The apocalypse makes a great story
Dear Readers,
Amber here this week, Lioness’s writer-in-residence. Some of you have shared stories that I’ve been very moved by. Today I thought I would share mine with you.
I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness. When most people think of Jehovah’s Witnesses, they think of an oddball religion – a nuisance at the door on a Saturday morning, a person in modest dress smiling next to a cart full of magazines.
When Jehovah’s Witnesses think of me, on the other hand, it is as “gangrene” that had to be amputated. I am considered a “mentally-diseased” apostate for having left the religion. Some Jehovah’s Witnesses also probably think of me with pity these days: soon I will be massacred by God at Armageddon, because this pandemic means the end of the world has finally arrived.
Since the coronavirus crisis began, it’s not uncommon to hear people half-joking about (or sometimes seriously pondering) whether this is the end of the world. Even if we are not religious ourselves, most of our cultures have roots in religions that have a belief in some sort of apocalypse. In fearful times, our minds are wired to go there.
Apocalyptic narratives are ubiquitous in our literature, religion, and culture because life is unpredictable. Frightening things have happened throughout human history. Stories are what we use to make sense of our lives, the phenomena we don’t understand, and the world around us. Some churchgoers are defying stay-at-home orders and congregating together for Easter, despite the risk of being infected with the Coronavirus, perhaps because this pull to make sense of the chaos is so strong.
The story that was told to me from the earliest I can remember was that there were good people in the world, and bad people. To be good, you had to be part of my religion. God was going to soon bring an apocalypse that would wipe out all of bad humankind – meaning everyone except the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Those faithful who remained would get to live in paradise on Earth.
It was a good story. Rich in drama. A riveting climax. A happy ending (for some of us).
Stories taught to us when we are young create strong imprints. In the case of my religion, it was eight old white men in Brooklyn who decided the narrative. They wrote the materials I read, they told me what to do with my time, they created a lens for my thinking and by doing that, affected how I saw the world. They taught me that the truth was simple, and that appealed to my childhood mind. By the time I became an adult, I was utterly convinced that the very simplicity of my religion’s story was proof of its truth.
Religions like mine de-complicate everything. There is right and wrong. Saved and destroyed. Good and bad. Modern society isn’t as extreme as my religion was, for the most part, but the tendency that made people in my religion shun their loved ones for unbelief is a part of our human nature. We’re left or right, one side of an argument is true and the other false. That which is objective is that which adheres to the accepted narrative. Anything subjective is false.
That worked for me for the first 33 years of my life. Until my circumstances changed, and I couldn’t help but see that the true story was much more complicated.
The Indian Bhagavad Gita - a Hindu religious text - looks at truth this way: wholeness is only possible when all slices of truth are incorporated. The journey towards being fully who we are as people and as a society needs to make room for lots of truths, because truth is not binary. The only way to find truth is by making room for all of people’s truths, not by ignoring them, suppressing them, or pretending they don’t exist.
How I found my way out of my religion was by making room for stories other than the one I had been taught.
Many people think of a life like mine in terms of a complete sea change. That I am a new person now – the old me was someone standing on a corner in a modest dress, a caricature of a religious person.
The reality is that I don’t feel that different. When I moved outside one story, I discovered aspects of the world and parts of myself that were there all along. Shining light on parts of ourselves previously hidden, we recognize them: “Aha! You, the outspoken, curse-word enjoying, shit disturber! Of course you were in there all along!”
There is always another door that can be opened, a different story that will add a piece of truth to our search for understanding. We discover it when we see in someone else’s story something of ourselves, or when another person sees in us something that we don’t see. Education, a book, a new place, changed circumstances, or a life upheaval can open us up to a new story. Sometimes our own tragedy does, and sometimes someone else’s. A story can change a person, and it can sometimes change the world.
This is why I’m glad to be working with Lioness. I look forward to hearing more of your stories.
-Amber Scorah, Senior Writer at Lioness
Here’s what we’ve been reading this week:
Being locked down might not be making you feel very happy, but it may be causing you to think more deeply about life and others. Happiness has been for centuries a concern of religion, philosophy and the arts, but in the past few decades, the scientific study of happiness has exploded. A new column in The Atlantic (by a professor who teaches a class on happiness at the Harvard Business School, of all places) breaks down three equations for happiness that are worth revisiting math class for.
Covid-19 discriminates by gender - it has proven to be far more deadly to men than to women. On the flip side, it’s been men who have dominated the response to the crisis. Nathaniel Popkin explores the ways that male inferiority complex has played into depictions of pandemic as war, when it is actually a humanitarian crisis. He notes, “my shame as a man and my terror as a human is that exactly the wrong people are in charge.”
Reader Stories, on ethics in the time of Covid-19 bailouts…
As many small businesses scramble to apply for government loans to save their companies and employee payrolls, we heard from readers navigating this new territory:
From Shreya Murthy, Founder and CEO of Partiful:
“As an early-stage venture backed startup that recently raised a large pre-seed round, we did not think it was appropriate for us to apply for any loans or grants related to COVID-19 relief. While our business has been materially affected by social distancing policies - our first product was literally designed to help large groups of people gather in person - we’re still able to make payroll for the foreseeable future.
Our investors have been fantastic in both providing clear information on the Paycheck Protection Program but also reinforcing the ethics around who should actually be applying. There are certainly some venture-backed startups that won’t be able to make payroll without loans, but if those companies are able to raise additional funding from private sources, I think morally that should be the first route, even if it means higher dilution or taking a down round.”
And last but not least: read Lioness founder Ariella’s opinion piece published in Fortune Magazine today: We need to protect whistleblowers as the coronavirus crisis opens the door for bad actors. We argue that federal and local legislators need to protect whistleblowers who speak up about unsafe workplaces. Feel free to share on social media — and if you do, reply to this email with your social media post, and we’ll send you a Lioness-branded sweatshirt!
That’s it for this week. As always, reply to this email if you have a story that might change the world (or change anything that needs changing!). We love hearing from you.
-The team at Lioness