It is said that in a well constructed drama, all of the action must be character-driven, and that every word out of each character's mouth could have been spoken only by him.
It's amazing the extent to which that holds true in real life. Think of the people you know. When was the last time one of them acted out of character? Smart people tend to act smart, dumb people act dumb, lame people act lame, nice people behave themselves, and selfish people act obnoxiously. Everyone seems to have a certain set level of pretension and subterfuge which they consistently weave into their speech.
All the time.
People have varying levels of intelligence, which they never exceed (although they can often fall short of it). They have a certain level of narcissism, which also never deserts them, and a certain detachment (which is sort of the opposite of narcissism).
Whenever I hear a dullard say something insightful and/or funny, my first reaction is always: I wonder where he heard that?
People can put on acts for a short while, but they always revert to form. Everybody just has a certain way of.....being. Life is like a particularly well constructed screenplay that way, even if it usually lacks dramatic tension. (And, usually, heroic characters.)
I sometimes like to play a game at dinner: I suggest everybody act like one of the other people at the table, and say things that only that person would say. The game usually devolves into a situation where someone won't play by the rules: if I say something obviously stupid which the person I'm role-playing has actually said, that person will sometimes get angry and, whether or not he's supposed to be playing me, say, "Oh, I'm John and I'm a stupid asshole."
Which, believe it or not, I actually don't say. (I may act like one from time to time; but I never 'fess up to it in quite those words.)
Anyway, it's a fun game, and I recommend it, with the caveat that if you play it with someone unable to take a joke, be prepared for anger.
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Nietzsche said something similar to this. If you're not familiar with his work, he thought people should try to reinvent themselves so they could achieve greatness. He thought people should move away from their biases and preconceptions, and maybe even from what's considered 'socially normal'. He was an elitist who wasn't at all keen on people who clinged to one, timeless identity, instead believing that people needed to always adapt and learn to become better people. But even he recognised that there's ultimately a limit to how much people can change. No matter how much we learn or experience, there's always that fundamental part of us that will always stick with us no matter what.
Research has showed this to be true: the tenth shyest child in the class will be around the tenth shyest adult in the class reunion - assuming all former class members are still alive - fifty years later (Susan Cain, 'Quiet'). If you've not yet read it, I really recommend 'The Blank State: The Modern Denial of Human Nature' by Steven Pinker. He really puts to rest the perennial 'nature vs nurture' argument by providing overwhelming evidence that our personalities are mostly down to nature (around 80%, by what he seemed to imply).
- Gethin
Gethin --
I sort of like what Nietzsche advocated, although when I look at the people who "reinvent" themselves, in modern parlance, they're almost always people I despise. (Think Madonna, people who adopt accents that are not their own, con men, people like that.) Having said that, I sort of wish I'd done little more of that in my own life.
And yes, traits that are genetically determined like shyness and intelligence are pretty much immutable. Take me, for instance. Even if I wanted to reinvent myself a con man, I wouldn't be able to, simply because I'm not quick on my feet. I can respond fairly intelligently to most comments, but that's only because I'm not doing so in "real time." If you had just said (in person) to me what you just wrote, my response would have been something along the lines of, "Huh? Wha...? Yeah, I guess. I never really read Nietzsche...."
So, just as well I never tried to reinvent myself as a con man.
Nietzsche didn't mean the Madonna, accent-appropriation type of emulation. He meant trying to become more like an ideal person: someone with extraordinary traits. Kind of like the WWJD ("what would Jesus do?") wristbands that some Christians wear so they can use Jesus' example if they're not sure how to respond to a situation. Depending on who you pick as a role model (Goethe was Nietzsche's), Nietzsche's idea can be a good one: it gives you a guideline on how to act in any given situation so you're not just blindly going along with how you'd instinctively behave. That way, you're not really changing your essence, just your actions and words. After a while, you become used to behaving more like your hero and thus become a better person. Your role model could be anyone: someone you've met (dead or living), a historical figure or even a fictional character. Your series of posts 'The noblest/smartest/coolest guy I ever met' is probably a good starting point.
