One of the most popular works of social criticism published in the 1950’s was David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (still in print in an “abridged and revised edition”). Though its prose was about as sprightly as a spavined ox (you can read the first chapter free and form your own judgment), it was the best selling book ever written by a sociologist, and its overarching concept, that character can be divided into “tradition-directed”, “inner-directed” and “other-directed”, was conventional wisdom for a couple of decades, until newer and shinier ideas displaced it.
Put very simply (which is how the trichotomy was understood during the heyday of the book’s influence), the “tradition-directed” follow norms inherited from the past, the “inner-directed” develop “an internalized set of goals”, and the “other-directed” are “sensitized to the expectations and preferences of others”. The Lonely Crowd’s thesis was that “other direction” was rapidly superseding “inner direction” in post-World War II America. Its legacy is the perception of the period before the upheavals of the 1960’s as an age of passive conformity.
Whatever the merits of Dr. Riesman’s analysis as a whole, “inner” versus “other” direction is certainly not a phantom. We live in an age in which the former has galloped off to an extreme, where individuals devise for themselves moral and intellectual principles founded on individual fancy. The justification for these closed universes of ideas is “It feels good” and nothing more.
Yet there is something odd about these idiosyncrats: They do not want only to live unmolested but demand that others publicly proclaim that their ideas are objectively valid. It isn’t enough to “identify” as a cat; everyone else must agree that you are a cat and display their agreement by, at the very least, referring to you by your preferred pronouns. Those who don’t go along are guilty of “hate speech”. They inflict traumatic damage on the soi disant felines. For that psychic violence, they deserve to be banned from social media and fired from their jobs.
Is this phenomenon truly “inner direction”? Those who assume bizarre “identities” seem desperately “sensitized to the expectations and preferences of others”. They yearn for approval and seek vengeance when it is not given.
Why, then, don’t they give in and reintegrate with normal society? The reason, I suspect, is that they also yearn for approval from the currently powerful movement that denies history and biology. To stop pretending to be a cat is to court vicious rebuke from former allies.
Dr. Riesman theorized that prosperity and population stasis would lead to an increasingly other-directed populace. He also believed that, whatever their shortcomings, other-directed people would inevitably be pleasant, albeit shallow, neighbors. On that point, our contemporary experiment seems to be proving him wrong. Being sensitive to what others think may once have led to passive agreement with their views. Today it leads to demands that the others be punished for their wrongthink.
While our current politico-cultural maladies doubtless have many causes and may be overdetermined, it is possible that part of the disease stems from the dilemma created by the superficially inner-directeds’ dependence on external approval and their efforts to obtain it “by any means necessary”.
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