A person who is “the same with everyone” is perhaps not as well adapted to their social environment as we might think.
Anyone studying human communication will soon realize that there is a built in paradox that pits our assumptions about personal authenticity against convincing evidence that effective communication requires many selves. There are those famous words from Shakespeare’s As You Like It:
All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts. . .”
And there’s this reliable contradiction: while we long for connection to individuals who will not say the wrong things in the wrong places, we also want reliable friends we can count on to be their predictable selves. If these two ideas aren’t at odds with each other, they are surely going in different directions, explaining why even those we know best can still disappoint.
Variations of what’s called “role theory” in sociology and “dramatistic ratios” in communication emphasize the consummate role-player. Each posits that, over time, we become performers able to manage how we present ourselves to others. We have many faces: whatever a setting requires.
Imagine some of the roles that may exist for a young woman with her own family: mother, wife, daughter, granddaughter, friend to a prickly neighbor, friend to others who don’t like the prickly neighbor, employee, church committee chairperson, weekend campaigner for a social action movement, and so on. Any of us who interact with “Meg” will know her by mostly what she says and does. But we are also not likely to see her in all of her other roles, something of a blessing for her. If she is reasonably well adjusted, she plays her parts well. In essence she is a one-person repertory company, since each setting puts her in front of a different audience. Meg may tell racy jokes over drinks with some friends. But she’s a different kind of person with her children, her parents and certainly those folks at the church where she helps out. A person who is “the same with everyone” is not as able to deal with their social environments as well as we might think.
The challenge for us is that, while we express enthusiasm for the idea of “personal authenticity,” the odds are great that we would be uncomfortable with individuals who struggle to meet the different normative expectations of different “audiences.” Violations of these expectations in the forms of unusual behavior and ill-chosen words would probably be enough to make us want to put some distance between ourselves and Meg.
Think of all the one-off individualists we celebrate in the movies (characters created over the years by Walter Matthau, Jack Nicholson, James Cagney, Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Matthew Mcconaughey, Dustin Hoffman, Lena Dunham or Vince Vaughn.) Character actors often give us individuals who seem to have been cut from a different cloth. But even though they attract us to screen narratives, their characters might well repel us as friends. In the flesh, we love our adaptable companions. Role-taking oils the social machinery that we would prefer to run smoothly.
People diagnosed on the autism spectrum are sometimes less able to read social cues. Many discover that by memorizing common social “scripts” they can still manage in what would otherwise be bewildering settings. To be sure, many have compensating strengths, like better resistance to the kinds of distractions that plague many of us. Even so, like those for whom the social impulse comes more easily, they can appreciate the value of the daily shape-shifting that is part of making one’s way in the world.
It remains to be seen how long Americans will accept a drama queen as President: how long it will be before their forbearance for the man who can’t fill the part is tapped out.
This site is all about maximizing the chances for success in connecting with others. But if we flip that goal over, we get an equally interesting effect by testing the limits of behavior a mile wide of the norm.
I’ve been thinking about this watching television news people on cable networks, trying not to register shock that the President of the United States has just trashed another convention of the presidency. News people are expert for keeping calm in the presence of disorder and rudeness. Serious and accomplished reporters can be very good for taking any act and trying to place it into a context that normalizes it for the beat they are covering. This is partly a function of their self-definitions as professional observers.
Those of us with shorter fuses may not have this kind of professional elan. But that’s what forbearance gives us: the use of euphemism and “just the facts” to keep an offensive act from devolving into a comedy of manners.
We would never think to associate public acts so careless and random as authentic examples of “presidential rhetoric.”
It’s not too much to say that this President has seriously undermined the conventional role functions of the Presidency. We would never think to associate public acts so careless and random as authentic examples of “presidential rhetoric.” But we’ve had over fifty days of them, and then on one recent Saturday: an astonishing and libelous tweet accusing President Obama of tapping phones at Trump Tower, followed minutes later by a second missive expressing giddy delight that a reality star was cancelling his show. These rants came a few days after Trump gave us the wide-eyed and definitive insight that “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”
Nobody? That must have struck analysts and experts in three previous administrations as news. No one else had apparently been able to grasp the complexities of American health care.
These combined responses and many more like them seem like evidence for what’s known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a condition where an individual with limited competencies lacks even the capacity to understand how limited they are. No wonder one of the dominant tropes emerging in the coverage of this president is of a man-child.
Donald Trump’s over 500 angry, misspelled and boorish Tweets alone would have disqualified him for leadership in most large organizations. Can we assume that one day these rhetorical ejaculations will greet visitors at his Presidential library?
To be sure, we grant every White House occupant some non-presidential moments: Nixon angrily shoving his press secretary toward journalists, Johnson showing photographers a surgery scar on his fat belly, Ford diving head-first down the stairs of his airplane, Clinton lying about his relations with Monica Lewinsky, George W. Bush commenting at a press conference on the British Prime Minister’s brand of toothpaste.
But nothing has scratched the mostly pristine finish of the institutional Presidency like Trump. He has entire seizures of misdirected utterance and grotesque overstatement. His willful ignorance, bluster and conspiracy-mongering, are not just unpresidential, but anti-presidential. His penchant for turning almost every claim into an accusation and most statements into shaky affirmations of his fragile ego has made his short tenure an unintended psychodrama: an embarrassment to be endured. His first address to Congress showed that he can follow linear thinking if it is fully scripted. Yet he seems uninterested in the kinds of details and substantive exchanges that the press and public long for. So it remains to be seen how long Americans will accept a drama queen as President. Like a school play, the mishaps and miscues are sometimes funny. But how long will we accept this bad actor before our forbearance is tapped out?
______________
Gary C. Woodward has written about the Presidencies of Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
