Be Your Own Person

by James Hudson

  Individuals need not do what others expect of them, and do best when they think for themselves. Being a team player will get you nowhere. Groups always demand individuals turn off their minds and allow a never-defined group spirit to control them, and this always produces disasters. Groups dumb down individuals by surrounding them and wearing down their rational minds. Individuals think better intellectually than groups. Bows and arrows, harvesting machines and software are not created by dumbed-down groups but by individualists. Groups and teams are guilty of violence, irrationality, compulsive lying and worse, as found in sports team mob action riots and the group massacres of the French Revolution. Group spirit is actually an evolutionary leftover from our instinctual jungle hunting group origins. Instincts can be controlled and dampened only by our more recently evolved human rational thinking capacities. The less intelligent the individual, the more they fall back on conformist instincts and the less rational their thoughts and behavior. Groups always try to pressure individuals to conform because dumbed-down minds love company. The stupider the group-minded people are, the more they want you imitate them and fail like them. Individualism always works out best.

  BE YOUR OWN PERSON,

  DON’T DO WHAT OTHERS EXPECT OF YOU

  James Hudson

  BE YOUR OWN PERSON,

  DON’T DO WHAT OTHERS EXPECT OF YOU

  COPYRIGHT © 2018

  BY JAMES HUDSON (PSEUDONYM)

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  Table Of Contents

  1/Don’t Do What Others Expect Of You

  2/Expectations Are Emotions

  3/Letting Other People Down Is Good

  4/Expectations And Manipulation

  5/Social Roles And Conformity

  6/Disregarding Group Expectations

  7/Don’t Be A Team Player

  8/Groups And Individualism

  9/The Stockholm Syndrome

  10/Individuals Outrank Groups

  11/Instinctual People Don’t Move Up

  12/Individuals Versus Conformists

  13/Three Psychological Types Of People

  14/Pushing Back

  15/Individuality Is The Purpose Of Life

  16/References

  Don’t Do What

  Others Expect Of You

  The world is full of people who demand that you do as they expect you to do. Their expectations can take on forms such as words, gestures, facial expressions and body posture. What they want is conformity to their desires on your part for no real reason at all except their narcissistic emotional satisfaction.

  “Expectations have always been used to manage people” according to Edward Alsworth Ross. Ross. It boils down to them trying to control you, and often your property, without your conscious and voluntary consent. They manipulate your emotions as opposed to your rational thoughts. People who do this sort of thing can be anybody - relatives, neighbors, fellow students, coworkers and even total strangers on the street haranguing passers-to demand agreement on any opinion of the haranguers’ choosing.

  Why do many people fall into line simply because others expect them to do so? Human beings are social animals, as Aristotle noted thousands of years ago. Being social tilts our thinking away from individual rationality and towards group emotionalism. Humans and prehumans long had no option but to try to work in groups. This behavior is survival-related and is of a purely instinctual group nature. People have no choice but to go hunting and gathering in groups. Sometimes our primitive ancestors worked together in groups during the era of mastodons to toss hunting nets over the animals they hunted. At other times dozens of people simply speared an animal with dozens of spears until they slowly brought it down. Women typically gathered fruits and vegetables while lugging along their children. Working in groups also tended to scare away certain types of animals.

  Our group hunting instincts are tied to our tendency to respect other people’s opinions, sometimes at the expense of our own opinions and self-interest. Marcus Aurelius said “I have often wondered how it is that.....so much more respect have we to what our neighbors think of us than to what we shall think of ourselves.” Other people’s opinions should not really count for anything, but we allow them to do so because they are tied to the emotional center of the brain which evolved out of our hunting primate origins. We do not really respect groups or the influence they attempt to exert over us, but being in the presence of a group counteracts our critical thinking abilities by tugging on our emotions.

  According to James Fenimore Cooper, what “ “They say” is the monarch of the country. No one asks “who says it, so long as it is believed that “they say it.” Designing men endeavor to persuade the public, that already “they say” what these designing men wish to be said, and the public is only too much disposed blindly to join in the cry of “they say.” This is another consequence of deferring to the control of the public, over matters in which the public has no right to interfere. Every well-meaning man, before he yields his faculties and intelligence to this sort of dictation, should first ask himself “who” is “they” and on what authority “they say” utters its mandates.” This is simply the herd instinct, like the flocking of birds, meaning people who believe that they are more important than the people they are trying to control by saying that it is the mindless herd that says something, and no proof is required of a bunch of herd animals thinking on the lowest common denominator level. There is no “they” that matters. Other people are not important because they are other people who quote some imaginary mass of other people as being the court of authority. You can pass judgment on any appeal made to the group instinct using the rational part of your mind.

