Socializing and The Individual

If you socialize that is supposed to meet that you ix with other members of a given society then you are an individual who is part of a greater whole. Now if the idea of the world having no boundaries is brought into the picture one may consider that the individual is a micro version of what the society is. In other words it is a mini representation of a bigger whole. Sounds like we can put on a different role any given day and play those roles to exhaustion as though to say that we can be anybody anytime. That fits with some people’s view on how they interact with society but not with all.

The individual is otherwise a small part of a largely impersonal whole which goes on while we are asleep and functions after our deaths. Society does not hiccup when you go to sleep forever, it has its own agenda especially  according to those who feel that the person can only be affected by it and interact with whatever it induces. That may make it sound like straight out of a Kafka novel, one where a man is taken away by the authorities against his knowledge and is never quite clear about the reasons behind it. One the other hand his interaction with society be be quite pleasant and much less anxiety provoking.

We learn and copy from our elders; behavorists would see commonalities between parent and child and even common spoken phrases and manners. According to modern day theories encompassing social behaviour, the individual either conforms to the society around him or divorces himself from it. He acts in concert with the forces of the society that he identifies with or removes himself from that. There according to certain sociologists could be the beginnings of criminal behaviour just as there could be the beginnings of suicidal behaviour. The person could become a fully integrated socialite or a recluse.

Society can nurture and feed the individual and the individual can then take off and become a very productive element or he can slip into isolation if he is uninspired by mass culture. That may depend on the man’s nature, some say affected by the person’s genetic makeup, others say affected by the person’s social intercourse, to the learning he received from his parents and peers. Some say he is a product of both, a mixture which has laid a framework for modern genetic studies and phenotypes and genotype specifically.The question in debate is whether we are product of who nutures us or we are what our nature dictates or we are a product of both, one adding onto the other.

Man is still a mystery especially when he does socialize for part of his life and then goes away to live in obscurity or vice-versa, when he was irreproachable as the Dalai Lama was hundreds of years back compared to the charismatic figure travelling the globe with his message of peace and love. Or perhaps history has not accurately informed us of how such figures actually interacted with society centuries ago.