But, I still like the idea of trying to reinvent yourself as a conman :-) There is a book called 'The Wisdom of Psychopaths' that gives helpful tips on how to become more confident and assertive, written by a guy who interviewed (dangerous, violent) sociopaths. One tip I learned from it was to pretend your anxiety/inhibition doesn't exist and do what you want to anyway. I've done that a couple of times in social situations and found my anxiety to have been misplaced: no one reacted badly.
- Gethin
As much as our society is pushing for every young person to go to college it is completely unrealistic. I have two stepdaughters that are in college, one will be graduating medical school in 2018 as a surgeon and her sister had to take a year off because she couldn't handle the pressure. The one that is taking a break is very bright, brighter on paper than her older sister who will be a doctor but she suffers from depression and anxiety (being an introvert). Arguably the more successful of the two is the one that is working harder to reach her goals because school didn't come as easy to her as to her little sister.
I'm an introvert also and in my line of work that's an anomaly. My parents told me my career choice was a mistake, that I didn't have the right personality for it. They're probably right in thinking that but somehow I make it work. I've learned how to be a Type A personality when needed but naturally am not. So I s'pose I've reinvented myself in that way.
Going back to the need for everyone to think all children should go to college when it's time is asinine. Like Mike Rowe states we need more folks to go to trade schools, not everyone should get a degree they'll never use. We need plumbers, AC techs, car mechanics, painters, landscapers, appliance repair and a whole myriad of jobs society needs. My first job was Jack in the Box when I was a teenager. I've never looked down on that as those are entry jobs for kids to learn from and prove they're growing up, becoming responsible. A factory full of people degrees won't get anything built without line workers.
As you've pointed out crooks will be crooks because that's how they're wired. We'd be bored to death if everyone was the same. I mean I hold conversations with myself once in a while but don't want to do it all the time. The old saying "variety is the spice of life" is true with people. We benefit as a society from our variances in personalities and abilities.
I've never been an intellectual but that has never stopped me from wanting to learn, I just know I'll never be a rocket scientist. I laugh when I can't remember the 4 digit door code to get through a door I've gone through hundreds of times before.
Gethin --
Well, there you go, I was giving myself too much credit: I can't even respond intelligently to comments. Okay, acting more like the ideal person, emulating greatness in some form, I guess that's good advice.
Pretending an inhibition isn't there, I can see how that would work. I may try it sometime. Sociopaths can be successful in all sorts of ways. Part of their lack of inhibition is in zeroing in on others' weaknesses and using those to manipulate someone. I'll probably try some milder method, like just pretending some situation isn't intimidating.
Not Dave --
The story of your two stepdaughters rings true somehow. I've never seen hard statistics on whether depression and anxiety correlate positively with IQ, but I've always gotten the impression that they do. (And I've heard others say the same, with the same caveat, that they've never seen studies on it either.)
I can't imagine there are many introverts in law enforcement. That's generally a job that attracts high testosterone, mesomorphic, guys with little sense of shyness.
I guess you're more like your younger stepdaughter, the one who had to overcome obstacles to do what she wanted.
From what I have read about Jung (I am definitely no expert) and his theories of Introversion and Extroversion, we all have characteristics of both the extrovert and the introvert but in the end we will lean to one or the other. In my work situation, I have to be extroverted and that is not a problem for me. I am not shy and don't have a problem taking control if I need to. In social situations, I tend to look like an extrovert...at times I can be the life of a party and I wouldn't mind more social situations if it didn't take me so much time to recover from a social situation. I enjoy being around people (I like) but I can only take so much. I do not get energized by being around people. People actually drain me of energy and I have to recover from this. The recovery consists of being alone to "charge my battery". I need this recovery for varying degrees of time. But it is an everyday thing. I think the way we recharge ourselves is a characteristic of the introvert or the extrovert. I think I tend to fall more into the introvert category due to this and during the times that I did not get this time to be by myself (college, living in the dorms, having rooommates) it affected my anxiety level to a point that I had to be medicated. Of course, at the time, everyone thought that it was just the challenges of college etc. but it wasn't. The problem was that I couldn't find a place to "recharge" and it caused some major problems for me.
