The Social Network of Tribal Consciousness

Growing up as a Jewish boy in America, grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I often dreamed of being taken away. There were recurring night terrors of trying to find hiding places in my house or a neighbors’ house and then silently waiting to see if I would be safe or if someone close to me would turn me in. The most intense moment of these dreams was typically when a person close to me, a teacher or one of my parents’ friends for example, would open the closet where I sat huddled and would stare at me for a split second, deciding if they would close the door and keep going or start screaming that they “found one.” I woke up from these dreams feeling unsafe, unsettled and desperate to fit in.

After I watched The Social Network about Mark Zuckerberg’s creation of Facebook, I had the same feeling as I did in those childhood dreams. I hadn’t felt those feelings in decades yet there was something very similar in watching the film makers’ perception of Zuckerberg as an isolated, desperate boy/man in a world where he felt he wasn’t enough, wasn’t safe somehow, and that his successes just wouldn’t matter.

We don’t have receive any information about Zuckerberg’s family history in the film. In fact, we hear about his best friends’ father a lot, meet the twins’ father and perceive his influence throughout, yet there is no connection for Mark with his father. Zuckerberg’s dad is clearly absent in mention but dramatically present as a ghost role. This was, for me, one of the most unsettling factors in the film. We are to believe that the man behind the curtain doesn’t have parents and that he is as alone in the world as he seems; or as he forcefully creates himself to be, squeezing even the people who like him out of his tiny bubble.

It’s easy to watch the film or read articles about Zuckerberg and brand him a classic ass hole, as was suggested several times in the film itself (only by women, incidentally). Yet, beneath the ass hole persona is a clearly wounded young man, desperate to connect while constantly disconnecting. The girl he is rejected by in the beginning of the film is the woman he still attempts to connect with at the end of the film. Unsafe,unsettled and desperate. There is more to the character’s behavior than his character, there is his wound.

My grandparents lived long lives beyond the camps and the Holocaust, but I remember the packed suitcases always stowed in the front closet of their Brooklyn apartment. Just in case. There is a tribal consciousness that exists for many Jews, albeit unconscious, that affects the way many of us interact with the world. It is a millenniums old history of working our way into the public trust, only to be rejected when we “get too powerful.”

In a week when Rahm Emmanuel returns to Chicago from the White House to run as the first Israeli mayor of a major U.S. city and when Rick Sanchez is fired from CNN because of his anti-Semitic remarks, it is hard to argue that the tribe continues to strive to feel safe, settled and part of the society that has embraced us better than any other in history. It is hard to argue that Mark Zuckerberg is/was consciously playing out a need to fit in as a result of being Jewish, but it would be equally challenging to argue that it doesn’t exist somewhere in his unconscious, tribal self.

How does one enter the collective relationship status for an entire tribe?