I'm going to have to get my quiet time on the road today, but wanted to keep the November streak going with today's Wednesday Wisdom post.
Who are you?
Are you the person that society has crafted?
Or are you the person you were born to be?
John
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Obviously some of society's influences do distort our nature, and need to be purged in order to allow that true nature to emerge and express itself.
But is there such a thing as a true self entirely independent of outside influences? I don't think so. Humans are social creatures and are shaped by the culture we grow up in. You grow up speaking the language of your cultural surroundings and not some other language, you grow up absorbing the values and behavioral standards of that culture and not those of some other culture. Later in life some people do question and change those inculcated qualities, but it is hard to imagine growing up without absorbing any language or values or behavior patterns from a surrounding culture, and a person who somehow did so would be a psychological cripple, unable to think or behave remotely normally -- not an authentic self or "the person he was born to be".
Coelho probably does have a point about "everything that isn't really you", depending on how that's interpreted, but we can't get rid of everything that "society has crafted" in us, or there'd be nothing much left.
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