Our Differences Are What Make Us Beautiful (Pt. I)

It is dusk when the boy in The Alchemist is settling into the sacristy, with a sycamore tree growing through its half-destroyed roof, for a night of sleep. As he had done many times before, he saw to it that his sheep were closely secured, before using his jacket — one of his only three worldly possessions, besides his sheep and the clothes on his back — to brush debris off the ground where he lay, and his book — the second of the three — as a pillow.

He woke from the same dream he had the week before to see stars through the broken roof, and his sheep began to stir at the same time he did. As the day broke, he spoke to them about the same thing he had the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that: the beautiful daughter of a merchant in the village he was headed next — around the same time as the year before — to ask for her hand in marriage; to live in one place forever. He recalled his last conversation with her, in which she spoke of her village and the unchanging nature of its days, and he provided much-welcomed knowledge and stories from the distant towns he travelled through on his shearing route.

The boy named Santiago is both excited and uneasy as he departs this new overnight post he discovered, amidst pastures he had walked with his flock many times before. He is excited to see the girl, and uneasy she might have found another to marry in his absence. He then shocks and unsettles himself with an intrusive thought about his sheep, his beloved companions, which appears to set off a cascade of mind-changes and related experiences regarding his route, his desires, and his future.

But more on this shortly.

We’re making some quick pit-stops around the world.

First up.

In his latest book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell takes readers on a gripping, investigative journey through an idyllic small American town he and others have come to refer to as “Poplar Grove.” We are given no clue as to the town’s true name and location, or much of its people’s identification; only a slow, eerie, Truman Show-like unfolding of all the ways this place epitomises perfection, community values, conformity, security, and success by any means necessary.

He weaves the findings of two assistant professors of sociology at the University of Memphis1 throughout his chapter — in the audiobook, you get to hear them speak for themselves — and together, they paint a compelling picture of Poplar Grove as, seemingly, the idyllic place to raise the consummate small American family with a big American Dream.

Anna Mueller and Seth Abrutyn, said professors who have studied and interviewed this town at length, note the uncanny way its younger inhabitants seem fast-tracked toward achievement, toward an American archetype we see idolised on Hollywood screens: unfailingly popular, studious, sporty, and full of sunshine, with a bright horizon brimming with prospects.

The ever-smiling sorority student. The all-star college footballer. The Ivy League top graduate, ripe for picking from the small town and shipping out to the big city. And eventually, the shiny, put-together parents waving from behind a white picket fence and a SOLD sign, having returned to Poplar Grove whence they began to restart the cycle with their own children.

And why wouldn’t they? It’s the kind of town where everyone knows everyone; Gladwell writes how a real estate agent drove him around town, pointing out who owned every house, what they did for a living, and how many children they had. He asked what this town has to offer? “Everything you’d want,” the agent replied. “A feeling of safety and security, a feeling of good neighbours, a feeling of I can count on others around me.”

As they drove, Gladwell saw there were churches everywhere, cosy, oak-lined streets, charming, respectable architecture — much of it “water-privileged” and in the $700k range — abundant community features like a community centre, parks and sporting fields, a town library, even a petting zoo.

Most notably, premium-quality schools; its high school is one of the best in the state, which is part of why Poplar Grove had grown to be more desirable in recent years. According to the agent, the target market is unquestionably “working class affluent…doctors, lawyers, professional people” — with families, he emphasised. Everyone has a family, 100% of all new people moving into the area. And they stay, “because why would they leave the perfect community?

“We don’t have condos, we don’t have rentals, we don’t have lower-end dwellings that attract any type [my italics] of diversity. So, it became a very homogenous place to live. Which is probably why there’s a shared value system of good grades, good sports, go to the best college you possibly can.

“It [has a] very, sort of...umm...collegial feeling,” said the agent, with some hesitancy.

Gladwell describes Mueller’s first impression of Poplar Grove as “extraordinary…[a] beautiful scenic community that has a really strong sense of itself. People are really proud to be from Poplar Grove,” and quotes from the book she later produced with Abrutyn based on their field work, Life Under Pressure — a title that provides a clue as to what might be hiding behind this town’s beaming smile; why, after hearing about the circumstances of this town from a local scientist, they returned time after time and got “more and more caught up in the drama unfolding there.”

“The clarity and consistency with which Poplar Grove-ians could name their shared values was sometimes uncanny. We was a constant refrain. ‘When we think of Poplar Grove,’ Elizabeth, the mother of a teen shared, ‘we think of achievement. We speak of scholastic achievement, and we speak of sports achievement.’” [My italics.]

