On Trusting Strangers

Many today are concerned about the problems of alienation and loneliness. Our modern economies have created tremendous material abundance, but we seem to have traded away something precious in the process - communities imbued with a sense of belonging. How do we get that back? Sofia Khu reflects on the concept of 'guest-friendship', found in various traditional cultures, for insights on this problem. She also offers the concept of 'dynamic reciprocity' to explain the challenge of creating the types of relationships that can forge genuine communities. 

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I drove across the country this past July with minimal plans and no reservations. Part of the allure of such a trip was the idea of throwing myself, and my boyfriend Josh who came with me, into a relatively unstructured two-week journey. I had the outlines of a plan—a general route, the date that I had to return my rental in San Francisco—but no real daily agenda. 

Traveling like this felt like stepping back in time. I watched the landscape transform slowly as the miles went by. And we found ourselves in several situations where we had no choice but to turn to complete strangers for help, and not just to solicit small talk or travel recommendations. I’m talking about hitching a ride after getting lost on a hike, and waving random people down for help when your car is stalled on the side of the road in a cell service dead zone. 

At my most positive, I felt like Josh and I were fumbling our way across the country, catapulted to our destination by angels in the form of strangers. But when I remember carefully, I can recall the feelings of dread and anxiety that precipitated these interactions: what will these people think of me? What if they say no and lash out? What if these people are dangerous? 

It’s nerve-wracking to make a big ask, especially of someone you do not know.

In hindsight, it felt like a privilege to be helped by these people. My interactions with helpful strangers, though brief and not very deep at all, bestowed me with a sense of real lingering happiness. I felt light for hours, even days afterwards. 

These experiences called to mind the ancient Greek value of xenia, which I first learned about while reading the Odyssey. The term can be roughly translated into “ritual hospitality towards strangers” or “guest-friendship.”

This ancient Greek value codified into social norms the idea that if a stranger showed up at your door, you should take them in. This was, of course, a tradition that strengthened the social fabric, and additionally gave the Greeks a sense of identity–it was this kind of tradition that kept the Greeks more Greek than Barbarian. 

Guests and hosts had a reciprocal relationship: guests had a responsibility to the hosts, just as the hosts had a responsibility to the guests, and it was expected that if the host was to find himself on the road in the future, his former guest would take him in, too. This social norm required an act of empathy, of imagining yourself in the guest’s shoes.

Similar traditions are found all over the world and across time. There is the Hindu Atithi Devo Bhava - the Sanskrit translates to “the divine dwells in the guest (who comes without notice).” This tradition was interestingly used as the slogan of a national tourism campaign by the Tourism Department of India (it’s interesting to see how this common sociocultural behavior has been subsumed by the travel and leisure industry).

Perhaps guest-friendship can also be boiled down to what is known in the modern western world as the religiously-inflected “golden rule” - to treat others as you’d want to be treated. In that light, I should say that the people who helped Josh and me when our car stalled in Yellowstone were proud supporters of BYU, and presumably Mormon. I’ll never know their names, but one put down his birding telephoto lens to help me pop the hood of the car, and the other drove his van (and his five kids in the backseat) back and forth between our stranded car and cell service three times to call AAA, then a park ranger, and finally to tell us that he did both. 

I highlight this experience because I am accustomed to thinking that Mormon Americans from the mountain region are fundamentally different from me. And perhaps we still are, but stranded on the side of the road, those differences seemed to fade in the face of my immediate identity as ‘someone worthy of receiving help.’

This, I think, was what made me feel a sense of belonging that stretched beyond my affinity to the coastal metropolis where I grew up, and my ethnicity, and my race, and my upper-middle class upbringing. I felt American, whatever that means, because I had created kinship with another American fundamentally different from me. That moment of community began when I asked for help, and it ultimately happened because someone else answered my call.  

I’m not saying we should simply revive guest-friendship as it functioned in the old world. But I do think that it’s helpful to consider the way that our current society crowds out such opportunities for those crucial, community-sustaining kindnesses that guest-friendship once compelled us to participate in—and the rare places where they still flourish today. Searching for where guest-friendship survives, and where it does not, may point us towards new ways to understand and reverse the nagging atomization that has crept up on us all.

The Market fills our Needs

We help people when we see that they really need it. But what does it mean to still need help when the normative way to fulfill our needs is through the market?

We exchange an amount of money commensurate to the products and services that we require. If our needs go unfulfilled despite this mechanism of fair transaction, it’s most likely our fault: We haven’t saved enough money for our needs, or we’re spending our money in the wrong ways, or we just have not dedicated the necessary time and diligence to researching all our best options. Whether we are in need of therapy, a meal at a restaurant, or a ride back from a remote location, we are expected to prepare and plan for the best purchases.

Today, technology has added an additional layer of alienation to this process of market exchange. Prior to the internet, purchases still meant at least some form of minimal social interaction with a clerk or cashier. 

But today, the internet has made this process more and more solitary: If we need food, we can Doordash, or order on a kiosk or app instead of talking to a waiter; if we find ourselves in a strange part of town, Google Maps tells us where to go if we’re lost; and we can search for top restaurants and shops via Yelp and TripAdvisor, so only the truly adventurous need ask a local stranger for recommendations or directions. 

