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Chapter Eight
CULTURE AND PERSONALITY
The Standardization of the Self-Esteem
"We are born to action; and whatever is capable of suggesting and
guiding action has power over us from the first."
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY
". . . mankind's common instinct for reality . . . has always held the
world to be essentially a theatre for heroism."
WILLIAM JAMES
If there were any doubt that self-esteem is the dominant motive of man, there would be one sure way to dispel it; and that would be by showing that when people do not have self-esteem they cannot act, they break down. And this is exactly what we learn from clinical data, from the theory of the psychoses, as well as from anthropology. ...
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... Anthropologists have long known that when a tribe of people lose the feeling that their way of life is worth-while they may stop reproducing, or in large numbers simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish:...
... It is wrong to say that man is a peacock, if we mean thereby to belittle his urge to self-glorification, and make it seem a mere matter of vanity and self-display. ...when we tally the sum of these efforts, the excruciating earnestness of them, the eternal grinding-out of the inner-newsreel, we can see that something really big is going on—...
This is the uniquely human need,... each person's need to be an object of primary value, a heroic contributor to world-life—... This seems to be the logical and inevitable result of the symbolic constitution of self-worth in an unbelievably complex animal with exquisitely sensitive
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and effusive emotions. ... Self-preservation, physio-chemical identity, pulsating body warmth, a sense of power and satisfaction in activity—all these tally up in symbolic man to the emergence of the heroic urge. ... Freud saw the universality of narcissism, and revealed the invertedness and the clinical liabilities of it. Adler too studied the neurotic overemphasis on the "Will to Power," and made the idea a central part of his formulations. But it was Nietzsche, earlier, who saw the healthy expression of the "Will to Power" and glory, the inevitable drive to cosmic heroism by the animal who had become man.
... If you are a psychiatrist or social worker, and want to understand directly what is driving your patient, ask yourself simply how he thinks of himself as a hero, what constitutes the framework of reference for his heroic strivings—... If you are a student of society, and want to understand why youth opts out of the system, find out why it fails to offer them the possibility of real heroism. If you are a child psychologist you already understand the
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deeper meaning of what we casually and often scornfully term "sibling rivalry." ... The child needs to be an object of primary value, and by definition only one person can be primary;... Children are not vicious animals struggling to dominate rivals, but culture-heroes in the making, desperately trying to stand out.
Culture and Personality
... Culture is a structure of rules, customs, and ideas, which serve as a vehicle for heroism. ... The task for the ego is to navigate in its world without anxiety, and it does this by learning to choose actions that are satisfying and bring praise instead of blame. ...
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...if the function of self-esteem is to give the ego a steady buffer against anxiety, wherever and whenever it might be imagined, one crucial function of culture is to make continued self-esteem possible. ...
... Once the child learns that he is an "I" in relation to others, he has quickly to bolster this discovery by finding out: "What does this world mean to me, and how do I act in it?" ...once an animal becomes self-conscious, straightforward action is no longer possible. The prescription for conduct free of anxiety is to choose the "right" thing to do. And, as soon as one course of action becomes "right" and another "wrong," life becomes moral and meaningful. Morality is merely a prescription for choice; and "meaning" is born as the choice is carried into action.
...
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...
The self-reflexive animal discovers his body as something which enables him to transact with the world in a certain way. ... Societies arrange their members in categories of infant, boy, girl, adult male, adult female, old male, old female. Old English recognized the adolescent whom we have chosen to ignore, with the designations "lass" and "lad." The designation "old man" in one culture may entitle the actor to enjoy finally the power over others that he has waited a lifetime for—as the aged males of the Australian Tiwi tribe apportioned the young women among themselves. The same designation in another culture may entitle the holder to being left out in the bush for the hyenas to carry off.
...
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...
The world of action is structured in terms of: "What is the person's position, and what behavior can I expect from him as a result of it?" "What is my position in relation to him, and what behavior does this position entitle or oblige me to?"
