Personality, Language and Distractions in Society

While there is a never-ending tussle between ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ over the share of influence each has on human behaviour, one could find an interesting way of looking at things from a psychological angle that takes into account not rational actions, rather it focusses on something that is often overlooked – ‘distractions’. The reason for such distractions could be many, all pointing towards one dominant fact that human society is a complex system with innumerable degrees of freedom. The limiting factor of human agency could be found in the form of language, an idea that was well articulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein. A careful analysis of the development of human personality shows that what goes down as individual is scarcely so. Social institutions act as rationalizing agents that supply an identity to a new-born baby even before it is born. In a civilized society, most human interactions take place in three distinct settings for a growing individual – the family, the school and the economy or the world of professional employment. In the Parsonian scheme of society, especially social structure, there is a movement from particularistic to universalistic in terms of the nature of human interactions. The power of language acquisition which is natural to every human being does not equip one with the required vocabulary in order to facilitate interactions. It is learnt through interactions over a period of time. It is through language that one develops a particular world view. But the process should not be seen as a smooth, streamlined process. There are ‘chaotic’, noise-like disturbances called ‘distractions’. This paper looks to analyze some of the positive and negative aspects of the phenomenon that go into shaping human personality.