pat loughery

A couple of days ago I started reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.  One of the sections of the book is a brief interview with Adam McHugh, author of the FANTASTIC Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture which I’ve written about several tiimes and continue to recommend.

I’m only a couple of chapters into Quiet, but one of the themes in the second chapter is excellent. A few highlights:

America had shifted from what the influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality—and opened up a Pandora’s Box of personal anxieties from which we would never quite recover[…]. 
In the Culture of Character, the ideal self was serious, disciplined, and honorable. What counted was not so much the impression one made in public as how one behaved in private[…].

 

But when they embraced the Culture of Personality, Americans started to focus on how others perceived them. They became captivated by people who were bold and entertaining. “The social role demanded of all in the new Culture of Personality was that of a performer,” Susman famously wrote. “Every American was to become a performing self.”