... Status and role are basic to an understanding of human behavior because they tell the individual what he should do in a particular social situation, and how he should feel about himself as he does it. ... Status and role serve further to make behavior predictable, so that the meaning in everyday life becomes dependable; the individual can count on others to behave according to his expectations. ...
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...
And, as in a high-school play, everyone scrambles for the lead parts. ...
One of the great and lasting insights into the nature of society is that it is precisely a drama, a play, a staging—... Individuals are given parts to play in the status-role system,... ...a claim for a part to play in the cultural plot. When others recognize that claim, as the culture provides that they do, meaningful motivation and value become an inseparable part of daily action.
Caillois and Lasch might have something to say against this metaphor. Genuine
drama
is predicated on its ultimate un-reality. To refer to anything important in real life as a "drama" is to stretch the metaphor too far. Once again, follow the millennials: real-life "drama" is when people are behaving ridiculously, indeed, anti-socially, as if the real-life stakes were as un-real as they are for the professional actor. On the other hand, if someone behaves "rationally" or just "instrumentally" then they are doing something so different from what any party to aesthetic "drama" might do that the metaphor no longer works. It is at that point more of a binary opposition, actually, than a metaphor.
So,
I suppose the point
is that
this is just how un-real
the cultural plot
and our
contrived,
symbolic,
social
character
can become
.
Culture and personality become so un-real that they are at work in reality but not on it. But if we live long and well enough, eventually circumstances will force us to make the journey back to reality. Right?
I'm interested particularly in this aspect of Becker's theory because it makes a small but decisive first step towards honing in on an inventory of "pragmatic" social behaviors based on their validity and effectiveness, and not merely based on, say, their preponderance, or yes, even their essentiality. The eco-pragmatists and eco-semiotists (I can't believe how many times I've typed these ridiculous platitudes) that I occasionally stumble upon out here on the internet don't seem too interested in the granular detail of social behavior, but rather are content to namecheck evolutionism (or perhaps "survivalism," to deploy a Laschian double entendre!) as proof-of-concept. But Becker, quite to the contrary, goes to great lengths to show that all of this can turn not merely sour but indeed truly "evil." Any thoughtful effort to lay out the details of how that all unfolds seems worth considering.
Finally, for good measure, here is today's reminder that environment matters too. It seems we insist on rejiggering our lived environment so as to render our essential social wiring increasingly maladaptive. There's nothing either pragmatic or principled in that. If we cannot change the wiring, then we are stuck trying to change the environment. But, umm...we're "getting colder," no?
(See also p. 96 below.
Theatrical acting is a vicarious freedom of acting control of a situation. It demonstrates perfectly how control can be gained merely by properly saying the right things. Perfect acting is a unique exercise in omnipotence, gained simply by infallible command of the script.
But in another sense the script has control of the actor.)
The word "status" is not to be confused with status used in the everyday sense,... In sociological terms, everyone has a status , a formalized cue that makes it possible to predict how he will act in a certain situation. It is easy to understand that the culture as a whole has the most to gain from this predictability; life can go on with a minimum of confusion,... ...the culture
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may provide variations in grammatical form to be used in addressing people of various statuses,...
Why does man unnecessarily complicate his life? Because in this very complexity there is a challenge to ego mastery, and a denial of meaninglessness. ... The individual undoubtedly derives the greatest stimulus from this conceptual ordering,... The more intricate the staging, the more all-absorbing the play. ...
... ...there is also the physical aspect of man's existence: culture has to provide man with safety as well as self-esteem. This is its other crucial function. Action has to be dependable and predictable. And the area of least dependability in social life is, naturally, people. ... A schizophrenic child may develop a deep attachment to, say, a radia-
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tor, in preference to his mother. Both function, but the radiator more warmly and more predictably. Person-objects, on the one hand, are powerful and capricious. ... The ego thrives on control, but person-objects, theoretically, are always beyond control. ... A person-object is a locus of causality, capable of introducing undreamed-of events into one's life. ...
