New Yorker cartoon by the late Charles Barsotti
When I was a young child, I would look at my parents and other adults interacting with each other, with a mixture of bewilderment and amazement. “Surely”, I thought to myself, “they don’t really believe what they’re saying. It must be like an act, like the adult form of playing — they’re just pretending to know what they’re talking about, ‘playing’ at being adults.”
I was always a ‘slow learner’. I didn’t mimic adults’ behaviour like a lot of kids. I had been conditioned to try to understand what was going on, and why it was happening, before emulating anyone. And I was conditioned to always speak the truth, no matter what, which meant waiting until I thought I had some idea of what the truth in a particular situation really was. In many situations I never did have any idea what the truth was, so my conditioning drove me to stay open and assert no opinion — which drove other children and adults crazy.
So lots of kids learned ‘social graces’ — like how to behave in ritual situations (church, parties, school), and how to converse (what was permissible and advisable to say, and not permissible or advisable to say, to certain classes of adults, to get their approval, regardless of what one really believed). Not me.
I never learned how to sweet-talk, how to coerce, how to ridicule, how to deceive, how to persuade. Why would one ever want to learn and practice such dishonest skills? So I didn’t talk much, and largely withdrew from social contact both with other kids and with adults. I couldn’t understand their behaviour, and didn’t much want to learn it, even if would make my life easier.
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