Name the sport, the kids were winning championships. Even their school theatre productions — typically labours of love and mild drudgery for many a parent that attends them — earned Mueller’s acclaim as “spectacular.”

In summary:

“If your kids grew up in Poplar Grove, there was little chance they would wander off the path that every upper-middle-class parent wants for their children: to be active, and popular, and work hard at school, and make the kinds of choices that lead to a better life...and then, of course, come home to Poplar Grove,” writes Gladwell.

Little chance...

For kids to be themselves.

For those who don’t, won’t, or can’t fit that mould.

Of holding back one’s humanness; of not suffocating internally from sucking in every little might-be mistake and step out of line.

Of sharpening one’s own inner authority and sense of intuition; of getting lost in the necessary thickets of exhilarating adolescence and finding one’s juiciest truths in the understory.

Of ever being enough — no matter how heartbreakingly, sacrificially exemplary one strives to be.

Life under pressure, indeed.

And this is what lies behind the town’s beaming smile; in what I didn’t share with you earlier, which is the second half of the title of Mueller’s and Abrutyn’s book — The Social Roots of Youth Suicide and What to Do About Them.

Indeed, this appears to be Poplar Grove’s singular imperfection. Despite “having it all” from the outside looking in, and bright futures looking forward; despite their wide and well-meaning community where everyone knows everyone and wants to help...its perfect youth have developed a seemingly contagious habit of killing themselves.

Second stop.

In 1975, a Swedish linguist named Helena Norberg-Hodge was swept up in an unlikely assignment. Accompanying a film team on an excursion to the remote, politically-locked region of Ladakh, India, previously untouched by Western tourism and influence, she travelled the lone road into an alien, “dream-like” landscape of desolate mountain deserts and prayer flag-adorned monasteries...with no idea she would remain there for nearly two decades, witnessing and documenting its jaw-dropping changes.

Her initial observations of untarnished, “undeveloped” Ladakhi culture, generously detailed in her groundbreaking book Ancient Futures, are diverse and surprising (and in no particular order):

Life was dictated by the seasons. For eight months of each year, the entire region is frozen solid — so for the most part, hard work stopped and revelry began. Norberg-Hodge notes how crammed with festivities the long winter seasons were, with much drinking and singing, sharing of stories and elaborate rituals celebrating harvests, weddings, rites of passage, and more. “Even during summer, hardly a week passes without a major festival or celebration of one sort or another, while in winter the celebration is almost nonstop.”

Ladakhis enjoyed “a surprising amount of leisure.” They played as hard as they worked and devoted themselves to spirituality; much time and reverence was paid to religious practices, not just of a Tibetan Buddhist nature but Islamic and some Christianity too — and, perhaps miraculously by today’s standards, all faiths fell in peacefully alongside one another. People, simply, did not fight one another over religious differences; they were embraced and accommodated.

Likewise, Norberg-Hodge emphasises the almost total absence of anger, grudge-keeping (“mild disagreements” were easily managed by a spontaneous intermediary), bitterness or self-pity among the people. A phrase she commonly heard them utter was Chi choen — meaning, what’s the point? “Nothing, it seemed, could affect their equanimity,” she wrote. The reflexive response to potentially infuriating, disempowering circumstances, even from children, was extreme tolerance. “Anyway, we have to live together.”

Which is remarkable, because by Western standards, there was much in Ladakhi society that might have enraged or exasperated our delicate and entitled sensibilities. For example, living with multiple generations under one roof, and the open practice of polyandry — the sharing of wives between multiple husbands. (This might seem anti-feminist at first glance; however, it served a real purpose of keeping the community’s population in check, and women’s autonomy and sexual freedom were well-respected.) Also, at the time of Norberg-Hodge’s arrival, there was no electricity or modern comforts, a horrific prospect to most — yet there was no internalised belief of poverty, or the sense that the people were missing out on anything meaningful; no FOMO. Enough to eat, enough to drink was a common refrain.

“Despite an extreme climate and a scarcity of resources, Ladakhis enjoy more than mere subsistence — an achievement all the more remarkable since people have only the most basic tools to work with...Nothing more sophisticated is necessary,” says Norberg-Hodge.

