II. SOCIETY AND THE SOCIAL MILIEU
This social environment in which mankind has acquired nearly if not all the traits that we regard as characteristically human is what we call society, society in the large; what Comte called “humanity.”
When, however, we attempt to consider a little more in detail this society which ideally includes all mankind, we discover that it is composed of a number of smaller groups, little societies, each of which represents some single aspect or division of this all-enveloping social milieu in which we live and of which we are at the same time a part.
The first and most intimate portion of man’s social environment, strange as the statement may at first seem, is his own body. After that, his clothing, tools, and property, which are in some sense a part of his personality, may, under certain circumstances, be regarded as a part of his environment. They become part of his social environment as soon as he becomes conscious of them; as soon as he becomes self-conscious.
Most of us have known, at some time in our lives, that “sickening sense of inferiority” that comes over one when in competition with his fellows, he realizes for the first time, perhaps, the inadequacy of his personal resources—physical, mental, and moral—to achieve his personal ambitions. But we who are presumably normal have very little understanding of the struggles of the physically or mentally handicapped to accommodate themselves to a world to which they are constitutionally not adapted.
So important to the development of personality is this interest which, with the advent of self-consciousness, the individual discovers in himself, that it has been made the basis of one of the numerous schools of psychiatry in Europe. Dr. Alfred Adler’s theory of “psychic compensation” is based on the observation that an individual who is conscious of his inferiority inevitably seeks to compensate himself for this lowered self-esteem by greater concentration and effort. Eventually he may, in this way, succeed in overcoming his constitutional handicap; or he may find compensation for failure in one field by success in another and different one. Adler points out that there are numerous instances in which individuals have made striking successes in fields in which they were least fitted, constitutionally, to succeed. The classic illustration is that of Demosthenes, who, according to the anecdote that has come down to us, was a stutterer, but, by putting pebbles in his mouth and talking to the waves on the seashore, overcame his handicap and became the greatest of Athenian orators.
When this sense of inferiority is acute because of some physical deformity, or in consequence of any other constitutional inferiority, so that the person is peculiarly sensitive about himself, the result is frequently what Adler describes as “psychic overcompensation,” which manifests itself in certain definite neurotic and socially pathological tendencies, usually described as “egocentrism.”
In such cases, according to Adler, “the neurotic shows a series of sharply emphasized traits of character which exceed the normal standard. The marked sensitiveness, the irritable debility, the suggestibility, the egotism, the penchant for the fantastic, the estrangement from reality, but also more special traits such as tyranny, malevolence, a self-sacrificing virtue, coquetry, anxiety, and absentmindedness are met with in the majority of case histories.”
As soon as we become conscious of ourselves, self-control—which is not fundamentally different from the control we exercise over external volume—tends to become one of our most difficult and absorbing problems. Man has many advantages over the lower animals. On the other hand, the lower animals are not subject to what Frazer describes as “the perils of the soul”; they do not have the problem of managing themselves. This was evidently what Walt Whitman meant when he wrote:
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained, ...
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
No one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.