The problem of "What will the next person be like" is at the core of human adaptation, because self-preservation may depend on it. ... But when one is dealing with massively unpredictable human objects, dependable cues for inference are not easy to come by. Therefore, man is given to stereotyping in the interests of his own security. People are forever trying to put each other into neat little boxes, and file them away in the cabinet, said Joyce Cary in The Horse's Mouth. ... To say that someone is as "smart as a fox" is a sort of plebeian character analysis. ...
So it is easy to understand that status cues and role prescriptions for behavior take care not only of self-esteem, but
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of the vital matter of our safety as well. ... We do not let our ordering of the world rest for a moment. Probably, if most of us had our way, we would try to maximize the predictability of everyone else, while leaving ourselves free to inject novelty into our relationships. Only this kind of power would give us complete safety and control. But it would also be dull.
The Paradox of Hero-Systems
The most impressive thing about the study of culture and personality is how very neatly the two elements dovetail into one coherent picture. ...
But as early as the beginning of culture and personality studies anthropologists of the stature of Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict saw the underside of these genial arrangements—the cost in human freedom that they represented. ...
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...
The child is shaped to follow automatically certain rules in a world which automatically executes those rules. Socialization, in this sense, is a kind of "instinctivization" of the human animal—a paradoxically symbolic instinctivization, but one that represents the same hardening of behavior as that found among lower animals. ... The result is that people willingly propagate whole cultural systems that hold them in bondage, and since everyone plays in the same hero-game, no one can see through the farce. ...for every genial invention of man in evolution, for every simplified ordering of his world, and most of all for the expression of his unique humanness, there is a tragic paradox.
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Chapter Nine
SOCIAL ENCOUNTERS:
THE STAGING OF THE
SELF-ESTEEM
"Society is organized on the principle that any individual who
possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect
that others will value and treat him in a correspondingly appropriate
way . . . he automatically exerts a moral demand upon others,
obliging them to value him."
ERVING GOFFMAN
(1959, p. 13)
... Even if we know about roles and statuses, how they structure social life, we tend to consider the whole thing as matter-of-fact; there shouldn't be much at stake in social encounters, since everything is fairly well pre-coded and automatic. So many of us may think—and we would be wrong. ... We began to understand that the individual's view of himself depended hopelessly on the general reflection he received back from society. ...
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... Society must protect its person-objects at their sorest point: the fragile self-esteem of each and every member. In the social encounter each member exposes for public scrutiny, and possible intolerable undermining, the one thing he needs most:... With stakes of this magnitude there can be nothing routine about social life. ...
... Goffman has coined the perfect word for these conventions—he calls them "face ritual." In the social encounter the individual entrusts his "face" to others, and has the right to expect that they will handle it gently. ...
Now, we cannot understand how crucial this process of face protection is unless we shed our old habits of understanding face as a kind of vanity, or as a curious preoccupation of a decrepit Chinese culture. We have to reorient our understanding of the word "face," as we did for the word "self-esteem." They are both grounded, in short, in the basic anxiety- buffering function of the self-system, and reflect crucial aspects of human adaptation.
... We can only fully appreciate the importance of face when we realize that nothing goes deeper than the exposure of the self-esteem to possible intolerable undermining in the social encounter.
... On the one hand, society has a right to engage the self, to lay a social claim on it... On the other hand,
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each individual has the right to keep others at a distance, and insist on his body privacy, his separateness, the simple fact that he is a person. ... There is a delicate tension to be maintained in social life, between avoiding and approaching others, a recognition and respect for the self, and a tacit claim on it.
...
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... If we are properly proud, we have learned not to submerge others with what may be uncomfortable private data. We may tell our boss that we are ill, but we will not tell him the shape and color of our stool. To have learned honor is to know when to refrain from encompassing others with one's inappropriate designs. It is this overflow that we call "privatizing" the social context. ... Man must make provision for the utmost sensitivity in social intercourse. Goffman goes so far as to say that this fine social sensitivity is what we mean when we speak of "universal human nature." ...
