By Dan Hazen / Herald Forum

I was lying in a meadow at the foot of Mount Christie in the Olympic mountains, a two-day hike to the nearest logging road. I hadn’t seen another humanbeing for three days, yet I had never felt a greater sense of belonging.

Belonging is mysterious and powerful. Present amid profound solitude, it can also be absent in a dense crowd. It is a lived experience that we cannot deny exists, yet we lack tools to measure, dissect or quantify it. We can only point and say, ‘There it is” or “There is the space where it should be.”

Belonging is at the heart of our “culture wars.” Humans in the developed West fear that we are running out of Belonging; that Belonging is a perishable resource like oil or gold. If you’re lucky enough to possess Belonging you better hold onto it, protect it, hide it and defend it. If you have none, it’s expected that you’ll pay for it, extract it, or take it by force. This scarcity myth inevitably leads to war because the myth creates haves and have-nots, privileged and oppressed, powerful and powerless, all of whom are arrayed against one another because they’re convinced Belonging, while highly valuable, is limited.

“Will you be on the right side of history (with Us)?” “Silence (disagreeing with Us) is violence!” “Make America (Us not Them) great again!” “Love it (code for Us) or leave it (join Them).”

Belonging is always at work in the background like your gut biome: it has its place, but in recent decades it has taken over like an aggressive bacterial infection, and it’s making us critically ill. Belonging is a currency openly traded on playgrounds and in middle school hallways because children have always believed The Limited Belonging Myth. If you have the power to grant or withhold Belonging, you essentially define reality (a core definition of leadership) and this is how children construct their sub-cultures and authority structures. Why this childish economy has spread like mold into adult culture and politics is a partial mystery.

I suspect some of it has to do with our unique place in history; for at least three generations, parents have failed to help their children grow out of that playground economy. Some of it has to do with our bloated, over-indulgent appetites: we’re basically bored and so we invent ways of excluding and including, creating drama and manufacturing controversies to entertain ourselves. (This is a hallmark of decaying empires). But some Belonging is natural and good.

How do we separate the real, healthy and necessary Belonging from the fictional, corrupted and life-threatening kind?

First, consider how you would change your behaviors if you knew Belonging was boundless and eternal; that you can never run out of it. How would you live? For example, if electricity were free, non-polluting, and 100 precent renewable, how would your life change?

Second, consider how you would treat others if you knew that they Belonged too, no matter their nationality, class, politics, race, gender or place in a “network.”

Third, live like those two things are true and see what begins to fall away.

Dan Hazen lives in Marysville and works in Everett.