It's been over a century since Dale Carnegie began teaching the importance of extroversion, bringing with it a cultural shift that champions an aggressive social and work style. Gone were the days of championing introspection.Derek explores his own relationship with introversion in Yogaland, wondering how a quiet form of self-investigation that often champions the loud and bombastic on social media. The influence of the extrovert has dominated many domains, but none more insidiously than the wellness influencers feigning compassion in an attempt to influence people but not necessarily win friends. Show NotesPeople Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
Thanks for listening and your support, which keeps us ad-free and editorially independent.
I've picked up and put down Quiet for years now.
The book has always been on my I'll Get To You list, which is a growing library of titles that catch my interest but don't have immediate utility.
Mind you, not every book has to have a purpose.
But in my career, I'm often reading nonfiction to prepare for an interview or write about a topic.
And given that I work with a lot of software engineers at my full-time work, a lot of them tend to be on the introverted side.
And so I felt it was a good time to brush up on my communication skills with fellow introverts.
The timing of reading this book with the last episode of Conspiratuality was purely fortuitous, and I'll get to that.
Susan Cain traces the cultural change from championing inner virtue to outer charm at the turn of the 20th century, when figures like Dale Carnegie usurped the wisdom of thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Forget long stretches of contemplation broken up by thoughtful and measured speech.
And forget 19th century manuals that heralded qualities like duty, citizenship, honor, reputation, and morals.
Carnegie was part of a forefront that introduced a new language into the social dictionary.
Magnetic, fascinating, glowing, dominant, and energetic defined the leaders of the day.
A century later, that remains the case.
Sure, Steve Jobs' LSD experiments still inspire mythical awe, yet for the most part, C-suite leaders are expected to steamroll in both boardrooms and on social media.
In the 1920s, a new concept was introduced into psychology, the inferiority complex.
Naming a disorder is to watch it proliferate in society, and Americans were ready to reinvent themselves.
As Kane writes, early Americans revered action and were suspicious of intellect, associating the life of the mind with the languid, ineffectual European aristocracy they had left behind.
It was 1921 that the terms introvert and extrovert were introduced in one of Carl Jung's most influential books, Psychological Types.
Jung defined introversion as an attitude type characterized by orientation in life through subjective psychic contents and extroversion as an attitude type characterized by concentration of interest on the external object.
Gotta love Jung's writing.
As American society and work life transitioned from the contemplative to the bombastic, people like Carnegie made millions offering workshops to pull the extrovert out of you.
A debate over nature and nurture, then and now, persists.
Can an introvert become the charismatic life of the party?
For Kane, disentangling the two isn't so simple.
Again, she writes, To ask whether it's nature or nurture is like asking whether a blizzard is caused by temperature or humidity.
It's the intricate interaction between the two that makes us who we are.
As I mentioned earlier, it became apparent even the most introverted among us can become charismatic figures in certain situations.
questions.
There's no coincidence that Kane cites Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who happened to be the focus of my last bonus episode and also who, sadly, passed away just last week at the age of 87.
But that's a pretty good life, so we'll celebrate his time here on Earth rather than getting too sad about it.
Kane notes that the secret to entering flow states is that the activity has to bring an intrinsic reward.
So in my case, playing basketball was its own reward, win or lose.
And that also explains why in situations of sport, I have no issue talking to anyone.
Even today, I'll approach someone in the gym without a problem, as I'm both in my environment, around people working out, and because it has long served as my social network, considering most of my time is spent at my desk in my home office.
Csikszentmihalyi realized that people in flow will work endlessly simply because they love what they're doing.
Being relatively unmoved by rewards, Cain writes, gives you the incalculable power to go your own way.
This is an exemplary state of existence to the introvert, who can write, paint, read, listen to music, or partake in any number of activities they're passionate about and still find satisfaction.
Yet this is at odds with much of modern success as presented by Carnegie and the many business coaches that have followed him.
To be powerful means to be extroverted.
Leave behind the quiet power of introspection and talk, just talk, loudly and confidently.
The words aren't even as important as the conviction behind them.
To captivate is to seduce, to put in a trance, and then to suggest, to pull toward you, to manipulate and monetize.
This is as true for the life coach yoga instructors as it is for Very recent presidents.
