openness and psychological complexity and our online lives
I’ve long been interested in positive psychological outliers like the highly creative, the highly intelligent or the deeply compassionate. There are vital personal lessons to be learned from case studies and observation of people like this.
Openness is another characteristic, perhaps somewhat less mentioned in general discourse, but nonetheless important. It’s difficult to avoid the self-observations of limitation, incompleteness, the unhealed, and fragmentation - of a self operating as a dim light in a darkened space of unknown dimensions. We seize upon solutions to these fundamental perceived absences through education, spiritual practices, psychotherapy and more. But at some point the identification of openness as an elementary or prior-to-everything orientation can occur as a response. We are missing something, but to begin the journey to the discovery or achievement of what it is that we are missing, we have to orient ourselves in metaphorical space. We can’t have impediments in our way, especially the self-hidden ones. We become doors, windows, something closer to nothingness for that which we want or need to more easily ingress. The self is framework of apprehension whose limitations are the limitations of the self.
If you reflect enough on how openness can be operationalized in any given context, you begin to construct a spectrum of human performance. Closed-offness, dogmatism, stultifying self-referentiality congregate on one pole, while on the other exists openness (perhaps more difficult to metaphorize and describe compared with its opposites) and allied traits like spontaneity and improvisation, e.g.. With this spectrum in mind you have a lens on the nature of others that seems permanent in the same way that violence or love informs you. How is any given person operating in their total context of life? Heads down, self-maintaining, following rigid schemata, pulling back, resisting, holding tight, a mentality strewn with absolute refusals, or ... air and light and quick turns, epiphanies, awe, live questions, ongoing fascination. These are the differences that openness can help facilitate.
By psychological complexity I’m referring to something like:
-breadth of knowledge and understanding, multidisciplinarity
-affective modes and registers, seen, integrated, but not blindly in thrall to them
-multifarious functional modes like creativity, openness, determination, compassion, explored and in various developmental stages
-a highly adaptive cognitive architecture for reasoning, thinking and analyzing, the cultivation of multiple perspectival modes of thought
My point in all the above is to underline a point that we can lose sight of in our online lives. What you’re seeing with my or anyone else’s blog reflects a pattern of selection. Some people are committed to curating an online persona of seamless erudition and high mindedness - I’m suspicious of this, although I appreciate the appeal and intent. Others prioritize spontaneous reblogs of interest. Regardless, the mistake is in losing sight of what you might call an online persona bias, either as creator or viewer. We are not our online selves, only in part. Our online selves reveal both consistencies but also tensions and contradictions between who we are to ourselves and how we present to others offline. Openness and mental complexity - these traits aren’t necessary conditions to see beyond online persona bias to the simple fact that we’re multiple in our presentations, but they might help.
Myself, I tend to be combative online, drawing critical attention to what I consider to be my and humanity’s perpetual enemies - the right-wingers. In one on one interactions I try to lead with consideration and peaceful intent. I love exploratory dialogues, the mutual building of understanding and supportive mutual criticism. Online or offline I view the louche or crude with camp irony. I also think that all of us were destined for some poetic way of life, where Platonic ideals are always in view if not strived for, and where respectful silences and deep appreciations move through us in unexpected and even mysterious ways.
Anyway, me online is not me in my entirety, only a little. Just so you know.
