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+---- Thread: Liberal outlook vs social skills (long) (/showthread.php?tid=21816)
Liberal outlook vs social skills (long) - Timmy Boy - 08-29-2011
Hi guys,
Sorry for the long first post but this is something that's been on my mind a bit recently. I'm wondering if the liberal way I've been raised to look at the world has stunted my development of social skills a bit, because social skills are about compliance with unwritten rules of interaction that aren't always completely logical. It's something that I believe impacts on my interactions with friends, families, and - more recently - potential employers. A lot of this is just written so that I can vent so don't worry if you don't fancy reading the whole diatribe.
My parents are divorced and my mum raised me pretty much on her own. She had a very laid back and tolerant style of parenting, and the one thing she was really big on was treating people nicely. Beyond that, there was no pressure to conform to social norms. My Dad was much more conservative, and this led to a lot of clashes when I went to stay with him, but he was so extremely explosive and unreasonable that he failed to have much impact on how I turned out, save only to make me ever more resolute in railing against irrational or unfair treatment. I guess you could sum up my resulting world view with John Stuart Mill's harm principle - that an act is only "wrong" if it actually hurts someone, and if it doesn't, you have no business telling me what to do.
The problem is that most people don't think that way. Most people just try to behave in the way that they think is expected of them and don't really question whether those expectations are entirely fair or reasonable in the first place. I have difficulty relating to that way of thinking and it has sometimes led to people thinking I'm a bit "weird" or at least being a bit patronising towards me.
At school I got bullied quite a lot for my hobbies and/or dress sense (as a young boy I was a geeky bookworm and as a teenager I was a goth/metalhead type). Although there were other people with similar tastes and/or levels of maturity, they were a lot more inclined to just keep their heads down, whereas I thought "why should I be the one to back down, they're the ones with the problem", which only made things worse. I ended up missing a lot of school and having great difficulty concentrating in classes, and while I have done OK academically I regret letting the bullying get to me so much as I feel I could have done better.
When I left school and went to college (followed by university, at which I read law) I felt like I had a great opportunity for a fresh start - my confidence increased and I acquired a circle of very good friends. That is, however, subject to a couple of caveats: Firstly, even my current friends, great as they are, can be a bit patronising from time to time as I apparently fail to pick up on some subtle social cues. Secondly, I feel that university is a bit of a bubble in which you can afford to be a bit more quirky than you could out there in the real world, because you have a lot more choice over who you spend time with. I studied law because I felt that a career as an advocate would be ideal for me, but since leaving university, I have found that the legal profession is very conservative and it too has a lot of rituals and customs that I don't agree with. For example, in my first paralegal job, I found that my colleagues were not as socially tolerant as I was, and while I thought they were nice enough guys generally I wouldn't say I really bonded with any of them. Also, I am finding it difficult to bring myself to shmooze like the other law students/graduates do in order to progress their careers as it feels a bit like selling my soul, but with the legal profession being the way it is I wonder if my "no nonsense" attitude towards it is hampering my progress.
I have also experienced problems in dating because there seem to be a lot of rituals involved that don't make a lot of sense to me. I have found most girls I've gone out with to be very capricious, flaky and determined to make you jump through hoops for them. My response is usually to just dig my heels in and say "either you like me or you don't, if you like me and I like you let's just go out, what's the problem?". However, I encounter this problem so often that I wonder if maybe I am the one with the issue sometimes.
So at the end of the day I wonder if, by being so instinctively liberal about everything, I'm hampering my ability to interact with people who don't see things my way and thus succeed in life.