... Ceremonials for avoidance provide for a psychic as well as for a physical distance. They imply that the self is personal. On the other hand, ceremonials for engaging the self imply that, if properly approached, the self cannot refuse to be social. We may politely decline a seat someone has offered,... We refuse the gesture but we acknowledge the validity of the social claim. We cannot kick the chair over and remain silent. Now, it is obvious that neither of these processes could occur at all if there were no integral performance selves. Therefore, a fundamental obliga-
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tion for social living is that the individual have a self. There must be something socially transactable. ...
The Self as a Locus of Linguistic Causality
The psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan liked to use the term "self-system" instead of the Freudian divisions of the psyche, because he saw that you cannot arbitrarily chop up the child's total ongoing action and experience. For Sullivan, this self-system was largely a linguistic device fashioned by the child to conciliate his world. ...
After the child has fashioned a transactable self his work has hardly begun. ... Children are notoriously termed "cruel"—the only way we find of expressing the idea that they have not yet learned to use the face-preserving social conventions. ... "Cripple!" "Fatty!" "Four-Eyes!" He sees the selves of others as something to be
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overcome, but not yet to be appeased in his own interest. ...
...
If the self is primarily a linguistic device, and the identity of the self primarily the experience of control over one's powers, one fundamental conclusion is inescapable. To pre-
[94]
sent an infallible self is to present one which has unshakable control over words. ... The easy handling of the verbal context of action gives the only possibility of direct exercise of control over others.
...
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...
... By verbally setting the tone for action by the proper ceremonial formula, we permit complementary action by our interlocutor. Not only do we permit it; we compel it, if he is to sustain his face. ...
We are uncomfortable in strange groups and subcultures largely because we cannot frame the appropriate verbal context for sustaining the action or the ceremonial. ...
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...
Take the fascination of youth for the theater. Goethe considered acting in one's youth an indispensable preparation for adult life. Theatrical acting is a vicarious freedom of acting control of a situation. It demonstrates perfectly how control can be gained merely by properly saying the right things. Perfect acting is a unique exercise in omnipotence, gained simply by infallible command of the script. ... Learning a foreign tongue sometimes conveys the experiencing of the sheer power-control aspects of language. The individual finds that he is capable of utterances which usher others into appropriate complementary action, but which utterances, because they are new (and in a foreign tongue) he at first experiences as unreal and ego-alien. It is then that he can best "watch himself perform, and see and feel in action the power aspects of language. ...
...the individual can navigate without fear in a threatening social world. He can even ignore the true attitudes of others, as long as he can get by them with the proper ritual formulas of salutation,... Everyone is permitted the stolid self-assurance that comes with minute observation of unchallengeable rules—we can all become social bureaucrats.
However, there is a more subtle aspect to this mutual protection of fragile self-esteem. ...
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...the ability to use formulas with facility actually implies the power to manipulate others indirectly, by providing the symbolic context for their action. ...
Even the slave enjoys power by skillfully using the obsequious formulas of deference appropriate to his status. ...an army officer may exclaim to his sergeant, "Stop 'sirring' me!" It is a protest against being manipulated by an overly constrictive social definition of one's identity. ...
...
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...
...not only is motivation reinforced by the flawless performance, but agreement in values is also cemented by the mutuality of performance. ...
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The linguistic self-system is an ideational device in continued movement—scanning, questioning, assimilating. It needs reinforcement and something to feed on. As the individual exercises his creative powers in the social encounter, and basks in the radiation of fabricated meaning, his identity is revealed to himself. ...: "I feel like spitting, but a doctor cannot spit in front of others." First we discover who society says we are: then we build our identity on performance in that part. ... It is hardly an exaggeration, then, to say that we are created in the performance. ...
