How “civilized” are we really?
The other day, I was thinking about the phrase “like attracts like”. I’d been talking with a friend about relationships and my seemingly fruitless search for a datable woman. Oh, I know, there are plenty out there, but I never seem to run into any, or they have “issues”, like they have a husband or they have thousands of miles between us. In any case, we were talking about a woman I know who thought she’d found the One, only to discover that he wasn’t quite what she thought. This dear thing, who’s recently been through a divorce and has been dating about six months, isn’t really over her marriage ending, I don’t think. My friend knows the story and, when I told him about her latest difficulty, said, “healthy attracts healthy”. (Which, incidentally, might explain why he and I are both single! But, that’s another story.)
Well, I thought about that phrase. It sounded so familiar that I just couldn’t let it go. Turns out, that’s the Law of Attraction, as laid out by most coffee-house mystics who read their tarot decks. “Like attracts like.” Of course, I quickly made the jump to something my ex-wife posted on her blog right before she left me, “What am I? Flypaper for freaks?” Well, setting judgement aside, considering that she married me, it still made me wonder. How often does that kind of magical thinking, often expressed in “folk sayings”, direct our actions?
Consider, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. A warning against doing something comes naturally to us. Another “law”, the Doctrine of Signatures, says “the attributes without mirror the attributes within”. At some level, we think that what we see on the surface is the reality of a thing. This is just a warning that we might be misinterpreting what we see. That there is more to the universe than what our five senses percieve.
Then, there’s my old favorite, “guilt by association”, or in a more folksy way, “If you lay down with dogs, you wake up with fleas”. That, simply, is the Law of Contagion, or, “contact results in contagion”. That which we touch or become overly familiar with becomes a part of us, and, conversely, we become a part of it. In magical thought, this is how so-called voodoo dolls work. The doll represents the whole, but we think this way all the time when it comes to people. How many times have you decided not to get involved with someone because of the company he or she keeps? I can’t count the number of times I got this message in one form or another when I was growing up. The admonition to keep to one’s own tribe.
So, why do we think this way? Can we overcome this kind of thinking? Should we? Does it serve its purpose and make our society what it is?
I don’t know, folks. I don’t have any answers, just questions. And, I’m always looking for better questions.
