The Human Psyche

   Since the age of thirteen I have been fascinated with psychology and sociology. As a result, my senior year in high school I took a psychology class. One day in class the teacher asked me if I think people are products of their environments. After answering his question yes, a young lady in the class yelled out, “no, we are what we chose to be regardless of where we grow up”. What she did not realize is that we are a sum total of our life experiences and we rationalize life based on our experiences. It is ones environment that teaches them how to respond to the occurrences they face in life. Many children believe when they grow up they will be nothing like their parents, only to find as adults that they are just like them. We are all products of our family units and the environments in which we dwell. Humans decide to either embraces or disassociate with something based on their perception of that things. Information is gathered from what we see or hear from others. When information is internalized an option is formed accordingly. Once a person identifies them selves with an idea or group of people they adjust their diction, manners, and costume accordingly. I say costume because we are identified according to the way we present ourselves. It is important to note that, unless you design your own clothing you are only wearing some one else’s vision of you. There are those who attempt to live outside of conventional society. In an effort to escape life in the herd some people try to disassociate themselves with the social structure, not realizing that in so doing they have only joined a social sub-group. Even the unstructured sub-groups have rules on how not to follow the rules. The truth is no one on the planet is unique. Every thought you have some one else has thought. The appearance of being different from every one else is an illusion. Once you analyze your self and those around you, you find that it is the human ego that deceives us. One’s ego can help them acquire all of their goals, or destroy every thing they touch. Left unchecked the ego is mankind’s most destructive weapon. A person’s ego can give them the straight to cure diseases or run for Head of State. On the other hand ones ego can also lead them to ravish and annihilate a whole country. Martin L. King Jr, John F. Kennedy, and Mohandas Gandhi were all exceptional people. What made them special was not their ideas alone but the charismatic way they were able to present their messages. People were moved by their speeches because they had the same idea. Speeches don’t change people ideas do, and if people don’t have the same ideas then they have no reason to fight together. These three great men were able to harness the power of their egos and excel above others. For one to believe they can accomplish something others cannot they must have a big ego. If we analyzed a person’s life we would see that there are specific events that take place that shape that person into who they are. The person we will become is determined by the person we were. To get a better comprehension of this, look at one’s time reference.  By looking at one’s life from their birth until they become a teenager, then from their early teens until they become a young adult, and finally from there until they become fully mature, one can see that there were key events that shaped that person into who they are. Few people can narrate a day by day dictation of their life to you, but every on can give you specific events that sparked an ideology in them. Some times these occurrences make us better and often times people become tortured by them. One cannot always control what goes on around them. Every action a person takes good or bad affects some one else, directly or indirectly. The movie The Lion King got it right, “we are all apart of the circle of life.”