  Men who went hunting spent a major part of their time hunting and getting ready to hunt by sharpening their spears. Women invented carrying bags of various types to carry around whatever fruits and vegetables they found in their food collection areas. Spoken language popped up about a quarter of a million years go. Some people had forceful personalities that they used to induce others to follow their lead and their nonverbal expectations. This probably took forms such as telling others to go to certain areas to hunt or gather. If their personalities did not produce enough food, others who might have had better food-gathering skills would soon take their places after the tribe members got tired of going hungry. A lot of the time, especially among male hunters, something as simple as a pointing a finger or a shake of a head might indicate their expectations to others in a nonverbal manner. In any event, if they were wrong, others soon found reasons to ignore them and their expectations. If their expectations produced nothing, there was no reason to pay any attention to them in the future, unless they happened to be violent.

  According to Gustave Le Bon: “Our savage, destructive instincts are the inheritance left dormant in individuals, it would be dangerous for him to gratify these instincts, while his absorption in an irresponsible crowd, in which in consequence he is assured of impunity, gives him entire liberty to follow them. Being unable, in the ordinary course of events, to exercise these destructive instincts on our fellow-men, we confine ourselves to exercising them on animals. The passion, so widespread, for the chase and the acts of ferocity of crowds proceed from one and the same source. A crowd which slowly slaughters a defenceless victim displays a very cowardly ferocity; but for the philosopher this ferocity is very closely related to that of the huntsmen who gather in dozens for the pleasure of taking part in the pursuit and killing of a luckless stag by their hounds.” People are susceptible to group instinct emotions for genetic reasons. Anything that helped keep us alive by bringing in food remains retained in our genetic code because it promoted survival.

  However, even violent people get hungry when their plans and expectations produce not
hing tangible such as food. They inevitably get reduced to following other people’s directives and expectations. Governments are founded on the belief that supposed leaders cannot lose power over others and that others have no power over their self-appointed leaders. Other people get stuck with the tab. This is the basis of king-led governments. Power over others is inherited, like inheriting power over flocks of chickens. The king’s whims and expectations take precedence over all other opinions. Kings’ opinions are always backed up by all sorts of violence.

  Expectations are simply opinions that are often expressed in nonverbal form. They are usually not worth the bother of thinking about because opinions are purely subjective and have no intrinsic value in and of themselves. When a mother tell her children that blue is the perfect color for all clothing, which is simply her non-objective opinion, it has no basis in reality or utility in the real world. When she tells her children that she expects them to wear blue clothing every day, her purely subjective expectation is something that should not enter the minds of her children because no proof is forthcoming. Their problem is that her subjective opinions have more value than they should have. The mother actually wants to impose her opinions on others to paint the world the color of her narcissistic expectations because children do not have the power to oppose her. She has nothing rational to back up her emotional expectations, which are simply narcissism expressed as being a desirable form of reality. Some such women might even punish children for daring to wear different colors. Children can think in any way they want, of course, because they are human beings capable of independent, objective thought even if mothers simply want to make them into vassals who cannot think for themselves. Children who start out like this become progressively less able to think for themselves, act for themselves and become servile drudges to external forces, usually meaning other people. The world is full of parents who would rather destroy the lives of others than be contradicted. Frederick Nietzsche noted: “Parents involuntarily make something like themselves out of their children.”

  Everyone’s mind has what is known as a locus of control. There are two types of locus of control, internal and external. Having an internal locus of control means that you are self-directed, self-reliant and self-motivated. An internal locus of control means that you also think that you are in control of your own life and that external things, such as people and organizations, play only a secondary part in controlling your life.

  Having an external locus of control means that other people and organizations play a major role in controlling both your actions, thoughts and response to others’ expectations. More specifically, it means that you think that life in general is under the control of things or people that are not under your control to any measureable degree. Military soldiers in a war have no real control over their lives.

  Lower class people with no real education, no understanding of life in general and society in particular, often believe in vaguely defined conspiracies to the effect that they cannot get ahead because some sort of shadowy group conspiracies are blocking them or holding them back. It may be the case, of course, that it is their alcoholism, social class, manner of speech or some other factored perceived by others that is the real problem. As one’s social class rises, these beliefs seem to fade into the background because they are beliefs that have little or no basis in fact. Semi-literates often hold such beliefs to explain their lack of upward social mobility, and their beliefs are reinforced in discussions with others of their own kind. An unskilled manual laborer thinks he cannot become company president because someone above him is terrified of his genius, while the reality is that he is an alcoholic.

  Expectations Are Emotions

  Expectations are emotions expressed as purely subjective opinions. They can be expressed verbally, using facial expressions, posture, gestures of the hands and in a variety of similar fashions. Expectations are expressed for the explicit or implicit purpose of controlling other people and what they do. It is a form of social psychology. Humans and pre-human beings were social animals who went hunting and gathering for the purpose of collecting food, usually in the form of animals, fruit, vegetables, and roots that could either be eaten raw or cooked. Our ancestors had no choice but to collect food in groups because a lot of things required that they do so in groups to ward off predators. People looking for food had to communicate with each other. Men in particular had to tell each other about really dangerous predators off to the side off to the side of the hunting group hoping to side swipe a few men into becoming their dinners. Women gathering fruit had similar concerns about members of other tribes wandering into their food collection territory.

