Resilience is not conformity

5 questions for journalist, activist, and author Soraya Chemaly

The virtue that I want my kids to have more than any other? The one that I think I am most responsible for seeding in them? The virtue that I am convinced is essential to this moment above all else?

Resilience.

And yet…what do I actually mean by that?

Reading Soraya Chemaly’s brilliant, wide-ranging book—The Resilience Myth—made me realize that I have not been wrong to prize resilience, but that I have not been thoughtful enough about what it actually means. And I’m not alone. We live in a time when resilience has become a buzz word, bandied about for all kinds of purposes—many of them not pure in the least—and we have to stay awake to what it actually means.

True resilience, as she argues in the book, is not about an individual bouncing back from hardship like a champ. That’s just the rugged individualism of American delusion set to a resilient tune. True resilience is about collectivity and vulnerability.

This book is so outrageously important and Soraya is a fierce, gifted thinker and writer. Meet her and rethink everything…

Courtney Martin: The main thrust of this book is that we have the wrong picture of resilience in the popular imagination--a strong individual who bounces back from adversity. In fact, resilience is created through interdependence, vulnerability, and the recognition of real and healthy limitations. Everything about this made sense to me, and yet somehow, I had never heard this argument made quite this way before. Why has the individual version of resilience taken such hold in our culture? 

Soraya Chemaly: The idea of resilience is shaped by the highly individualistic nature of our culture. We learn through stories, news headlines, popular movies, education materials, sports culture, militarism and more that individuals suffer but, if “strong,” persevere and even “grow.” We mainly learn to think that our coping with stress and loss, or adapting to adversity and trauma is mainly up to us as individuals because that is the schema that promises — an allure — the highest level of real or perceived control.

But usually what we are experiencing is a lack of control, true vulnerability. When we think of having to be resilient it is in response to the contingencies of being fragile in a complex world. We didn’t evolve to survive in this environment as atomistic, separately self-sufficient beings who live in relations of competition and domination, which are underlying assumptions of mindset models of “resilient strength,” and “mental toughness” models.

Sure, we have to personally figure out how to adapt, but we rarely do that alone, at all times, in all circumstances. It’s at best a partial truth and certainly an insufficient one.  We are alive today because as a species we leverage our collective cognition, interdependence, mutual care, and integration - not separation - from our environments.  Individual resilience erases all of this to instead conform to cultural ideals calibrated not to help us adapt well but to perpetuate certain status quo norms, including, deleteriously, those grounded in rigidly binary and hierarchical social relations, by which I include relations with “nature,” a concept that we are theoretically excluded from. That idea alone, that we can be resilient “outside” and “in domination” over nature is absurd and yet, it’s a premise of so much of our mainstream ideology of survival and strength.

There are such wide ranging implications for us getting resilience wrong--including educating and parenting our kids in ways that don't actually support them. I love this point: “Younger people aren’t distressed because they lack the right mindset or don’t understand what is happening around them. They are distressed because the world is distressing, and adults have failed them.” How would our parenting look different if we were keeping the collective definition of resilience in mind? And how does your argument about resilience apply to the campus uprisings we are seeing right now? 

I recently shared how I think about young people and their ways of being resilient, ways that far too many parents and pundits have scored and mocked. Children, students, and young adults today have grown up as digital natives in a densely networked and accelerated sociotechnical world. It’s not only that they have had different experiences or a firehose of experiences that differ from other generations — mass gun violence, climate disasters, the rise of anti-democratic forces, MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements — but that how they know and learn is different. Hyperlinked, pluriversal, fluid. They have had to consider context, complexity, and connections over time and over space - both the negative and positive aspects. Their resilience isn’t coming from isolated subjectivity of personal growth but their implicated subjectivity in relational awareness. It’s a different way of being that older people resist and often don’t understand.

My primary thought is that what scolds talk about as ‘resilience’ is in fact, ultimately just a way to say, “conformity.” Many young people, the world over, are not interested and the threat is that their resilience — their worldview — makes them entirely ungovernable. 

