The Appeal of irrationality

How much of personality development is in your hands?

The villager ties the baby elephant's feet with the help of a rope to a tree. The baby elephant is not happy with it and wants to free itself. He tries hard but the rope proves much more strong for its weak body to break. After several tries, the baby elephant give up thinking it is not possible for it to break the rope. Twenty years later, this baby elephant grows to fully grown elephant with massive body size but still when the villager ties it with a rope to tree, it doesn't try to break it, thinking it is not possible for it to break...

This is just an analogy that how culture and installed mindset affect our world perspective as well as our concepts of our potentials and talents. Each one of us may be full grown elephants that are tied to some sorts of ropes that we have long forgotten and even don't recognize any more...

The fact is that we all are in perpetual struggle to use our potentials for growing up to our fullest but as I said there are ropes that work as constraints in our ways. We need to recognize and that may help somewhat to deal with them accordingly. I recognize three constraints,

1. Culture

2. Law

3. Place (Village, Town, City, Cosmopolitan city)

As you can easily notice that if we move from one place to another all these three constraints, Culture, Law and size of opportunities (place) change accordingly. So moving is a way that people try to overcome external constraints. Our age (Globalization) is known for this process as immigration and travels are the highest than any other time in history. These three constraints also change temporally (That is going part of another knol; I am trying to write in pieces and put them together in the last one to conclusion, just to avoid, lengthy and boring reading)...

Why I am focusing on moving here instead of struggles for changing them in the native places? Because, here I wanted to talk about personality and changing these constraints require collective efforts and for an individual developments, moving is a better alternative for a lot of people.

Biologists love to study organisms in terms of traits (a distinguished quality either inherited or environmental that could be measured, like height, shape and size of a body part and so forth). Following Biologists, Psychologists also tried to find set of traits by which they could study human personality and they have found five universal traits that is known as Big Fives... including,

1. Openness

2. Conscientiousness

3. Extroversion

4. Agreeableness

5. Neuroticism

I have posted, BBC documentary in two parts at the end of this knol to illustrate the big fives. You can watch them also on You Tube (Just make green tea and pick a bag of dry fruits to watch them. It takes time to watch them all but worth to watch ;)

These big five traits are universal traits but I want to clarify here though personality makes us in large what we are but human behavior is very plastic. Personality may effect the the levels of our comfort with situations and also our perceptions about others and things but it is also true that an introvert person can become extrovert if it happens that the job or circumstances require so. The same is true about other traits and that is a good news... So, my main point is awareness. As we learn more about ourselves, it becomes more easy to manage ourselves and steer our lives accordingly...

Besides big fives, there are some additional factors that play big roles in making us unique than others and they are including, Identity, Narratives, Life History, Experiences and Values. If I go back to three factors, I mentioned earlier like culture, law and place, you can see these additional factors are tightly tied to them. So, simply by moving we can expand the dimensions of these additional factors greatly, either it is identity, narratives, life history, experiences and values and have more choices to choose better ones for blooming of our potentials.

Day; 1
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Please follow the other 5 parts of Day 1 show on You Tube. I didn't post the rest to avoid making this knol very heavy....
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Day; 2
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Please follow the other 5 parts of Day 2 show on You Tube...
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In this knol, I just tried to tell the importance of moving in personality development. I will try to illustrate, how both personality and moving can be linked to moving vertically across social ladder.

Reading Society

My first cultural shock at time, when even I hadn’t heard of cultural shock was when I saw some boys from a religious minority community of Quetta city had dyed their hairs with medium blond. It was a Reflex Reaction like those of Knee-jerk reaction when one steps in some sharp thing or eye-blinking to sudden exposure of intense light as I hadn’t seen anybody dying hair in blond color. Though it was a cultural shock but it allowed me to understand the layered society that I was growing in. The dyeing of hair was an expression of dissatisfaction of those boys with their appearances and status in the society. In short it was a sign of identity dissatisfaction. Later on, I found this phenomenon is cosmopolitan and people change their appearances as a sign of identity dissatisfaction. Some religious minorities in Quetta were living in walled colonies and were attached largely to specific professions like sweepers in Municipality, Nurses in Hospitals and as Railway Workers. Those were kinds of jobs that others communities generally hesitating to have. It was not only religious minorities who were somewhat involved in those professions but also a sub-tribe by name of “Lodhi” who were largely iron-smith by profession and it was common to see them in Quetta making and repairing iron tools. In fact, it was really offensive to call someone Lodhi (it was meant useless person).

I was wondering that if Constitution of the country in large have given freedom and equal opportunity to all citizen irrespective of their religious and tribal affiliations (though the quota system is a biased law that discriminate among citizen based on their tribal affiliations and locality) and also religion does not permit to discriminate (though extremists don’t see it this way) then why some professions are considered to be the domain of the certain communities or layers in society. When I learnt about caste system in India then it was easy for me to understand that these layering were inherited from Indian society. Here is a documentary to learn in brief about caste system..



