The Death of the Inner World

-- By VanWheel - 16 Feb 2012

The Transformation

As a very small child, the world consisted only of me, my imagination, and objects and people in the singular moments I interacted with them. I didn’t care if my clothes didn’t match, or if my hair was out of place, or if my opinions would draw laughter from other people, because I didn’t care what other people thought. It didn't matter. I was always asking questions--why do the leaves fall off trees? Why can't dogs talk to us? Why can't I wear PJ's to school?--but I never asked questions I already thought I knew the answer to. What would be the point? What would I gain? I, like most very young children, lived mostly in an inner world, one that revolved around me, my wants, and my questions.

At some point that changed. My clothes started to match; my hair was smoothed back by scrunchies and hair spray, and I hesitated to share my opinions, waiting first to measure the temperature of a room. I stopped asking questions to which I did not know the answer and began asking only the ones to which I thought I did. My inner world--the one that fosters not only the egocentricity of children, but also their curiosity, brazenness, and growth--began to crumble as the outer world came into place at the center of my attention. I could no longer imagine my own world, my focus drawn to what others thought of me and how we compared.

The Need to be "Right"

Having undergone this transformation, I found myself skeptically raising an eyebrow when we were told, on the first day of class, that the course was meant to be about the process, not about the result--that we were not meant to try to prove thinkers or ideas right or wrong, but rather see where those thinkers and ideas took us in our own thoughts. It was an intriguing concept, especially when the first semester of law school had seemed so focused on the adversarial process, on the idea of turning arguments and facts to prove the correctness of your theory over someone else's. Yet, as intriguing as the thought was, I doubted it would take root. It is too tempting to be "right," particularly in front of your peers and rivals and particularly when it means that you get to show someone else to be "wrong."

To me, much of this need to be "right" and have others be "wrong" seems to stem from the transformation in perspective from inwardly to outwardly-looking. Once we begin to really care what other people think, people seem to stop acquiring knowledge, personality, identity for their own sakes and begin shaping and sharing these factors in terms of how other people will view them. Perhaps as very young children we actually have some subconscious desire to be extraordinary or different or unique, but as we grow older it seems to develop into a desire to appear extraordinary, different, unique, without necessarily being so. The over-achievers of society tend to do a little bit of everything--sports, clubs, politics, academics--but do very little to the best of their abilities. We mold political identities--republican, democrat, independent--that many of us are almost rabid about when pushed; yet very few could actually have objective, fact-heavy debates on all the political issues behind the philosophies. Students, particularly the best and the brightest, almost never ask questions that are born of genuine curiosity or ignorance; rather, at best we ask questions meant to lead to something else we are thinking of and at worst we ask questions we presume to already know the answer to in the hope of looking brilliant or making someone else look foolish.

As small children, being "right" was not particularly important because most of us didn't care whether other people shared our beliefs; we simply had them and they could change from day to day. As adults, however, being "right," in the sense that others acknowledge that we're "right," that we're intelligent, seems to be the focus of many academic careers. I get the impression that it is typically those who are the best at this skill, at appearing extraordinary and right, who tend make it to the top law schools and into the legal profession. The problem I see with this is that this mentality does not seem to be particularly compatible with developing an inner world, one that does encourage introspection, doubt, and human growth.

Conclusion

It seems to me that the most brilliant and extraordinary people in the world are those who have a highly developed inner world. Albert Einstein, for instance, clearly spent much of his time in his own head, dreaming up theories that others had not thought of, that science had not touched. He wasn't a man afraid to ask questions he didn't know the answer to, likely because he recognized that doing so was not so much a mark of stupidity as of intelligence. Even in the fictional legal community, Robinson seemed impressive to his fellow law students in many ways because he knew who he was. He clearly couldn't care much how his official superiors or society saw him, given the way he responded to others pointing out his vulgarity. It appears to be thinking apart that sets people apart, but I feel the legal world is most likely to be filled with people, including myself, who are more interested in the appearance of thought than in its actuality, whose inner worlds are in ruins because we are taught time and time again that it is more important to develop the shell that goes around it.

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