People probably bemoaned this at every stage of consolidation, every stage of market evolution; I assume something like this happened when, say, large supermarket chains replaced family-run neighborhood grocery stores. This process of change is not about technology per se; rather more about businesses increasing efficiency. 

Mutual Aid

In contrast to the atomized, market-driven social world of the middle and upper-middle classes, there’s a long tradition of mutual aid in communities that are unable to buy their needs in the market or are neglected by the state. Think of the free breakfast initiatives, ambulance programs, and medical clinics started by the Black Panthers, and networks of legal and psychological support provided by and for queer people during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. 

The current market makes it easier for a well-resourced person to choose atomization over interconnectedness; atomization is the default and the ideal as shaped by market and social forces. The story is different for those who don’t have it good, so to speak. 

As a person with a solidly upper middle class background, travel is the only context in which I’ve faced the cracks in this norm. No matter how carefully I plan and research for a trip, something usually goes wrong–a flight delay, a surprise closure–and I finally must ask someone for help. 

Dynamic Reciprocity: Interdependence is Messy

I think many people find it scary to think about the extent of our dependency on others. Our typical American paradigm of adulthood is independence, and the idea of what makes someone independent is tied with the financial. Money creates the illusion of ultimate independence: if you work hard (and smartly) enough, you can buy anything you might need and want. 

So perhaps this struggle with dependency, and all that it brings, is a barrier to achieving a sense of community. 

In our early conversations about this article, Tusk and Quill editor Nimayi Dixit pointed me to some Twitter discourse (see here and here) about people actively choosing lonely lives over living in community. Though personal choice certainly contributes to atomization, I don’t think it’s the main force shaping this trend. 

I think it’s slightly misleading to focus on the aspect of choice here. We are so accustomed to “choosing” solitude over community because the solitude in which you buy everything you need is predictable.

In contrast, our desire for community is diffuse and often imprecise, especially at first. We don’t want to be alone, we want people to understand and support us. And we want to understand and support others. But what does that actually look like on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis? This changes all the time. There’s no way to know exactly what others need at any given moment; it’s often hard to know exactly what you want yourself, at least right away. 

Community, then, is a constant negotiation: what do you need? What can you give? And on and on. As these negotiations proceed, they iterate. Choosing community is just the first step of a long process. 

In an interpersonal relationship, it’s imperative to first get to know our own discomforts, then communicate them, and it’s the other person’s responsibility to listen and create space for such communication to occur. In this way we can discover and create boundaries; and they will shift over time as we ourselves change. Momentary discomfort is usually part of this process of discovery and communication, so it’s also our responsibility to give each other grace as we learn what makes us uncomfortable and learn how to communicate this fact. 

This process is a practice; the more we do it, the easier it gets. But by definition it’s a messy process. Finding and staying in community is made up of these little give-and-takes because what we need is always changing.

No wonder it’s easier to choose to be isolated–our current society did not equip us well for the challenges of living in community. In the wake of the Me Too movement, we continue to discuss the way people fall short of respecting–and even simply discussing what their boundaries and desires are.

I would argue that we lack specific language to describe these exchanges that make “living in community.” The best we have is language that invokes the market. But it’s important to acknowledge the fundamental differences between relationality in market exchange and in community. If market exchange becomes our de facto benchmark, we hamper our ability to imagine and describe new possibilities of relationality. 

In market exchange, the terms of engagement are clearly defined at the outset, at least from the perspective of the consumer. She will find the price up front, and both she and the seller know the goods or services she will receive in exchange for the price that she pays. Although the price for apples or a good lawyer will change, sometimes significantly, from place to place and year to year, the consumer does not usually experience this change in her daily economic interactions. Whether she shops at Walmart or Wegmans, someone at headquarters is probably following the supply chain and carefully monitoring demand, but the two will not meet. The consumer, especially in more modernized economies, simply searches for the best price available, almost never haggling or negotiating unless the purchase is something like a car or a home. The average consumer experience of the market fosters an expectation of equivalence–in other words, the right price for the right goods. In contrast, building community requires an understanding of what I call dynamic reciprocity

First, dynamism: the constant negotiation driven by the ever-changing needs and wants of the participants. They choose how they engage with each other in a way that can change quickly and often, with every interaction.

Second, reciprocity. Reciprocity does not result in instant equivalence. Merriam-Webster defines “reciprocal” as “shared, felt, or shown by both sides.” This deals in feelings of mutuality rather than objective definitions of equivalence. Reciprocity does not connote objective commensurability between the two sides in the way that “equivalence” does. 

Reciprocity means both sides of the relationship care about the needs of the other and adjust their own behavior accordingly, rather than one side scurrying to satisfy the unaccountable whims of the other.

The term “dynamic reciprocity” is, for me, a reminder of the messiness of our interpersonal relationships. This term is like a pebble in the pocket that evokes the possibility of a different kind of future—one that looks a little bit like the past, but different, where market exchange does not dominate the way we expect to relate to other human beings. 

We’ve shed our attachments to many rigid social rules in our modern-day society, and I do think this is for the better; but we can’t lose sight of the importance of a strong social fabric. If sticking to traditional social rules is not the way we want to build our communities, we will have to practice our dynamic reciprocity and all the smaller acts of vulnerability that it requires.

Sofia is a participant in the Tusk & Quill Rotational Program. 

All opinions expressed here are solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the author’s employer.