Introverts are frequently criticized for ‘living under a rock,’ ‘being sheltered’, and of course ‘being out of touch with reality.
So what exactly do they mean by ‘reality’? What do they imply is an insubstantial fantasy land?
The extroverted critic clearly presupposes a very precise meaning of all that is ‘real,’ tangible, and substantial.
From their criticisms we can infer that their reality could be defined as as:
the sum of the shared knowledge, preferences, and actions of every person in a given mass society.
The more people who are doing any given thing, the more real it is. I suppose this because:
the strength of criticisms they administer is proportional to the popularity of x thing ‘everybody else has heard of’ or ‘everybody else likes’ or ‘everybody else has done/experienced.’
The extrovert critic demonstrates that being defined by their surrounding society is one of their cardinal values. This is a value that is suddenly and jarringly violated when they discover the ‘serious’ person in the corner hasn’t heard of their favorite band. So important and ‘real’ is a detailed knowledge of the mass collective that they quite literally conceive of its absence in one’s life as existence in a land of fantasy and illusion.
To understand the Loud perspective is to understand that being even slightly out of tune with one’s surrounding mass society is to be mentally ill. From their definition of reality, it is the logical conclusion for them to arrive at that someone divergent lives in a realm of delusion.
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Not all of this stuff is true of all introverts. I’m an introvert and I’m assertive. I’d probably have to watch it with a host family, either in the U.S. or abroad. I haven’t usually felt like much of an outsider in my life. I’m a reasonable person, but I’m not a people pleaser. I do believe in dressing modestly, though, and I do believe in respecting many aspects of other cultures when traveling abroad.
My blog is written with a strong emphasis on more extreme forms of introversion.
To make meaningful, generally true statements, one must generalize I’m afraid. I stated in my very first post in this blog that I do not intend to subject myself to the usual politically correct paralysis.
As I have previously clarified, it is not my primary objective to be always agreeable.
I use the term ‘introvert’ mainly because people have heard of it and because it is searchable. Otherwise it is imprecise for my purposes and loaded with tons of pejorative baggage.
I actually like to substitute a more precise dichotomy of Loud and Subtle rather than introvert or extrovert.