I have come to understand that a large number of US Americans have little concept of how to Talk-To or Talk-With other people. In US society, for all i know from purrsonal experience, what really seems to count in life is neither Talk-To nor Talk-With but just — Talk. As in TALK!-TALK!!
This may have its roots in a dogmatic notion that it is desirable and proper for a successful individual to be overconfident, self-centered, self-promoting, extraverted, aggressive, chatty, loud, competitive, materialistic and assertive. People in the United States who do not conform to this cultural dogma are expected to wind up unsuccessful and sidelined in life. Judging by their behavior, most US Americans believe in this cultural dogma, and that makes it a reality of US American culture. This is by all means comparable to people in European cultures, who used to be convinced that Earth was the center of the universe, that it was created in six days of divine labor and that it was flat, as freaky fuck. Such ideas have little to do with facts or truth, but they are common social realities and as such, quite powerful and persistent.
It can be a bad mistake to interact with a mainstream US American the same way as, for example, you may want to communicate with a mainstream European. For the longest time it wasn’t that clear to me but today i am quite positive that, to get respect from the average US American you need to be prepared to fight them. You need to be able to kick their ass; in talking speed, in talking volume, in vocabulary, in the ability to ignore their provocations and dismiss their arguments and opinions as outdated, unintelligent, uninformed, uneducated and irrelevant. It is fairly naïve to think that you can have a friendly, easy exchange of words with any average US American, anytime. More often than not you need to beat them, best them with your own words.
You need to be prepared for a US American to make underhanded efforts of launching Ad Hominem attacks at you, to come at you from blind angles, to lure you into traps and to hit you below the belt. Disrespect, dishonesty and hypocrisy is a basic, consistent, pervasive US standard. Things may not always escalate to open insults, but unspoken competition and silent disrespect between unacquainted individuals is a social default and always present. This default only has a chance to go away when you hit the mind of your All-American Average-Hero hard enough to make them realize that, if they stay true to their cultural conditioning, if they hang on to their twisted idea and casual abuse of that cultural value of Free Speech, if they keep treating you as indifferently and dismissively as they treat any neutral person by habit, they will end up hurting themselves more than they hurt you, and that their default disrespect will only lead to them losing yet another round against you.
This means that there are good reasons to practice a kind of mental martial art when you are in contact with North American culture and their members; a non-physical Aikido style of self-defense. This should be an interesting skill to look into for anyone who finds themselves in need of being protected from being routinely manipulated, shouted and yelled at, dismissed and lied to, from being casually insulted and randomly hurt. This is especially true when the contact is happening in the internet landscape.
Like it or not, you have to face a US social standard of abundant, attention-seeking, competitive, casual, artificial confidence and thoughtless arrogance. You have to deal with standardized delusions of grandeur, with normalized narcissism, with provocative indifference and disrespect, with mainstream-supported bragging, self-promoting and ego-tripping — 24/7/365.
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
annaxmalina
izzy806
stormborns
