who want to trust others are being conditioned to not trust, because we keep burning them. We keep betraying their trust.

A humorless society denotes an untrusting society. Here is a collective of people unwilling to be vulnerable to one another, because they have—whether they realize it or not—proven to one another that the other is not to be trusted.

How do we heal this spiritually fragmented world? I reckon the first step is to bring back humor, to give one another the benefit of the doubt, to at least try and make an effort to empathize so that we can experience humor as intended. If each and every one of us can just do that, I think that’s a really positive and healthy step in the right direction toward healing societal wounds.

In Chinese Mahayana Buddhism, Mi Le Fuo (弥勒佛), the Laughing Buddha is also Maitreya, the bodhisattva of maitri (metta), loving-kindness. Maitreya is a messianic figure prophesied to be the next Buddha.

There’s conceptual affinity between humor and loving-kindness. If we as a collective can cultivate a sense of humor, if we can empathize with one another’s humor, then that in turn will proliferate loving-kindness. To appreciate another’s humor is to be benevolent, and vice versa.

Wetiko is an Algonquian term from Ojibwa traditions that means a viral selfishness that will consume anything and everything tainted by that selfishness contagion. It’s an epidemic psychospiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind that can become a collective psychosis. Lately I’ve been reading the works of Paul Levy on wetiko. Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil, first published in 2013 by North Atlantic Books, integrates discussions on shamanism, alchemy, and Jungian psychology to address the wetiko that Levy observed was taking hold of our society. That was 7 years before the global coronavirus pandemic. In 2021 he published a follow-up, Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World where he addresses the connection between Covid-19 and the wetiko virus.

The last line of Dispelling Wetiko, that earlier 2013 publication, was Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ, a mantra invoking the bodhisattva of compassion and mercy, a mantra that invokes the six virtues to dispel the six evils.

A humorless society is a symptom of wetiko. That also means we have the cure. We’ve got to bring funny back. But more specific than that, we’ve got to love and trust one another enough to empathize with each individual’s sense of humor. Sure, it’s complicated. There are many layers of healing on many fronts that need to happen. Levy notes that the most dangerous part of wetiko, why it takes hold as a social contagion, is because we are unaware that we ourselves are infected.

Lots of love always,

bell

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Purpose of this Email Newsletter 

I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly I want to do with this Google groups e-mail newsletter thing. While it’s going to continue to be a “news and updates” place where I send promo announcements, I’m thinking it’s a pretty neat platform for social commentary and more personal ramblings. 

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Pre-Orders for SKT: Revelation Second Printing Still Open

We are still taking pre-orders for the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot Revelation Edition, second print run. More info on how to put in your order here: https://benebellwen.com/skt/pre-order/.

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Benebell Wen

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