Ladakhis suffered no unemployment or homelessness; they created no waste or pollution, and revelled in frugality2. Every family owned a good five acres of land and tended to it happily and self-sufficiently, at a pace in which “an eighty-year-old as well as a young child [could] join in and help”; in one’s own time and always accompanied by laughter and song. Their time was nature’s time, “measured loosely...never a need to count minutes.”

Children regularly mingled with elders (who lived well and vitally into their final years), members of the aristocracy and esteemed religious figures with the common folk — and all community members, regardless of personal differences and material motivations, made service of one another their highest priority. “It was more important to keep good relations with your neighbour than to earn some money...one person’s gain is not another person’s loss...Ladakhis are aware that helping others is in their own interest.”

I could go on and on. (I’m a little obsessed with Ladakh, and with Helena’s accidental entwinement with it.)

The reason I dig into this is because I am not sure whether this country’s history is given knowledge to many people; and yet, to me, it ought to be prescribed learning for everyone. The Ladakhis of old unintentionally laid out a peculiar, yet beautifully simple, practical blueprint for handling much of what hamstrings us in modern society: the social alienation, ego politics and corrosive ideological division, chronic health crises, climate disrepair, out-of-control costs of living, mass unemployment and homelessness, purposelessness, mistrust and hypervigilance, and so on.

By Norberg-Hodge’s account, Ladakhis not just survived, but thrived for a long time in (what many in the West might think of as) “primitive,” localised harmony, with deep respect for themselves and community, their cultural identity and sense of belonging to their earthly home, with no scarcity to speak of...because they never knew any other way of being.

“I have never met people who seem so healthy emotionally, so secure, as the Ladakhis. The reasons are, of course, complex and spring from a whole way of life and world view. But I am sure that the most important factor is the sense that you are a part of something much larger than yourself, that you are inextricably connected to others and to your surroundings,”

says Norberg-Hodge of her adopted community’s “irrepressible joie de vivre,” and their quality of close-knit connections over time that defied her then-incredulity as to how any group of people could be so happy and loving toward one another.

Until — positioned ever so fatefully where she was in the mid-1970s, when the Indian government opened the region to tourism — Norberg-Hodge witnessed Ladakh’s introduction to foreigners (namely Westerners, though also greater India and Asia) and their media. And with that — breathtakingly quickly — the “avalanche” into all that Helena and the Ladakhis’ were happily accustomed to not having, and then tricked into thinking they were missing.

Enter Western-style development; as in just about every other pure and untouched locale in the world. This historical repetition of discovery, enamourment, and eventual overhaul for compliance with modern appetites is by no means a unique one; what is, however, is having someone on the ground, wide-eyed and with no political or financial agenda of her own, who speaks the languages of both sides and can translate the observations and psychological implications of modernisation in real-time.

Helena watched in horror as invasive, heavily curated media infiltrated this remote location that recently had not even a television, and flashed its people with visions of lives that were seemingly better lived than theirs; as the allure of paid and prestigious jobs in the cities drew men away from their villages and left their women and families at home in isolation, and wives without recognised work or communal purpose.

As Western-inspired, geographically-generic schooling spoon-fed Ladakhi youth the curriculum of conformity with the wider world, leaving a taste of cultural embarrassment and inferiority on their tongues; as healthcare was siphoned from local doctors and shamans, with a lifetime of training and intimate knowledge of the people they treated, into centralised hubs where patients are made to wait long hours and take mysterious pills for their ailments.

As their good health and self-sufficiency became eroded by convenience, through the introduction of imported goods that disincentivised Ladakhis’ from growing their own food, making staples by hand, and crafting their exquisite clothing and wares — embedded with cultural richness — that were gradually sold to tourists.

As the light slowly dwindled in the faces of her once-joyous friends and adopted family, as cooperation turned to competition, as all-encompassing love and tolerance grew to genuine distrust and judgement of one another.

The changes are too numerous, complex, and mind-boggling to relay here in their entirety. However, Norberg-Hodge spends chapters and chapters in Ancient Futures detailing heart-wrenching stories about the virus of scarcity and insecurity that infected people’s minds.

Stories of tourists, “armed with cameras, bon bons, and pens…[with] special powers and inexhaustible wealth,” who spend in one day what a typical Ladakhi might make in one year and tip big out of pity, assuming the Ladakhis are poor; and so gradually, Ladakhis came to believe they were poor. Where once Helena would regularly hear her friends use chipper phrases like, “Plenty to eat, plenty to drink,” and, “We don’t have any poverty here,” there were now self-pitying words to the effect of, “If you could only help us Ladakhis, we’re so poor.”

