Fulfilling the measure of your creation?

I was recently at this pep talk directed partly at teenagers. The motivational speaker was talking about how everyone should always be theirselves, show up as themselves, make sure that no matter what else they do in life they be true to themselves and don't allow anything to come in the way of that. There was a noticeable discomfort from their teachers at this point. The teachers apparently didn't want the students to be themselves. In reaction, the speaker added a little caveat, "within the appropriate boundaries of the situation". And that makes sense, I guess, if you think about it. Being yourself at someone else's wedding might be a little bit more subdued than being yourself at your own, for instance.

But I do think it's safe to say that there is a lot of pressure on people to be something other than what they are. If society hasn't figured out a way yet to benefit pretty directly from what you have to offer, they're not so interested in you being yourself. Of course, we have scores of examples of geniuses, artistic and otherwise, whose true selves and true thoughts were rejected, whose social sphere pressured them to mightily conform, but they were such forces of nature that they never did. And we get to reap the benefit of that failure.

But we still love to preach the doctrine of conformity. When teenagers saying that they are going to be an artist and don't need college, or an entrepreneur and don't need college, etc., many will still attempt to interfere in that person's life in an attempt to dissuade them from pursuing their dreams/passion/drive.

Similarly, even from many people who seem a little more open-minded about sociopathic identifying individuals still an inherent, there is often a trailing "but" or "as long as they behave". Like the mixed messages given to children and young adults, the true message being preached is that society has no real desire to accommodate or adapt to you, you must accommodate or adapt to the majority or suffer consequences.

But I want you to think, you normal people, how toxic it is to your soul when someone, some situation, or some institution has denied you authentic self expression. How terrible is it to you to not be able to be yourself? Also, think about how pressure to conform unnaturally is likely what leads child sociopaths to develop in such grotesque ways.

Famous runner Eric Liddell (of Chariots of Fire fame) famously said "I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast! And when I run I feel his pleasure." Mormons have a similar concept, that every living thing is to fulfill the measure of its creation -- the lions are meant to predate as much as the lambs are to graze. How can it be that some people get to live an authentic and purposeful life filled with meaningful self expression, except sociopaths? Maybe for those proposing solutions to the so-called "sociopath problem," ask yourselves what you're really demanding of sociopaths and ask yourselves whether you would be fine with those terms if the roles were reversed.

Dialects and self-awareness

The other day I get in an almost fight with a Palestinian about my accent. He happens to be in my country for work and we met during a poker game with some mutual friends of ours. He asked about my accent and I said that it does not originate from my country of origin. He thought I was lying. More than that, I think he thought my refusal to own up to also being a foreigner was somehow a way to insult his own pronounced accent. When he started to get belligerent I figured I would just lie and gave him a fake backstory about a thickly accented grandmother that raised me with absentee parents, which seemed to satisfy him.

With that in mind, I found this Slate article to pretty entertaining, perhaps even a parable. It discusses the rise and spread of an American English dialect called the Northern Cities Shift, "NCS" and had this to say about the acquisition of regional dialects:

Children acquire language from face-to-face interaction with their parents and peers, and this learning is shaped profoundly by our desire to fit in. People wring their hands about the supposed disappearance of dialectic diversity for the same reason that such diversity is not, in fact, going anywhere: We cling to our specific identities and peer groups, and we defend our individual and regional idiosyncrasies when and where we can. Our dialects are often the weapon readiest to hand in that fight.

Did I not acquire my own regional dialect because I was not necessarily motivated by a desire to fit in, at least not as a very young child? Or because I never really identified with my peer group? The most unusual aspect of the NCS dialect spread, according to researchers, is how unaware the "shifters" are of their own speech patterns:


If news of this radical linguistic shift hasn’t made it to you yet, you are not alone. Even people who speak this way remain mostly unaware of it. Dennis Preston, a professor of perceptual linguistics at Oklahoma State University—he doesn’t merely study how people speak, he studies how people perceive both their own speech and the speech of others—discovered something peculiar about NCS speakers when he was teaching at Michigan State University. “They don’t perceive their dialect at all,” he says. “The awareness of the NCS in NCS territory is zero.” (Well, almost zero. The high point for NCS awareness may have come 20 years ago, when “Bill Swerski’s Super Fans” was a popular recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live.)

According to Preston, most American dialect regions are oblivious to their quirks, but NCS speakers show a particularly striking lack of self-awareness. In one experiment, shifters were asked to write down a series of words, some affected by the NCS, some not, but all dictated by someone with an NCS accent. The expectation is obvious: Shifters should ace this test. But, amazingly, NCS speakers frequently did not understand their own speech. When they hear the word cat in isolation, for example, they seem to flip a mental coin to decide whether the speaker is talking about a common pet or a folding bed.

In a separate experiment, Nancy Niedzielski, an associate professor of linguistics at Rice University, told 50 NCS speakers that she was going to play a recording of a speaker from Michigan saying the word B-A-G, which she spelled out for them. She then asked the test subjects to identify whether the signal they heard sounded like byag (the NCS pronunciation), bag (the “standard” pronunciation), or baahg (a vaguely British pronunciation). Not one of the 50 subjects said that they heard the NCS pronunciation. “There’s just an incredible deafness to the local pronunciation,” Preston says—adding that the reason, in his opinion, is clear. “They believe that they are standard, normal, ordinary speakers, and when they’re confronted with evidence to the contrary, they reject it. They reject it in their daily lives, and they reject it even experimentally. They don’t even understand themselves.”

For me it's hard not to see parallels between these NCS speakers and your typical empath: oblivious to their own behavior, unable to see parallels in their behavior and those of others, unable to even understand the fact that they are failing to understand something that is relatively obvious to others. When people talk about sociopaths being able to see right through them I usually think, yes, but a lot of this stuff is obvious if you're not caught up in that particular flavor of self-deception.

But I'm glad that people think I speak with an accent to the point that they won't even believe the truth about me. It just makes it that much more easier to obfuscate. I guess people will just believe what they want to believe, right?