Society and its institutions whether it is culture, religion, tribes, communities, government, corporations… all are structured and to read a society we need to learn about the social structures. Though social structures are evolved to keep society in order but the social classes are coming out as their products. Even in very liberal and advanced society like US, the class system is a natural outcome of social structure. Following educational video though it is an old one but still illustrates very well this phenomenon,



The bitter side of social class is that; if you are born in a lower social class or in a minority community in any country (even in a liberal society), you are going to have a very different experience than members of majority group/ higher social class. It seems that class struggle is a perpetual struggle.

In a next part of this knol, I will try to illustrate how psyche of people shifts along classes as we progress and why Carl Marx’s prediction that communist revolution will follow a capitalism crisis didn’t come true after 1920’ great depression (instead fascism rose and lead to WWII) and also it didn’t come true in current crises of capitalism (Is there a new kind of fascism underway as it happened after 1920's great depression?)…

Who owns internet?

The only thing that corporations do not understand is that web is not their private property. It is something belong to humanity yet they want to claim it as their private property and flaws in the system is there to serve them... The thing to worry is the censorship of internet which will lead to a new kind of class system, those who are born to be privileged by laws and those who are born to be under-privileged by laws... My understanding is that, the efforts to censor internet is to have bigger bites on already thinned capital of common people will only shift the centers of ideas. It is the nature of ideas to seek no boundary and stay only with good hosts... So, let's see....the coming of a new dark age (It is the dawn of dark age as it is going to force people to think according to their pocket sizes and also put more time to worry about ownership than learning or creating something :(

Mind -Maps

There is a saying that, “whole is more than its parts”. Well, that is true but if one wants to study a scholar, a good practice asks to look for parts than whole, meaning a young Marx/Nietzsche is not the same as a middle aged Marx/Nietzsche. So to understand well, one needs to go in parts rather than in whole. The same is true about all of us, what we are today, weren’t the same a decade ago. What has changed in us? Besides, other biological changes, the main change that has happened is the increasing detailing of our mind-maps.

If you ask one, “Who do think, will quickly solve a math problem, a mathematician or a novelist?” OR “who do you think will draw a closer image of you? An artist or a Physicist?”…he/she will not take time to answer you. He doesn’t need to know results of I.Q scores to pass his judgment. Just knowing that one has put a lot of time in a field is enough to know who is going to do better…

Warren Buffet is known as a most successful investor as well as one of the richest men in the world. In a time that is known as age of computers, there is no computer on his office desk. Instead, he spends most of his time reading. He is also known for not wasting his time in visiting the businesses he buys or sells. How can he be so different than others? One of the main reasons believed he has built the most “detailed mind maps” of the companies in his head by reading a lot about them over years, based on which he invest and sells and earns. You can say, this is one of his many open secrets.

In short, experts have more detailed mind-maps of their subjects than others so their minds can navigate easily, can think and understand better than others in their fields. Making oneself to familiarize with a field is essential for clear thinking in that field. Partial information or partial knowledge is more likely to end in misjudgments and misunderstanding.

If you look to ancient map, a medieval age map and Google earth image of city of Rome, one thing stands out very clear that by passage of time and compilation of knowledge on geography; the maps are more informative and easier to navigate despite of enormous growth of the city over time.

I chose this image just randomly from Google image to illustrate how mind-maps helps in visual organizations of our internal mind-maps...

Knowing that our minds build a map when think hard about a topic, teachers encourage students, when they begin to write essays or stories. Mind mapping as an external visual tool helps in organizing better our thinking patterns. Of course, what is in mind comes out on the paper. Simply, accumulating knowledge helps detailing the mind map and makes it easy to have choices for stronger and better points besides flexibility in organizing it.

You may say, “Well, I know all these things so why to repeat them?”…. The main reason for elaborating mind map from different angles was a few conclusions that I wanted to draw and to use them for my next knol,

- Culture is a kind of template for “general mind map”. Let me explain a little bit,
The cultural products like, books, articles, music, movies, games, etc are the end products of the mind maps. When we consume these cultural products, consciously or unconsciously our mind-maps (thinking patterns) are reshaped. As cultures are changing rapidly so are our mind-maps…

- While computers and networks are providing both information and mind-mapping soft-wares and tools yet we need other individuals to challenge, excite and inspire us.

- The love of something is a pre-condition for a having better mind-maps as it requires time and hard works to collect information and detail the mind-map on specific field.

- There is less truth in big gaps in intelligence but rather there are gaps in love of the fields that make difference….