Social conditioning is powerful stuff no doubt. Aside from learning to take Ritalin and cram for exams, one thing I did take away from college I thought that was particularly helpful and eye opening is the concept of social conditioning. The two greatest examples
1. Slavery
2. Indian Genocide
So let’s start with slavery. Slavery has actually been an accepted practice in almost every society a couple hundreds years ago and beyond. Everyone had one and it was just normal. But by today’s standards, even the remote thought of owning a slave is just ghastly.
Or take Native Americans, studying the events that
transpired a couple hundred years ago, it really isn’t terribly different what
Adolf Hitler was trying to accomplish in WWII. As far as I’m concerned the
In any case, all I’m trying to get across here is the power of social conditioning.
I think one of the biggest eye opening moments with regards to pick up was watching Mystery’s video’s and his thoughts on science and anthropology. It really made you question your social conditioning and it really explained a lot of conflicting thoughts I had in my head and in some sense, really liberated me. So for example, take marriage and monogamy. As human beings, from an evolutionary standpoint, we’re not designed to be monogamous in the long term, “pair-bonding” (love in laments terms) if you will, is a chemically triggered process that lasts for roughly 1-2 years, which make sense in prehistoric tribal societies. From an efficiency standpoint, this would allow a male to maximize the number of surviving offspring he would have.
Anyways, I’m not going to enter a giant philosophical debate on social conditioning, happiness, and human impulse.
Living in
In the end, I feel pretty confident that it’s fair to say that despite our social conditioning, our primal impulses always kick through, hence why you’ll never see a supermodel that isn’t pampered or an excessively rich/powerful man with shortages of women in his life.
So I suppose the question is, in today’s society, does social conditioning actually have any merit, is any of it actually true? Or is it there to keep the average American citizen subdued and obedient? Is it wrong for us to seek our innate human impulses?
Some food for thought I guess…..
What the hell is wrong with asian parents?
I recently just coached a program with APB out in
I honestly wonder what it is that is inherently wrong withmost asian parents in general.
I’m going to give three examples, both just happened in thelast month.
I was sitting down with my cousin, she’s about 13 right nowand she’s about that age where she starts flirting and meeting boys and whatnot. I half jokingly ask her if she had a boyfriend, she blushed a little andshe told me about a crush she had on this guy in her class. I told her awesome and of course given my PUA education, I started giving her a small game plan on how to get this guy.
My Uncle eaves-drops for all of about 2 seconds and totally takes a shit in his pants. “How dare you fill my daughter’s head with suchtoxic stuff”, “Don’t pollute my daughter’s mind with that kind of stuff”. I was a little taken back, so I asked him what his solution was on the whole datingscene. He told me that if it were entirely up to him, she wouldn’t date a guy until she finished her PHD in her program. So….. she’ll be roughly 30 before she ever sees a guys weiner.
Just before I left back to
Take one of my childhood friends. I’ll leave his name out here, but we recently sat down and got some food, it’d been roughly 4 years since I saw him last. So we start chattering, and the first couple I ask him are:
Okay, no exaggeration here, he tells me, no not really, butlet me tell you something awful that happened to me (and he said it reallyenthusiastically), to which I said “what” in utter suspense. “I got C on mycalculus exam”. When he said that phrase to me, the magnitude of importance wasequal to that of a guy realizing he had testicular cancer and was sterile at age 22.
At first I thought he was totally messing with me. He wasn’t, he was genuinely mortified at his math grade.
Okay, I don’t really think I need to defend myself here, there is clearly something wrong with this picture.
Perhaps the second case was a little extreme, but I’m justusing it to make a point here. Especially in asian families, a child is a product largely from their parents’ influence and quite frankly, I really don’t know what they’re trying to accomplish
If I look back on how I was raised, granted, I’m not goingto say they(my parents) were completely off on how to effectively raise a child since they did put me through a good school and spent close to a $100k on my education. So for that I thank them, but that being said, I honestly wonder why it is that asian parents have this giant obsession with education to begin with.
So again, the premise is simple in their eyes. Let’s get ridiculously amazing grades, go to Harvard, graduate with honors and get some awesome high salaried job, viola, live happily ever after.
Throughout growing up, my parents never really gave me the sex talk, it just never came up. I think when I was 18 and had my first girlfriend, my dad told me to be sure to use a condom if I got hanky panky withher, and that was pretty much the extent of sex/flirting education I receivedfrom both my parents.
I read this article recently, sometimes it just aggravates me,the ideas that asian parents instill in their kid’s heads.
http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/04/20/1900320.aspx