Hannah
Hannah --
Interesting. It's been a long time since I've read Jung so I can't comment on him. But the introvert/extrovert thing rings true. We can all act differently at different times, but we all also seems have a certain set point as far as extroversion. It's good that you can appear extroverted when you need to be, at times that's all that counts. Medication, that sounds serious.
May I ask what you do for work now? (No one here knows your last name.)
I never felt I needed to recharge myself, but I seem to have been around an awful lot of people whose company, for one reason or other, I didn't enjoy. (And the older I got, the more reclusive I've gotten, you may find the same.)
That goes for facebook. If you showed me my friend's facebook posts without their names, I reckon I could identify who posted or wrote what pretty accurately. You can also tell quite a lot about someone's intelligence and personality from that too.
Steven --
I'm not a Facebook denizen (I joined, but never put up a single thing, and rarely look, unless it's to look up someone I just met), but I would have a hard time telling people's posts apart, simply because so many people simply seem to repost stuff they got from elsewhere. a lot of the stuff that I've seen seems to consist of, "Look at this, isn't this great?" and doesn't really express the personality of whoever posted it.
Craig...for most of my career, I have worked in the juvenile justice system. I guess I could be considered a paper pusher now (director) but I paid my dues in the juvenile justice education system where I had to establish myself as the alpha in an environment which could go calm to chaotic if I didn't establish myself as the leader within seconds. I believe that I am an introvert but I can also take control of a room pretty quickly. For me, it has always been very interesting work because I never stop learning about human nature...there will never be a time that I have seen it all... and I actually feel that I am doing something worthwhile and has meaning.
Hannah
Hannah --
(Since we seem to be on a first name basis here I'll point out my first name is John.)
You can't be a complete introvert if you can take control of a room quickly. Granted, some of that is experience, but there are plenty of people who'd never learn how to do that, or whose instincts just wouldn't lead them in that direction.
I agree, that must be interesting work. You must have to deal with a lot of extreme personalities, including sociopaths, along, I suppose, with virtually every other syndrome. Must be scary at times, too. But you are doing something worthwhile.
I regret not having worked in some capacity where I got to meet a lot of different people.
I'm so sorry! I know your name is John. Duh! Here I am dissing you on your own blog by calling you by your last name. I'm just not with it today. No, I am not a complete introvert. And you are right. There are some instincts that play into it, although I did have a huge learning curve and actually made some matters even worse in when I first started. Yes, I have worked with some extreme personalities but the population I work with is rarely over the age of 17 and I don't work in an area which has a large gang population or anything of that nature so we are not talking about a large group of hardened criminals already into organized crime. Some of the kids I see are actually quite scared and did something dumb while showing off for friends and got caught because they don't have what it takes to be a criminal. But we have had our challenges. It's interesting because at this age, we get to see the family unit and watching the families interact can answer so many questions about behaviors or how these behaviors evolve. Most kids are angrier than hell and the majority have good reason to be angry. Sometimes, things aren't so easy to figure out. One interesting example would be that I always thought that Freud's Oedipus Complex was a stretch. I certainly never took it seriously. I looked at it as more of a basis for neo-Freudians to develop more coherent theories. Until I had a son, a mother and a father sitting across from me in my office and they were all playing their role in this Oedipal drama. And I knew that this boy was in trouble. The look on the father's face was probably one of the only things that truly scared me.
Hannah
Hannah --
It's okay, I just sorta figured you were maybe taking charge of the message board the same way you take control of a room. (Is it really that chaotic in here? JK. It's okay, really, I'm used to it.)
Ah, well that's good you don't work in a gang area. And yes, normal teenagers are going to do stupid stuff just to impress their friends. There's a big truth or dare mentality at that age.
Can't say I'm a believer in Freudian psychology. I did take a course in Freudian in college, and ended up concluding that it was sort of a neat way of labeling everything but it shed zero light onto human psychology.
I'm with you on dysfunctional families, though, a child is rarely anything more than a cross between his parents.
I recalle the William Shakespeare quote, "All the world's a stage..." He agrees with you. We all have our parts to play throughout our lives.
- birdie
Birdie --
Well that puts me in good company. (Even if he was referring more to the public face we present and I was referring a little more to the fact that our level of intelligence, narcissism, inhibition, etc, never leave us.)
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