You don't often live a long life being too far out ahead of your culture

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=11433

"... you have to think about what it means to actually be more complex than what your culture is currently demanding. You have to have a name for that, too. It's almost something beyond maturity, and it's usually a very risky state to be in. I mean, we loved Jesus, Socrates, and Gandhi—after we murdered them. While they were alive, they were a tremendous pain in the ass. Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr.—these people died relatively young. You don't often live a long life being too far out ahead of your culture."

Robert Kegan's Awesome Theory of Social Maturity
Mark Dombeck, Ph.D. Updated: Jan 20th 2007

Many years ago and quite by chance, I read a book that showed me a new and very powerful way of looking at a variety of human behavior we think of as social maturity. I recall being absolutely enthralled and blown away by the elegance and simplicity of the theory; the way that it explained things so nicely and made so many disparate facts about social maturity or the lack thereof seem to "click into place". I could not understand why this theory had never been taught to me in a psychology class! As time went on and practical responsibilities mounted, however, I let it go and did not think about it much for years. Last year, I found the book describing the theory on my bookshelf and picked it up again, remembering that I had liked it. I re-read the book, and experienced the same enthralling feeling all over again. My intention today with this essay is to communicate the basics of this theory of social maturity to you, my reader, so that you, too, will (hopefully) experience this same feeling of things suddenly "clicking into place" and making sense.

There are many different sorts of maturity we could talk about, but I will only be talking about social maturity. This sort of maturity has to do with how well people understand the nature of the social world they live within. Social maturity is what enables us to function as healthy adults. Without it, we end up having a difficult time ourselves, or causing a lot of difficult times for other people. A high degree of social maturity has something to do with a high degree of social skill, but these two things are not the same. A sociopath can evidence a lot of slick social skill, but that sociopath's ability to accurately represent the reality of the social word (e.g., to care about the fact that other people have feelings and lives) is likely to be severely delayed , and thus we would have to consider the sociopath to be fundamentally socially immature.

"Why is social maturity important?", you might ask. Think about it. Who are the people you want to be able to depend upon; to have as friends and family members? Not the fair-weather-friends you want to have a good time with, but the people you want to have as sources of comfort and advice when the going gets rough. You want to have socially and emotionally mature people around you in times of crises. Socially immature people are a blast at keg or cocktail parties, and make for exciting lovers, but due to their essential selfishness, they simply suck as spouses, and parents and grandparents, and as leaders of any variety.

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I remember reading this book by Robert Kegan called The Evolving Self some years ago when it first came out and it stuck with me and seems to kind of fit right into these times.

[Odin2005]

1. K&R

[ThoughtCriminal]

2. Could we say that part of the moral is

You really shouldn't vote for somebody just because you think they would be somebody you would like to have a beer with.

[Fumesucker]

3. There's a Heinlein quote that covers this..

"Being right too soon is socially unacceptable."

ETA: Perfect example, being a ten percenter in 2002.. I caught more grief in 2002, by 2007 despite the fact my opinion hadn't changed in the meantime strangely everyone agreed with me.

Of course living in bright red part of a red state means that I'm back to being a ten percenter again because I don't think Obama's a socialist Kenyan Marxist Fascist Muslim Atheist..

The social whiplash is starting to get to me.