Thinking Otherwise

The Power of Alternatives

By: Morris Berman

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In 1950 the sociologist David Riesman unloaded a bombshell on the American public with his landmark study, The Lonely Crowd. In it, he posed a stark contrast between two types of personalities, two ways of being-in-the world: inner-directed vs. other (or outer) directed. The second type of person, he wrote, is preoccupied with what others think of them, leading to a mechanical type of conformity. The first type, on the other hand, is the individual who charts their own path in life, pretty much unconcerned with how other people regarded them. Most Americans, Riesman asserted, fell into the second category, giving us a nation of conformists, or even emotional cowards, if you will. Hence the uproar over the book, as everyone became obsessed with the possibility that they might be other-directed, which was seen as a failure of nerve. In an essay of 1954, “Individualism Reconsidered,” Riesman issued a direct challenge to his fellow-citizens, exhorting them to find “the nerve to be oneself when that self is not approved of by the dominant ethic of a society.” From all appearances, it looks like they failed.

Thinking Otherwise is a series of profiles of individuals who lived (or are living) inner-directed lives. This would include Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became the poster-boy for inner-directedness (“Self-Reliance”). Or Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook), who believed that life was, or should be, a journey toward psychological wholeness (Jungian “individuation,” if you will), in the teeth of mainstream conformity, or public disapproval. The question we are left with in the wake of these profiles is whether thinking otherwise has the power to change things, to make a larger difference. I leave it up to you, the reader, to decide.

Morris Berman is a poet, novelist, essayist, social critic, and cultural historian. He has written thirty-one books and nearly 200 articles, and has taught at a number of universities in Europe, North America, Chile, and Mexico. He won the Governor’s Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, and was the first recipient of the annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992. In 2000, The Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review, and in 2013 he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association. Dr. Berman lives in Mexico.