5 Reasons You Did Not and Cannot Reinvent Yourself (Brian Rosner)

Today we're pleased to share with you an audio essay written and read by Brian Rosner

entitled Five Reasons You Did Not and Cannot Reinvent Yourself.

Brian is the author of How to Find Yourself while looking inward is not the answer from

Crossway.

Five Reasons You Did Not and Cannot Reinvent Yourself.

Written and Read by Brian Rosner.

The Social Animal When it comes to knowing yourself, social

psychologists speak of the looking glass self, a term coined back in 1902.

It refers to our tendency to understand ourselves by perceiving what others make of us.

In other words, the self is the result of learning to see ourselves as others see us.

The great Scottish poet Robert Burns is credited with saying,

O would some power the gift give us to see ourselves as others see us.

Apparently each of us has that power for seeing ourselves as others see us is the experience

of every human being.

Human beings are social animals.

A growing body of research, some parts surprising, some parts amusing, indicates the extent

to which we are profoundly relational creatures and pushes against any notion that anyone

is a self-made self.

I'll make five general points in connection with this fact, drawn from David Brooks's excellent

work, each one striking at the heart of expressive individualism.

The following five points are my own synthesis of the relevant studies.

You were largely formed by your parents.

Your thoughts are not entirely your own.

Your mind is not exclusively your own.

Your behaviour is shaped by the company you keep.

You don't know yourself that well.

Number one, you were largely formed by your parents.

Parents effectively pass on to their children an identity, which the child then accepts

revises or rejects in adolescence.

Even if you feel you have discarded the ready-made version of you, the influence of your parents

and family of origin remains pervasive and powerful.

To cite a bizarre example, consider your name, something you had no choice in.

One study found that people named Dennis or Denise are disproportionately likely to become

dentists.

People named Lawrence or Laurie are disproportionately likely to become lawyers.

People named Lewis are disproportionately likely to move to St. Louis and people named

George disproportionately move to Georgia.

These are some of the most important decisions in people's lives and they are influenced

if only a bit by the sound of the name they have to be given at birth.

Number two, your thoughts are not entirely your own.

We like to believe that you think for yourself and it's not just those presently around you

that affect your thinking.

The truth is, starting even before you were born, we inherit a great river of knowledge,

a great flow of patterns coming from many ages and many sources.

The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past we call genetics.

The information revealed thousands of years ago we call religion.

The information passed along from hundreds of years ago we call culture.

The information passed along from decades ago we call family and the information offered

years, months, days or hours ago we call education and advice.

But it's all information and it all flows from the dead to us and to the unborn.

The brain is adapted to the river of knowledge and it's many currents and tributaries and

it exists as a creature of that river the way a trout exists in a stream.

Our thoughts are profoundly molded by this long historic flow and none of us exists self-made

in isolation.

Number three, your mind is not exclusively your own.

Human beings are able to function in a social world because of our network of minds

created by our mammalian limbic systems which resonate with the mind of others enabling

us to partially permeate each other's thought and behavioural words.

As David Brooks writes, human beings understand others in themselves and they form themselves

by reenacting the internal processes they pick up from others.

As he points out our minds are intensely permeable, loops exist between brains.

The same thought and feeling can arise in different minds with invisible networks filling

the space between them.

Number four, your behaviour is shaped by the company you keep.

Once again somewhat humorous and mundane example makes the point.

At restaurants people eat more depending on how many people they're dining with.

People eating alone eat least.

People eating with one other person eat 35% more than they do at home.

People dining in a party of four eat 75% more and people dining with seven or more eat

96% more.

The impact of the behaviour of others can have an effect on how you behave even when you

don't notice it.

Yawning for example is highly contagious.

Indeed imitation is a powerful human instinct and it takes very little for it to kick in.

Friends who are locked in conversation begin to replicate each other's breathing patterns.

