Understanding Societal Expectations and Their Impact on the Individual and His Development

We generally fail to recognise how much we tend to take on the coloration of the thoughts and feelings of those around us. Just as a chameleon will adapt its body color to blend into its physical environment, we tend to adapt our ideas, opinions, and feelings to match up with those with whom we associate. Even if we tend to take issue with certain things, we frequently remain quiet in the presence of those who would disagree with us, while becoming vocally active in the presence of those who would agree.

Part of this response comes from the acculturation, the education, the training that we receive that automatically predisposes us to accept and adopt the way things are done in our society. At the same time, there can develop additional elements that help to maintain the acculturation, such as a desire to be part of the group or community, to fit in, to be accepted, and in more hostile environments, the instincts for self-preservation and neutralizing the fear that comes when one believes that standing out from the crowd will lead to negative consequences, ostracism, violence, injury or death .

This occurs in all social settings, as people adapt themselves to the community within which they live, imbibe the energetic characteristics of that community, and take on the mores and external trappings of their community. This can act as a limitation in societies that have strict limits or frameworks around what is acceptable, what can be done and what can be thought. It can be even more intensely stultifying in societies that have an authoritarian bent, that try to control what people read, what information they receive, and what they say and think. The dangers of this type of development were clearly outlined in Orwell’s 1984.

There can be a positive influence if one happens to participate in a societal grouping that is forward-looking, open, receptive and seeking a wider life and experience. In such cases, the pressure in the environment can actually be one that supports and encourages new ways of seeing and thinking. As long as this is a real sense of receptivity and not something contrived, it can provide a true haven for those who find the general social setting to be extremely difficult and who are not prepared to simply adopt the ways of the general society.

It must be noted that much of this occurs on an occult level and is not necessarily set forth in fixed external rules or actions. There is an air of expectation, a pressure of experience that pushes the individual in the direction desired by the society, in ways that he generally does not always see or recognise.

The Mother notes: “One is always identified more or less with all that one does and all the things with which one is in contact. The ordinary state of people is to be in everything that they do, all that they see, all whom they frequently meet. They are like that. There is something in them which in fact is very vague and very inconsistent, and which moves around everywhere. And if they simply want to know a little what they are, they are obliged to pull back towards them a heap of things which are scattered everywhere. There is a kind of unconscious fluidity between people, I have told you this I don’t know how many times; it produces a mixture, all that, as soon as it is no longer altogether material…. It’s because you have a skin that you don’t enter into one another like that; otherwise even the subtle physical, you see… like a kind of almost perceptible vapour which goes out from bodies, which is the subtle physical, it intermingles terribly, and it produces all kinds of reactions, constantly, of one person upon another.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology , Chapter 6, Some Answers and Explanations, pg. 159