Talk about “resilient optimism” and “strategic pessimism.” I found that conceptual duo so interesting. 

I love this too because I have never been a power of positive thinking person and always felt that maybe there was just something wrong with me lol. My deep dive into this topic really surfaced a central and valuable aspect of resilience, namely that resilient people are optimistic but they are also pessimistic. They don’t seek to “learn to be optimistic” as much as seek to use cognitive flexibility to determine when to be optimistic. That means they learn to also employ pessimism strategically.

Like optimism, pessimism has its uses, but we are far less likely to learn about them. Pessimistic people are very good at risk assessment. They are their own and, often, others’ early warning systems. Because they assess risk more broadly, they can prepare and adapt with less stress and difficulty which, in the end, means that they can afford a more realistic optimism. 

You also disturb our ideas that productivity equals resilience--in other words, if we are working, busy, producing things for profit, then we are virtuous and strong. If “getting back to work” isn't an accurate sign of genuine resilience, what are the signs we might look for in our own lives? What does real resilience look like in our communities? 

Productivity culture really is a snarly mess. Wanting to feel productive is very hard to avoid in our lives because Capitalism, of course, but even that suggests that productivity comes from some external mandate - a boss, a workplace, the need to make money to survive. But, like so many other things, productivity is woven into our identities, so that when we are productive and meeting the demands of our society, we feel good and valued. But, do we really feel good and valued or is something else going on?

It’s often the case that being productive fills a void: keeps you busy, makes you feel valuable, helps time pass, etc. but all of that can be true and also not actually about resilience. Is it really that productivity is a symptom of resilience or that resilience is an outcome of feeling validated and worthy in a culture that makes us earn our worthiness and then conflates it with money. 

You can keep busy, have your identity confirmed, and feed yourself and your family, thereby ensuring activity and survival, but at the same time you may experience exhaustion, burnout, disconnection from your own feelings, disconnection from people who need you to be present and supportive in times of grief. 

It also suggests that people who are not capable of productivity or of working — who are deeply traumatized, or bereaved, or healing from illness or violence — are weak or flawed. That they are, ultimately, lazy, a world that reflects negative moral judgment.  The same negative moral judgment lumps need and vulnerability together as weaknesses. If you are “lazy,” “weak,” and “dependent,” then surely you can’t be resilient. 

To go even further, the same productivity and self-sufficiency baked into our prevailing vision of resilience, are important to how we think of citizenship and rights.  Our government is structured around the idea of citizens as individuals who are “strong,” self-sufficient, physically capable people who do not need anything from anyone, especially from the State.

Our relationship with the state is defined in this way, around the notion of resilient men who stand on their own two feet, work hard, are productive in all circumstances, and don’t want “free stuff.”  The underlying assumption of the state is that we are not vulnerable, dependent beings who survive and thrive through mutual care. That assumption is faulty and we are living today with ever worsening outcomes as a result. 

5. You write “Our adapting has to, in the words of poet Georgina Herrera, be grounded in the belief in the ‘fleetingness of the terrible, and the permanence of the kind.’” I love that so much. What is fleetingly terrible in your life right now and where are you experiencing permanent kindness? 

Right now I am fortunate to have a certain measure of stability and peace in day to day life. The fleetingly terrible is sometimes acute and intense awareness of how short life really is and how much suffering could be prevented and avoided, but continues nonetheless. I experience permanent kindness from so many people - both those I know and love and complete strangers who touch my life in ways they will never know. But, also, I have come to really understand nature as a kind of kindness, in what I can only describe as a return to a relationship with other living things — the profusion of more-than-human life —that I had as a child, lost, and am happy to have found my way back to.

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We will be donating to the Haitian Women’s Collective in honor of Soraya’s labor. Get the book here. I would love to hear what you think, as I’m sure, would Soraya. You can follow her on social here.