People who are told to observe a conversation begin to mimic the physiology of the people

having that conversation and the more closely they mimic the body language, the more perceptive

they are about the relationship they are observing.

At the deeper level of pheromones women who are living together often share the same menstrual

cycles.

Number five, you don't know yourself that well.

This one is most important for our purposes and it makes looking inward to find yourself

problematic.

What are you like in terms of your personality?

Numerous studies have shown that there is a low correlation between how people rate their

own personality and how people around them rate it.

The same goes for how people regard themselves in terms of moral behaviour and would respect

to their achievements.

One study found that half of college students said they would call out a sexist comment

made in their presence.

However, when researchers arrange for it to actually happen only 16% actually said anything.

Many studies show that people overestimate how much they know and if successful how much

of it was due to their talent and grit.

One Harvard professor argues that we have a psychological immune system that exaggerates

information that confirms our good qualities and ignores information that casts doubt

on them.

Human beings are comically and infuriatingly overconfident and apparently self-confidence

bears little relationship to actual competence.

A great body of research finds that incompetent people exaggerate their own abilities more

grossly than their better performing peers.

One study found that those who scored in the bottom quartile on tests of logic, grammar

and humour were especially likely to overestimate their abilities.

Many people are not only incompetent, they are in denial about how incompetent they are.

David Brooks' summary concerning human beings as social animals is blunt but accurate.

We don't know ourselves.

Most of what we think and believe is unavailable to conscious review.

We are our own deepest mystery.

As Michael Horton insists, the self understood as an autonomous individual does not exist.

The notion of a self-made self is naive at best.

To recall and counter the greatest shaman, no one marches to a beat that they alone drum.

So much for nobody can teach me who I am.

When it comes to your personal identity, you have been schooled by others before you

were born.

You are not just an individual, you are not your own creation, you did not invent yourself.

You exist in a web of relationships.

You are a social animal.

Your identity is constituted in relation to other people and in being known by them.

Indeed, the social and psychological sciences are increasingly defining personhood in relational

terms.

The self is no longer seen as an isolated and individual phenomenon, but as something

formed within a network of relationships and neural connections are being in relation.

Most of the subtle influences that I have noted in this essay operate at the level of

the subconscious.

You are not the product of your own conscious deliberations and choices.

When it comes to forming your identity, your subconscious does the bulk of the work.

The research that David Brooks cites shows that the unconscious mind is the realm where

character is formed and most of our important decisions in life are made.

It is the natural habitat of the social animal, if you like.

You and I might like to think of ourselves as boldly expressing our individuality in

order to find our true selves.

But the truth is that rather than being a single soaring eagle, eyeing our prey from a great

height, we are more like a honking goose in a tight V flight formation.

But don't misunderstand my goose analogy.

It's not about repressive conformity, but interdependence.

This provide an excellent example of synergy.

As each goose flaps its wings, it creates uplift for the birds that follow.

By flying in a V formation, the whole flock adds 71% greater flying range than if each bird

flew alone.

When a goose falls out of the formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance are

flying alone.

It quickly moves back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird

immediately in front of it.

Like geese information, we humans are also wired to be interdependent, secure in a network

of relationships, with invisible connections and indesoluble tyres.

If we have as much sense as a goose, we stay in formation with those heading where we want

to go.

We are willing to accept their help and give our help to others.

We fly best together in harmony and unison, bearing our own burden and also sharing the

burden of others.

As any goose will tell you, it's the only way to fly.

In order to know yourself and be yourself, you need to be known intimately and personally

by others.

But it doesn't end there, you also need to be truly loved by them.

The known and loved are the key ingredients to every personal identity worth inhibiting.

That was five reasons you did not and cannot reinvent yourself.

Written and read by Brian Rosner.

For more, be sure to check out his book with Crossway How to Find Yourself, by looking

inward is not the answer.

Pick up a print copy of the book for 30% off or get the ebook or audio book for 50% off

directly from Crossway by visiting crossway.org slash plus.