And so we can understand that there is another side to the social credo. "Let us all protect each other so that we can carry on the business of living." Man is a social creator as well as a social creature. By the social exercise of linguistic power
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man creates his own identity and reinforces that of others. In this sense, identity is simply the measure of power and participation of the individual in the joint cultural staging of self-enhancing ceremony. ... Loneliness is not only a suspension in action and stimulation, it is a moratorium on self-acquaintance. ...
Subtler Aspects of the Social Creation of Meaning
If social encounters are largely a theatrical staging, part of the basic training of the players will be an inordinate sensitivity to cues. ...
"As members of an audience it is natural for us to feel that the impression the performer seeks to give may be true or false . . . valid or 'phony'. So common is this doubt that . . . we often give special attention to features of the performance that cannot be readily manipulated.
...... Our alertness to the performance of others... is an expression of our concern over sustaining the underlying meaning of the plot. Goffman continues:
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". . . Paradoxically, the more closely the impostor's performance approximates the real thing, the more intensely we may be threatened, for a competent performance by someone who proves to be an impostor may weaken in our minds the moral connections between legitimate authorization ... and capacity to play" (1959, p. 58)....we must feel that the performer deserves his status, and if he didn't deserve it he wouldn't be able convincingly to play it. ...when we see a mimic of, say, Jack Benny, it establishes another connection in our mind: if there is a false Jack Benny, then there must be a real one—... Illegitimacy implies above all that legitimacy exists.
In every culture man is alert to the discovery of fraud because it implies the basic legitimacy of the plot he is playing in. ... The performance takes on such a life-and-death flavor precisely because life-meaning is being created. This is why it is important for each actor to bring to the social scene his own special dramatic talent, whereby the quality of the performance is enriched. ...
Anselm Strauss points out (1959, p. 59) that each person
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has to assess three things about another. ...
1. The other's general intent in the situation.
2. The other's response toward himself.
3. The other's response or feelings toward me, the recipient or observer of his action.
...this trilogy allows one to fulfill his "social human nature"—it allows him to exercise those unique capacities into which he has been schooled. The adept performer should be able to:
1. Save his own face (protect his fragile self-esteem) against unwarranted attack or privatization.
2. Prepare the appropriate lines that may be necessary to protect the other's self-esteem,...
3. Frame creative and convincing lines that carry the interaction along in the most meaningful, life-enhancing fashion. ...A person's response toward himself... is a transaction with what Sullivan so beautifully called his "fantastic auditor." Other psychoanalysts call it the "observing ego." We direct our performance to this imaginary judge, who sets the standards for it and keeps us in line,... When we watch another perform we think that we can see how he feels about himself. Actually, we don't see this at all; we can have little idea how he "feels about himself." What we do see is how smoothly the individual is staging himself, controlling his performance. We
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do not like to see another who is too absorbed in his own staging at the expense of convincing delivery of the lines. ... When we talk about someone who is "phony" we mean that his staging of himself is overly obvious. He is unconvincing because he allows us to see his efforts at delivering the right lines.
Continual, keen scrutiny of the performance of others is the life preoccupation of an animal trained to be onstage. ...
... "Hypocrisy" is an unfairly negative expression for an adaptation to a social situation despite our feelings. We mask our private thoughts and sentiments to allow action to go forward. If these thoughts are inappropriate , masking them performs a vital social function : it allows the objective elements of the situation to hold sway. Instead of submerging the social context with our own private perceptions, we facilitate it by responding to its exigencies as cleanly as possible. ...
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...
Very interesting passage here. But is there anything at all objective about the various elements of the situation as given?
...: to employ a "line" usually means trying to get something out of an interaction that is grossly at the other person's expense. In traditional society there is less of this because cues are more dependable, and the situation tightly structured. There is very little "line" that one can employ on a date that is chaperoned. for instance. "Line" is a probing for advantage in the absence of standardized prescriptions for behavior, an attempt to emerge from the fluid interaction much better than one came in. ...
... Every performance has another creative element: by presenting uniquely creative lines the actor obliges his interlocutor to cope with the unexpected, also in a creative fashion. ...
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... By constantly fabricating the unexpected, we edge our egos to new assimilative mastery. After all, the individual who can be counted on to give us exactly that ceremonial proper to each situation is the one we call a crashing bore. ...
One of the impetuses to the fragmentation of society into subgroups is that they provide some respite from the continual strain on creative alertness of the self-system. ... In some primitive societies "joking relationships"... seem to be established at points of tension in the social system—among inlaws, for example—and relieve the individuals of the strain of meeting these encounters,... One of the reasons marriage often loses its stimulating color is that it provides a ready refuge from the challenge to ego-mastery of other social encounters. ...
...
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As... Georg Simmel... remarked, one of the truly great inventions of mankind was the secret. The secret brings conviction into the social drama because it adds a dimension of mystery to it. Cooley observed with beautiful insight that von Moltke was "silent in six languages." The implication is that this gave him an awesome aura of depth:...
Our earliest experiences of this take place when we are children,... Our verbalizations seem superficial, and the inner world of our silent parents seems pregnant with meaning. ...for a symbolic animal the inner world is the truly complex and mysterious one. Silence captivates us precisely because we presume that thinking is going on. ... Silence is convincing because it confronts us with a marvelous organic creation whose whole life-identity is inseparable from thought sequences, silently entertained. Therefore, we can feel that the culturally constituted plan for action has a deeper than merely man-made
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significance. ...we might say that pregnant silence is at the same time the most facile, as well as one of the highest, esthetic achievements. An illustration of this facility was given by Howard Rowland (1939), when he pointed out that catatonics get a lot of attention in state hospitals:
"They have an appeal to many employees as well as to many of the most intelligent patients. One factor is that the catatonic has a great many secrets locked inside him and, therefore, is full of mystery in the midst of a world where very little is secret about anyone [i.e., the ward world]."... I remember during military service being intrigued by a young recruit from Alabama who never said more than a few words,... It took me almost three years to discover that he did not possess any great depths... : the reason he was always silent was simply that he had nothing to say. Women who have landed the strong, silent hero of their school or college often discover the same thing, many years later, and to their chagrin.
A certain amount of silence, of course, is necessary simply to carry the play. ... When we engage the self we want to know that we are engaging something real—something that might just as well not need to be engaged, that was real and meaningful within itself. This is one reason constant
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talkers annoy us. To say that they "lack depth" is simply to affirm that silence is part of a good performance, because it implies that a genuine self exists apart from and beyond the immediate encounter. ...
One thing we can conclude at this point... is that man's meaning hangs by a ludicrously fragile thread,... Most of us never realize the artifacts that make symbolic life believable, the flimsy stuff out of which man draws conviction and self-aggrandizement. Much depends on what the actor can pull off,... the main thing that gives conviction to social performance is self-conviction on the part of the actor. ...
Consider Goethe. ... He radiated an aura of selfhood that was convincing to the core. In brief, he took himself seriously. ... In his case this started very early. ... It is unusual for a child of seven to be so convinced of his self-value, and we sense, of
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course, a pattern of mothering in back of it. ... ...it was Goethe himself who remarked that the influences of the young on each other are the "purest." They are not so subtle or indirect as the adults' involved, symbolic cues to action. The world of children is still a world where the convincing self alone carries the brunt of meaning.
... By putting forth a convincing self, the actor obliges others to a more careful deference. The strong self forces others to make an effort at performance that may often be beyond their means. Thus, the aura of his infallibility is enforced as their performance stumbles or becomes painfully effortful. This painful effort then generates a further conviction of meaningfulness in which all those around the leader can share. ...we can judge very
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clearly where man has departed from his subhuman cousins. We share the same awe and fear of power as the baboons, or any animal that is transcended by nature and by the strength of others. But in order for this power to truly captivate us, it has to be generated in the creation of meaning and in social performance, and not simply in brute animal strength. ...
...
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...
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