I grew up with the dialogue that you must be sure of yourself if you’re going to say something, lest it upset anyone in your environment, or humiliate you in front of other people. There was nothing worse than being an embarrassment. This wasn’t my parent’s fault — or their parent’s fault, in fact it wasn’t anyone’s fault; it was imbued, or subtly written into, the language of the culture of the British Isles. The way it was imbued was through language.
Language is so powerful in a way that I think goes largely unnoticed in modern culture; which is a shame because marketing companies are very aware of the power of language and use specific language to target specific audiences, much in the same way that designer’s use color to excite our emotional palette. This creates an imbalance; a closed dialogue between us and the companies that sell things to us. Recently, a colleague of mine was saying that he didn’t need any more stuff in his home. However, he went onto say that ‘if something in a shop is there, and it has the right price. I will buy it.’ That started me thinking, why?
Then why is the emotion, the language and the colors of the packaging evoke, and the imbued cultural narrative that if we don’t own stuff then we’re not worth anything? Or in other words, what we own makes us who we are. Cars are a great example because they’re so insular. You pack yourself into this little closed feedback loop where no one can hear you, or even see you sometimes, but you’re still interacting with others in a specific environment. You can be aggressive as you like, no one can touch you, and I think that’s where road rage develops from. Your car defines who you are, they’re an expression of who you are. Everyone has ‘my car’, and if you do own a car, it’s very difficult to imagine getting a car in a different class unless you have a change in values or circumstances; you have a baby and you start thinking of buying an estate.
I would observe that most people aren’t conscious of these powers that hold sway over their decisions and therefore the likelihood of making a decision that benefits their fulfillment and happiness long term is lessened. I was getting a new phone contract the other day and the woman behind the counter who was a lovely, and very switched on, individual. She said that she was furious at herself because as soon as the latest Apple phone (there are other brands out there) came out she locked herself into a two-year contract that was actually way more expensive than she wanted to pay, and the phone didn’t even fit in her pocket!
This is a closed dialogue.
In terms of having that an open dialogue conversation with yourself, the questions might be:
Why do I feel this way?
Where is it coming from?
Do I really need this thing? Or is it fulfilling a need that I have, that needs to be filled with something else?
I’ve been on social media a fair while now. I remember when it first came out and I was hesitant to create my first profile, it seemed to be less of an obligation back then and more of an exploration of character, people created profiles that accentuated their good sides to show off and that reflected the culture of that time. Nowadays it’s all about being authentic which is a wonderful thing but I think we might have gone a bit too far with it.
If someone disagrees with you on social media consistently, you block them. You might say that they’re not aligned with you or you couldn’t abide their point of view, this is fine when the views are extreme, or abusive, but more and more I’m seeing people actually being unable to have a debate on social media without working in the ‘you’ monologue mindset; pointing the finger at the other and telling them that it’s their ignorance or stupidity that is at fault. Just think how you feel when someone says: “You’re not right. That’s a stupid thing to say.” Compared to: “See this other perspective, how do you feel about that? Does that change your perspective?” One is much more likely to elicit a debate and a conversation than the other. Trust me, I’ve learned this the hard way like everyone else.
I mean, I have been consciously trying to not do this but it’s true, especially really emotionally charged conversations were it’s already removed from the types of health assessments you can make from body language, eye contact, and touch. This is a closed dialogue.
It has certainly contributed to the polarising, echo chamber, politics that we now see. When the Brexit campaign was happening here in the UK it was almost impossible to find someone on social media that thought differently to me, and the idea of seeking out these people and having a conversation to try to reach an agreement was too big and scary to contemplate. Once you’re not used to having a dialogue to debate and resolve conflictive interest you kind of forget how to do it, and it seems awkward and uncomfortable. This led to polarising comments such as: “You look like you voted Brexit.” Or “I bet he voted Brexit.”
There’s no way to really know the truth in that scenario, and speculation leads to rumour which, at least some of the time, won’t be true.
It’s not just social media where this has happened, it’s in religion too. Religion was one of the biggest communal enablers there ever was, it brought people together and it gave them a moral code to live by. It forced strangers who lived in the same place to have a common theme to work from.
Yuval Noah Harari said of the patterns of meaning:
Please recognize your own unacknowledged fictions.
There’s been a drastic downturn and I’d argue an unpopularity to religion, and a friend of mine said recently that people live unfaithfully. That really got me thinking and I think that the structure and dogma of religion were too rigid for most of our parent’s generation, and you can’t argue with the traumatic experiences that people had in that scenario. What didn’t happen was people weren’t willing to open popular movements of open dialogue with those institutions, or perhaps it was the other way around. We see that a lot with institutions who have power and status, they’re often rigid and inflexible.
The idea is that when we all started to live in a structured society, we couldn’t go around murdering each other and calling out ‘other’ so that we could victimize that other tribe. The problem being for the human brain is that we can only remember around 150 different faces and names at any given time. That’s in the book Homo Sapiens — which I believe should be mandatory reading. So we had to create an idea to connect us.
Rabindranath Tagore recognized this as the nation in many of his writings including this incredible book, but another form of this is a religion too. Yes, I realize we still exhibit the same behavior as I’ve just said on migrants or people of other cultures. That’s an entirely separate article.
The problem with these scenarios, and the reason that conflict arises, is that we are inflexible — and work from a closed dialogue, of what that idea is, we don’t encourage open questions and changes, we don’t question what that idea is and try to find new ways to solve the conflicts and problems within that idea. We discard it and create the same idea again, in a different form —the modern age equivalent of religion: personal development.
Both religion and personal development can be wonderful things, beneficial in many ways, however, I personally believe that it takes an open dialogue; and the necessary skills to do that, to take the structures of these and apply them so that we can live in balance and harmony to people who don’t share our beliefs, values, and world view.
Personal development tells you what the Abrahamic religions also tell you; that you are essentially flawed and you must work on yourself to become perfect. They usually work on a closed dialogue format of strict beliefs and stories that you must follow in order to attain this perfection; heaven.
The difference with personal development which I would celebrate is that knowledge is usually based on the latest researched science of the optimum functioning of the human body and soul. That’s not guaranteed though.
Eastern religions have a different approach. They have an idea that God is everything that you most resemble, and need in your life, that most fills you with the divine sense; in other words what fills you with light and excitement. Sounding familiar. The difference is, these eastern religions have characterizations of the divine that you’re supposed to take and have an open dialogue with yourself to see how you resemble them, much the same as the Greek pantheon of Gods which were said to resemble traits of human nature in all aspects.
Phillipa Perry states in The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read: if you don’t have an authentic and open dialogue with your child, then sometimes you are going against their instincts by telling them that they are wrong, a lude example of this being: If you tell them that the book is green, and really it’s blue, their senses are telling them one thing but their primary caregiver is telling them another. This creates a conflictive interest that will stay with the child and create behavior in the future.
We all have this sense of conflict from our childhood and it’s natural, especially for people who grew up in Western cultures that we’re encouraged to always be rational and right. “Do as I say and not as I do.” Was a parenting staple where I grew up. That’s now proven to be wrong and incredibly confusing and harmful to a child’s development and self-esteem. Authentic behavior and open dialogue is incredibly important, and I feel like we all must do more to make sure we’re encouraging this in our societies, then maybe we wouldn’t encourage these polarised political stances which don’t see any way to admit that their wrong and keep doing things at the detriment to all just because they can’t be flexible.