The Utopian Personality

There is a preoccupation with developing a personality. This focus itself converts it into a problem. In my opinion, it is not a problem to be a subject of focus at all. What plays on is not personality enhancement in any case but adjustment to existing trends. Personality development is only a euphemistic phrase used to get everyone to fit into patterns that are considered to be appropriate at a given point in time. If you adjust with manageable ease and leverage your ability to throw off pretensions that appear to be absolutely natural, you are branded as a developed personality.

Any misplaced mannerism is an object of focus and gets immediately mistaken for maladjustment. If you throw off pretensions all too obviously, you will be ignored not for an artificial reaction necessarily but for imperfect acting skills. This is not always the case in real life situations when you do run into understanding company now and then.

In a development programme where the objective is to be in perfect poise all the time, every posture is analyzed threadbare. Now this gets crippling. You will not be able to rid someone of his defense mechanisms on the pretext of wanting to transform his ego. You can at the most only improve his acting skills.

There is a problem here. The role that is assumed and internalized would be the only role that the individual may play throughout his life. Transformation, if it is to be believed, cannot be determined by practice. There are changes as much as there is growth and if allowed to take its natural course, will certainly appear genuine.

The word ‘personality’ seems to be the doing of power; the power to captivate as in the power to encapsulate. This is just a subtle form of domination. But the argument poses as an idealistic one that claims to forestall anarchy. One may observe that even the trainer gives in to the inevitability of spontaneous gestures. Acceptability of these spontaneous gestures is largely in variance. Change is not at all the monopoly of trend but a phenomenon that occurs at its own pace.