In America, We Now Value Looks and Status Over Quality of Character and Heart.
By: Brooke Meredith
Tags: Life Lessons, Culture, Psychology, America, Narcissism

In America, We Now Value Looks and Status Over Quality of Character and Heart.

And this is resulting in decreasing empathy, as well as a lot of shallow, narcissistic, self-centered people.

image by Kinga Cichewicz from Unsplash.com

At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a shift in our cultural values from one of inner character to “personality.” Personality, meaning, how one comes across to others. This is where things began to go downhill.

With the emergence of Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, this set forth a serious evolution in what we considered social and personal ideals. We changed from a culture that focused on character to one more interested in personality.

Within the Culture of Character, an ideal person was serious, disciplined, honorable, honest, empathetic, and humble. What was important wasn’t so much the impression one made in public. It was more how one behaved as a person, in private.

The word personality didn’t even exist until the eighteenth century.

The idea of “having a good personality” did not become widespread until the twentieth.

When America began embracing a Culture of Personality though, they started focusing on how others perceived them, aka, their reputation, popularity, and the impression they made on others.

We came to believe that quality people were those who others liked. That, instead of what made someone a great person being their inner character and behavior, it was more so what others think of them. As if the opinions of others determine a person’s quality of character.

(And, we all know that other people’s opinions of someone do not even come close to determining the quality of a person’s character. Consider people like Hitler, Donald Trump, rapists, sex abusers, even just nasty human beings. All of these people have others who like them. Yet, this does not make them quality people).

People who were bold, entertaining, and charismatic came to be seen as the ideal, as though evidence of someone envied and admired made them a great and worthy person.

When the twentieth century arrived, big businesses, urbanization, and mass immigration pushed more people than ever into cities. The numbers, as years passed, only continued to rise. In 1840, only 8 percent of people lived in cities, whereas by 1920, more than a third of the country was living in cities.

Americans then found themselves no longer working with neighbors or people they knew, but instead, with strangers. Now, how to make a good impression on others became a front and foremost priority, since many of the people with whom one would be interacting, they did not share any family or social ties with prior.

Americans responded to these pressures by learning to become salesmen who were not only able to sell products but also themselves.

Prior to Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, self-help books were more along the lines of messages like The Pilgrim’s Progress, which warned readers to behave with restraint if they hoped to make it into heaven.

Advice manuals of the nineteenth century were less religious, though still preached the value of noble character. They offered case studies of historical heroes like Abraham Lincoln, seen not only as a gifted communicator and speaker but also as a modest man.

Self-help books from back in the day celebrated regular people who lived highly moral lives.

Today, self-help books celebrate and encourage confidence, popularity, status, and outer success.

A popular manual called Character: The Grandest Thing in the World featured a shy shop girl who gave away her skimpy earnings to a freezing beggar, then went rushing off before anyone could see what she’d done. Her virtue, readers were to understand, was derived not only from her generosity but also from her humble wish to remain anonymous.

Sadly, such a thing would never happen today. If a person offered their earnings to a struggling someone, they would immediately post it to social media, brag to all their friends, and be sure to make what they’d done known so as to collect the proper accolades.

Because today, we most value our status in the eyes of others, the impression we make, and how cool people think we are.

We forget that in doing something possibly impressive and then bragging about it, this takes away from and tarnishes the act, making it all about and for oneself, instead of truly selfless and for others. We also forget that being “hot” or seen as “cool” are also not really that impressive at all, nor are they indicators of someone great in heart or of quality character.

By the 1920s, popular self-help guides began shifting to professing a value from inner virtue to outer charm. Teaching their readers to “know what to say and how to say it” in order to garner outer approval and admiration. Instead of being a great person in heart, we encouraged the seeking of people “thinking we are cool and charming.”

The words that appeared most frequently in earlier self-help guides were things like:

Citizenship

Duty

Work

Golden deeds

Honor

Reputation

Morals

Manners

Integrity

The words that began appearing in newer guides were words such as:

Magnetic

Fascinating

Stunning

Attractive

Glowing

Dominant

Forceful

Energetic

It is no coincidence then and can be seen as no surprise that our levels of cultural empathy have since been on a steep decline. This, coupled with our levels of personal narcissism on a steady rise. We have become a culture today who is obsessed with our looks, status, popularity, how “cool” and “hot” we are, with money, materialism, our numbers of followers and likes, and coming across as “likable” and charismatic.

Today, we are all about selfies, status, looking “hot” at any cost (financial, or to our physical and emotional health). We seek and pursue money, fame, and envy and admiration. Heck, the advent of the selfie stick is symbolic of just how self-centered we have become. A product created in order to capture better images of…none other than, yourself!

We are a society that no longer cares about the cultivation of character.

We don’t pay much lip service, or, devote hardly any time to teaching and touting values such as kindness, empathy, humbleness, honesty, simplicity, treating others with dignity and respect, open-mindedness, trust, and having an open and loving heart.

This is coming at a significant cost to our culture at large. Making for a far less hospitable, less happy, less interpersonally connected, and less healthy one.

(This article was inspired by parts of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain).