“A child who is to be successful is not to be reared exclusively on a bed of down.” – Akan proverb
There is no doubt that you come out to play when you are by yourself. That is, you are more of yourself when you are alone. For example, many of us are more likely to eat slowly and chew the food when we eat in public than when we eat in our homes by ourselves. It is not something many of us are proud of, but it is what we do. We are very comfortable with ourselves by ourselves. The moment another pair of eyes comes into the scenario, especially those not in our familiarity circle, most of us start to live up to their expectations.
There is something about expectations when we encounter people. As to whether they are really expecting something or not is secondary. Sometimes we feel like they are expecting more from us, and we want to prove them right. At other times we feel as if they are expecting less from us, and we desire to prove them wrong. Such expectations are contributory factors to our different behavioural attitudes in public. This sense of expectation is like a sentence hanging around our necks.
All it takes is for another set of eyes to be in our ‘business’ and then we strive to live up to the expectation of os watching eyes. Our communal attitude is hence a process requiring various elements, one of which happens to be our sense of perception in the presence of others. We create experiences based on expectations. The pertinent question is, do we have to behave according to the expectations of spectators? If that is the case, then a surprising majority of us can easily be classed as living double lives – through the in-house attitude and the communal attitude.
Fortunately, the clothes of hypocrisy do not look good on anyone. And so, such behaviour might not necessarily be hypocrisy. What we need to understand is that when we encounter other people our sense of impression becomes heightened, our energy level changes. And due to our interconnectivity, once our energy level changes the energy level of the audience also changes. Their presence becomes one of the most powerful of pleasures, and so we strive to please them in a bid to earn their applause. When they applause, it means they are happy and that makes us also happy. More often, we want these moments of pleasure to continue, and so we do all we can to sustain the behaviour that meets such expectations.
According to Freud, humans seem better able to deal with stimuli from the outside than from within. The behaviour we put up in the presence of others is our response to the stimuli coming from outside. The downside of this social orientation and interaction is when the expectations require us to act negatively and unethically. The pressure of these expectations pushes us to develop metrical requirements for the negativity. You become its servant, and this tasks you to build a formal model to represent how the negativity should be branded. Soon, others pick up this symbolism and mould it into their attitudes.
Once an activity – especially a negative one – has a symbol, it becomes easier to relate to. But more essentially, it takes over us and demands to be cloaked in a virtuous light so that it can freely mingle in society. For example, many individuals would rather give a token or bribe to a policeman for a traffic offence than risk what is popularly termed the ‘they-will-waste-your-time’ attitude. This is the honourable light with which we have masked a corrupt practice. Such masking makes it easier to rid our consciences of ethical dilemmas. But we need to understand that these ‘arrangements’ permit the emergence and thriving of negative and unethical activities in our societies.
Some of us mistakenly believe that if we do not partake in such petty acts of negativity, then we are good to go. Well, if you fall within that bracket, you are mistaken. This is because evil abounds because ethically upright and positively-minded individuals refused to condemn the negative and unethical activities. It is time to speak up and stamp out the negativities eating our society. We cannot live life by ourselves, we will always need other people. But there is no way we should live to suit the expectations of those evil-minded others.
The core ethos behind living is to awaken awareness of positivism and ethics, and to combine them in extraordinarily new ways at each moment to create a synergetic force as our contribution to culture. For that to happen, we have to bridge the gap between the ‘we’ in private and the ‘we’ in public. We must tap into the mental pool of resources – ideas, inspiration, insights and information – that we have accumulated to orient us toward the good; thus stimulating us to choose exhibiting virtue as our behavioural attitude. This will make us likable by ourselves in private. The new sense of appreciation will then enable us to strip the most complex of cultural phenomena down to their bare essence, forcing us to re-examine our layers of assumptions in order to eclipse the influence of others’ expectations. It will dare us to stand on the positive side of the integrity counter.
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Kodwo Brumpon is a partner at Brumpon & Kobla Ltd., a forward-thinking Pan African management consultancy and social impact firm driven by data analytics – with a focus on understanding the extraordinary potential and needs of organisations and businesses to help them cultivate synergies which catapult them into their strategic growth and certify their sustainability.
Comments, suggestions and requests for talks and training should be sent to him at kodwo@brumponand kobla.com