  Expectations are expressed to control other people and their emotions. Among hunter-gatherers it might take the form of pointing a finger, covering over the mouth to express the expectation that their targets should be silent, a frown when they thought a noise might scare off the animals they were hunting, and so on.

  In the contemporary era, this might be extended to include things such as an office boss frowning in the morning to express his displeasure with the previous day’s results, wide-open eyes as a way expressing his displeasure with someone’s mode of dress and a thousand other ways of expressing his expectations and reactions.

  In a tightly integrated social group, expectations developed slowly over the course of time. Any group slowly develops customs and mutual understandings intended to facilitate group cohesion based on behavioral conformity. What nobody talks about very much is that a lot of expectation-based conformity is disliked by everybody except the group leader. A lot of it is also meaningless personal peculiarities. This is particularly so for the case of expressions of obedience among those whom the expectations are enforced against. For example, in medieval European society, it was common for men such as warriors to bow down or kneel before their higher-ups. This was often the expression that the local king was some sort of stand-in representative of a supposed unseen deity. This was probably enforced at the point of a sword or spear. It served no practical purpose except to reinforce obedience to the expectations of the group leader, who was typically a self-appointed leader who ruled by threats of violence. Somebody is always in charge of groups, even street gangs with informal leaders.

  Expectations are thus forms of communication intended to communicate a desire to control the target of those expectations. Communication includes large chunks of lies and various forms of manipulation. A woman might express a belief that a man would never suspect her playing the field with other men, despite it being common knowledge that women do so to the extent that about one-third of babies born have fathers other than their supposed fathers by virtue of marriage. A woman expressing that her expectations that a man believe in her claims of fidelity are a meaningless lies and manipulation. In modern societies expectations have no foundation in truth or utility for the targets. There are often multiple layers oi manipulation involved. Regardless of whether the source of expectations if a group or an individual, it is some form of group-instinct emotion. Fritz Perls wrote that “I am not in this world to live up to your expectations.” Rational people decide how to react, or whether to react, using their rational thinking capacities. Doing as others expect is almost never in our self-interest because it is emotional in nature and cannot pass muster under rational analysis. Other people do this for their own benefit, not our own.

  The absence of team spirit is a good thing. Team spirit is for people who give up their individuality and subscribe to the delusional idea that having team spirit produces something of value for the individual. Team spirit is just a passing delusion that falls apart when it is time to lay off people when it turns out to the case that the team leader was lying in every way that matters and the company goes down the drain leaving nothing behind for those who wasted their time and energy on team spirit. Always remember that anyone who espouses and expects team spirit, meaning a mimicry of what is going on in his own head, is simply something intended to make his life b
etter in some way, such as money. Team spirit is thus intended to manipulate other people into making the team leader or owner better off than they are. Team spirit is thus group mindlessness intended to dupe people into turning off their rational minds in favor of mindless cheerleading in favor of the owners’ interests. Team spirit is not in the best interests of team members, just team owners. Team members are throwaways from the point of view of the team owners. When football players are too old to perform like team members half their age, they are routinely discarded without a second thought. The same applies to food service workers and other types of workers. The expectations of owners and managers are not contracts that are mutually agreed upon by two or more parties with full knowledge of the consequences. They are simply the biased opinions of one party that feels like controlling and manipulating secondary parties whom the first party wants to get something out of, usually meaning some sort of effort that benefits the party that expresses some sort of expectations. In some places, people who are willing to work for one day at a time, meaning day labors, wait at particular street corners in the morning and trucks come by. Drivers yell words to the effect anyone who wants to work for a day should get into the back of the truck. Those who get into the back of the truck expect to be offered work for a day, usually something of a simple manual, unskilled labor nature, such as sweeping streets, loading trucks and so on. Sometimes they are not paid at all. Meeting the expectations of an employer does not have a guaranteed payoff. They would often be better off being self-employed and hiring themselves out for cash by going door to door.

  Letting Other People

  Down Is Good

  It’s okay to let other people down. Their plans and open-mouthed expectations are intended to help them help themselves, and are intended to help you only incidentally, if at all. Once you understand that other people who espouse expectations are strictly out for themselves, period, you are way ahead of other people who think someone who wants to be their boss is their friend. They will tell any sort of lie to get you to show up and put out effort that primarily benefits them, until the wind changes. They act like they don’t know you when it comes time to pay you, so is okay to let them down. You are the one who decides whether or not to show up and you are the one who should be deciding how much effort to put out. Taking action of any kind is entirely voluntary on your part. Letting down those who want to manipulate you is always a good idea.