(Those last two phrases were, in fact, uttered by the same friend over two different years: 1975, when mass tourism was just ramping up, and 1983, when it had fully taken hold.)

Stories of children, who once displayed deeply entrenched morality around fairness and sharing, and would press dried apricots into Helena’s hands just for the sake of giving what they had, would now stick their hands out and demand pens and other trinkets they had learned to beg from tourists; of young boys, who used to happily cuddle babies and be soft in the presence of their families, learning the art of nonchalance and even aggression from watching glamourised materialism and violence in imported films.

Stories of villagers selling their gorgeous handcrafts and daily utensils — for example, butter jars with “the warm patina that comes from generations of constant handling...fine-grained apricot wood...a simple elegance that would certainly appeal to tourists” — to the city shopkeeper who was once a Ladakhi farmer, arguing over price because they had been promised more money in the weeks leading up, and leaving with a tenth of what they would undoubtedly be resold for, perhaps enough to buy only a few kilos of sugar. “It’s terrible...everyone is getting so greedy. Money was never important before, but now it’s all people can think about,” her Ladakhi friends would say to her.

Stories of her friends, unaware of inherent hazards in the countless new, foreign products flooding into their daily lives, baking bread on scraps of asbestos, keeping salt in pesticide tins, and eating butter laced with formaldehyde; suffering from chronic “diseases of civilisation” — such as cancer, diabetes, strokes, and stress — that barely existed in the region before; losing all propensity for

self-sufficiency — because why do things yourself when the government can take care of them?

self-assurance — because now there is an entire world to compare oneself to, and anonymity among one’s own people that used to recognise and accept them; and

radical equanimity — peaceful and tolerant townsfolk began to name and blame according to attributes like religion, their newfound bitterness and competition between one another eventually escalating into gun violence that placed the whole community under curfew.

Again, I could go on and on. All of this is, truly, only just scratching the surface. Read Ancient Futures at length to learn more; I thoroughly recommend it, and like I said earlier, believe it ought to be prescribed reading for anybody, especially children raised to be the new rulers in the Western way of the world — which is fast becoming the whole world.

Lastly. And a touch more lightly...

Recently, I went with some friends to a Michael Franti & Spearhead gig at The Tivoli in Brisbane, Australia. Upon walking inside, the diversity in the crowd became refreshingly apparent and appreciated; a kaleidoscopic spectrum of ages, genders, ethnicities, and physical abilities.

I thought it was cool to not be surrounded by a bunch of people that looked and sounded kind of like me, as would happen often at small-city gigs where touring musicians tend to attract a certain “sort”. Though, I guess the opposite should be expected in the presence of an artist who primarily sings about virtues like compassion, tolerance, peace and non-violence, helping one another, humanness, togetherness, and leading a heart-led life. Throughout what felt like multiple high-energy hours that Franti performed (definitely displaying more stamina than your average musician), he beckoned all sorts of adoring fans, with varying vocal abilities, onstage to sing with him — even got a middle-aged couple up to recreate their proposal that had taken place in the crowd only moments before.

The atmosphere he created was one drenched in oxytocin and shared emotional experience; sweat, tears, laughter, peace signs, hands held, hugs shared, kisses exchanged, awe-inspired smiles and stares, aware something very special and sacred was being felt and exchanged in equal measure. No trace of animosity — despite the close-proximity, sweaty shoulder-rubbing interplay of diversity in the room that has historically lent itself to tension, to put it lightly.

Against a frenetic backdrop of raw, handheld footage of Franti’s home life and the happiness of strangers, cosy silhouettes, warm rainbow lights, and the explosion of overwhelming goodness and energy and joy difficult to absorb and remember in its entirety, Franti spoke this simple message that stuck with me from the moment I heard it:

“Our differences are what make us beautiful.”

I later read an expanded version of this statement in a transcribed interview between Franti and CKUA Radio, Alberta:

“I’ve realised that 90% of what we are as human beings is the same...We need to eat, we need jobs, we need a roof over our heads, we want to get our kids to school on time. Contained within the difference is the beauty of the world. Our individual stories, our journeys, our food, our language, our culture, the way we celebrate, those are the things that make life really beautiful.”

You’ve been a patient passenger. Perhaps you see where we might be heading with all this?

Now, back to the boy and his sheep.

Part two of this chapter coming soon! If you would like to stay posted, this box down here is hungry for email addresses. Yours might be its favourite.