Am posting this here as new website a bit slow these days -sorry if you have already seen it!
People sense things about others. My mother swears her first impressions are always spot on. Mine are totally crap. It’s not just that I lack that intuitive
feel for people; it’s something more fundamental than that. Lately, I have begun to suspect I am a
hermit in a modern world. Think about
it, what social skills do hermits need?
None, in fact in a certain light a desire for social interactions is a
positive flaw. You can’t have a hermit
hanging out on street corners gabbing away about the local gossip. Neither, do you want a talkative hermit with
the broadcast signal ever on. No, you
want silence, introspection, a tendency to prefer your own company and a
genuine desire for solitude.
Perhaps, first impressions were evolved by the sociable
among us after their initial forage into community dynamics around Stone Age
fires. After chatting to enough fur
clad companions these extraverts began to figure out who would respond
willingly to conversation gambits and who would respond with a club to your head. This over centuries morphed into an
intuitive feel for different types, perhaps fuelled by common gestures, speech
patterns, physical habits etc After all, most of us can tell when relatives are
sulking, moody or bad tempered. They
don’t have to verbalise such distress, banging doors, awkward silences and even
the way in which they perch uncomfortably on a chair say it all. Gradually, those proficient in first
impressions began to use their newfound skills. It’s not a big jump from understanding your audience to
manipulating and directing them. Maybe,
our first leaders emerged from this very cohort, skilled in the art of reading
others, they could have used it to attain positions of authority. No wonder intertribal warfare became
common. Into the mix comes different
groups with their own loyalties and impervious to the group manipulation of
their rivals.
You can see it all evolving nicely with politicians and
sales people emerging from this early branch of extraverts. So if this holds true, what happened to the
hermit? Well, perhaps being on your own
lends itself to development of crafts and arts. It allows extra time to fine hone skills that only the extended
isolation from others permits. Some
philosophers and scientists perhaps, could also trace their evolutionary roots
back to the hermits in caveman days, loners who had time to examine sunsets on
a mountain top, contemplate the grain of a wooden club. But it is not all rosy in the hermitage.
Psychopaths and violent criminals also usually spring from
hermit stock. Studies have show that
the majority of criminals at the vilest end of the scale have not yet mastered
the social skills of toddlers. Such
people have often cannot even manage basic eye contact when speaking, nor
learned rudimentary body language cues. So there you have it. Hermit or socialite? Are you adept at social skills, reading
people, responding to their overtures?
Or are you happier in your own company, introspective and socially
constipated?
Mind you it makes sense in caveman society that if you are a
violent killer, there would be a high likelihood of some community minded
individual clubbing you to death in your sleep. After all, one of the advantages of community living is that
one’s faults are plain for all to see.
Indeed one of the little known facts about psychotic aggressives is
that, generally, they move frequently causing little oasis of pain in their
wake. Out of proportion to the number
of social contacts most of us have. The
advantage of moving is that they can often evade detection by exiting when
their activities begin to reach night time clubbing proportions or in today’s
parlance, when they come onto police radar.
But there are psychotic individuals who perversely rise to
the very top. Probably, the caveman
example would be the violent oppressor who manages to rule the community with
fear and impunity. Despite their
violent tendencies such characters have usually cloaked themselves in the
disguise of a greater cause. Thus,
justifying their mass murders. You may
well think I’ve lost the plot here but you need only look back to Stalin, Russia (through his land
programme and The Great Terror caused the death of millions), Hilter,
Germany (including six million Jewish people in the Nazi genocide) and
in case you think World War 2 was an exception, later the killing propensity of
leaders went on with Mao Zedong, China (40–70 million people through
starvation and executions). The
list goes on, stretching not just back into the past but depressingly on up to
present days. So leaders can be killers
and often are. The question is, are
they hermits with killer tendencies or extraverts with murderous intent? I have come to no conclusions except two
suggestions:
- My
conviction that things will improve when we elect leaders not because they
want the position of power but because they are capable of serving a
nation.
- It
would also help if the horrendous tortuous process of becoming and staying
a leader did not deform even normal decent human beings into a shadow of
their former selves. You may be a
hermit or an extravert or somewhere in the middle but do spare a thought
for those in power whatever they started off, corruption seems to set in
sooner or later!