Michael Meade, mythol­o­gist and sto­ry­teller, says there are three lay­ers of human interaction:

“If the First Lay­er of human inter­ac­tion is the com­mon ground of man­ners, kind speech, polite greet­ing, and work­ing agree­ments; if the Third Lay­er is the area of deeply shared human­i­ty, the uni­ver­sal broth­er­hood and sis­ter­hood of all peo­ple, of the under­ly­ing, fun­da­men­tal one­ness of human love, jus­tice, and peace­ful coex­is­tence; then the Sec­ond Lay­er is the ter­ri­to­ry of anger, hatred, wrath, rage, out­rage, jeal­ousy, envy, con­tempt, dis­gust, and acri­mo­ny. It is the Via Neg­a­tive, the field of Con­flict, the plain of Dis­cord, the hills of Tur­moil. And, the Sec­ond Lay­er always exists between the First Lay­er and the Third.”

You can find this quo­ta­tion and a more com­plete expla­na­tion in Mead­e’s poet­ry anthol­o­gy, co-edit­ed with Robert Bly and James Hill­man, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart.

I use this mod­el in my lead­er­ship work fre­quent­ly because it so ably defines the quest, com­mon to human com­mu­ni­ties, to reach the Third Lay­er. As impor­tant, it does so in a way that enno­bles the Sec­ond Lay­er — that painful pas­sage through the dark­ness of gen­uine con­flict and neg­a­tive emo­tions. Mead­e’s work sug­gests that con­flict is inevitable if we want to real­ly expe­ri­ence and act on the deep­er human uni­ver­sals, the rich val­ues wor­thy of guid­ing rela­tion­ships, from one-on-one part­ner­ships to a whole soci­ety. His mod­el shat­ters the illu­sion that some­how we reach the ground of a bet­ter world with­out expe­ri­enc­ing the worst of it, with­out an exhaust­ing strug­gle, maybe even a vicious fight with each oth­er over the nature of real­i­ty. He reminds us that the strug­gle is worth­while because it reveals the cor­ner­stones of what it means to be human.

The strug­gle is what we do, it’s what we have to do, and all the First Lay­er pre­tend­ing in the world will not let us escape from the demand to dis­cov­er again the absolutes we are meant to share. The Sec­ond Lay­er is unques­tion­ably tor­tur­ous: chock full of our inse­cu­ri­ties and illu­sions, inhab­it­ed by scape­goats and caus­es for blame, loaded with pow­er strug­gles and wars in which all sides are “right” and “good” with­in the lim­its of their think­ing it is so. The Sec­ond Lay­er is a tight­ly knot­ted cloth of threats to our sta­tus, our sense of cer­tain­ty, our auton­o­my, our desired rela­tion­ships, and sense of fair­ness, to use David Rock­’s SCARF mod­el to describe what is at stake: our famil­iar and most pre­ferred identities.

Fur­ther, Meade points out that just because we’ve touched the uni­ver­sals before does not mean we can eas­i­ly find them again. We must go through the Sec­ond Lay­er repeat­ed­ly. He writes,

“Here’s the bad news: The Third Lay­er is con­stant­ly mov­ing its loca­tion; it’s not to be found today where it was yes­ter­day. We can go through the motions, exact­ly repeat­ing every­thing that pre­vi­ous­ly got us to the state of peace, love, bliss; and we get nowhere. We return to places where we fell deep into love and find the view obscured by a new fac­to­ry; the roman­tic restau­rant has been replaced by a fast-food joint. We bow in all direc­tions, say the prayers just as before, but there’s no sense or sight of god; we come up emp­ty. The Third Lay­er is mys­te­ri­ous, unpre­dictable, leaves no for­ward­ing address.”

It’s clear our cur­rent polit­i­cal strife is part of a Sec­ond Lay­er phe­nom­e­non and we can legit­i­mate­ly ask: is it real­ly 1984, as many would claim? Well, in some way it sure­ly must be — the metaphor is too apt. We are direct­ly expe­ri­enc­ing that “nev­er end­ing fight” about just what we mean by “truth, jus­tice, and the Amer­i­can Way.” In using the catch phrase of a super­hero — one who stands for good — I in no way want to dimin­ish where we are in the real strug­gle, nor am I tac­it­ly encour­ag­ing a slide into any pas­sive form of fan­ta­sy and moral relativism.

To the con­trary, it is clear we have a long fight on our hands and in the most pub­lic way pos­si­ble. We will have to col­lec­tive­ly find our way through the dark­ness, the anger and bro­ken illu­sions, right back to dis­cern­ing whether truth exists any­more among the bias­es and the lies, and if so why truth is so vital any­way. We have to find out what jus­tice means — again and from the core — and learn new ways to defend its val­ue. And we’ll have to find out if there is some­thing, any­thing, espe­cial­ly impor­tant about this “Amer­i­can Way.” We urgent­ly must redis­cov­er that, before we help burn down the world in the name of giv­ing evil a chance. This is our “super­hero” work, isn’t it?

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the hour is late and the dan­ger is high. And I believe this is the exact episode in which the pow­ers we’ve pro­ject­ed onto our super­hero from the 1930’s must final­ly be reclaimed. We can wait no longer. It’s us step­ping into the phone booth now, nobody else, in order to defend a Third Lay­er val­ue called decen­cy — which is what Super­man stood for, right?

So I say, let’s have a real­ly big fight — a mean­ing­ful and pow­er­ful one, one that real­ly gets to the essence — about the nature of decen­cy as human beings and how to tru­ly self-gov­ern in its name.

RSS and email sub­scrip­tion, occa­sion­al Unfold­ing Lead­er­ship newslet­ter, search and oth­er func­tions may be found at the “Fur­ther Infor­ma­tion” tab at the bot­tom of the front page.

Pin­ter­est users, you can pin pic­tures from this weblog via this Board.