Don’t bank on the buffalo: why we need to adapt or die

A patient of mine - an ex-banker - recently professed that he didn't know who to be any more because his long-term vision of being a successful, rich, powerful banker was no longer possible. He is not alone: many of his peers are having an identity crisis.

Gone are the days when it was possible to make it rich with a click of the fingers and when bonuses alone were enough for families of five to live on for years - the ideal many recent city recruits were striving for. Now, not only have the pots of gold gone into negative equity, but the phones barely ring any more. What do you do when the conditions for a form of 'success' (eg making money) cease to exist? What happens to a culture?
 
In Radical Hope, a fascinating study of the demise of the Native American Crow tribe's way of life, Jonathan Lear examines what it takes to keep hope for the future alive. At the age of nine, the last great Crow chief, Plenty Coups, had a dream that there would be no more buffalo and that his people would fall to the ground and nothing more would happen.

Sitting Bull’s kamikaze strategy - to fight in the name of honour - cost him his life

Plenty Coups had his dream in 1857, and it correctly predicted the tribe's future: the Crow were hunters and, as the buffalo were wiped out, so was their way of life. But Plenty Coups had also had a dream that told him to be like the bird, the chickadee, and to listen to and learn from his environment. Thanks to the way they interpreted that dream, the Crow were able in subsequent years to settle their disputes peacefully with the whites.
 
What was significant about this dream was that it gave Plenty Coups and the members of his tribe a new way of being, a new cultural identity that enabled them not only to survive -  the Crow Indians did far better in their negotiations over lands and rights with the US government than most other Indian tribes - but to construct a new vision of life that held hope. Lear argues that this can happen when a person or a group can transform their ego-ideal so that it can be congruent within a changed set of circumstances.
 
The idea of the ego-ideal goes back to Freud, and it constitutes a model to which the person aspires to conform. The Crow Indians' collective ego-ideal was bound up with being good hunters and fighters: when hunting is no longer possible and fighting over territory that is already demarcated has lost its purpose, this creates a crisis of meaning. Different options are then available, and we have seen the tragic results of many of them.

One miserable option is simply to survive materially and physically without hope. The effects of this option are all too evident in the Indian tribes who have been sequestered in reservations and are now suffering from serious depression, with alcoholism and crime rates rising.

An alternative option is that of carrying on with the old ideal in the name of honour - the kamikaze option, which was Sitting Bull's preference. As leader of the Sioux tribe, his strategy was to go on fighting the white man, a strategy which cost him and many others their lives.
 
Another option is to become assimilated into a new culture, though this can be at the risk of taking on a false or foreign identity that has not developed from within and fosters an unstable, ersatz culture. Since the credit crunch, job applications for the civil service 'fast stream' have increased by more than 30 per cent and the education sector has seen a similar surge in applications. While these are considered 'secure' jobs, it will be interesting to see how the ethos within these sectors is affected by a new group of employees - employees who may be coming with the mindset of 'get rich quick' bankers.
 
Plenty Coups's achievement, at least according to Lear, was that he could hold out an ego-ideal to the Crow that embraced resilience and learning, receptivity and intelligence instead of the old ideal of power obtained through success in the hunt and at war.

Through this shift in ego-ideal, the Crow were able to recover a system of values and meaning and self-esteem which helped them to adapt within a new culture without losing their identity.

Is there a lesson we can learn from Plenty Coups now? For my ex-banker, and for us all, we need to face this fundamental question and to re-evaluate our values and our dreams. ·