Word: inners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When a tradition-directed person fails, he feels shame in departing from the path under the eyes of his fellows; when the inner-directed fails, he feels guilt in departing from his own principles; the other-directed, living in hope of the approval of his peers, is seldom free of a diffuse anxiety lest this approval be withheld. Riesman notes that from the walls of the inner-directed school, the ruins of Pompeii and the bust of Caesar often looked down-reminders of the past from which one learned the moral principles of history, part of the gyroscopic mechanism. These...
...STYLE INDIFFERENT is an other-directed type. In a Vermont town, interviewers found that the older generation had inner-directed attitudes toward politics; they knew quite a lot; they thought they could influence political causes (and some felt guilty because they did not). The younger generation contained many new-style indifferents, "who know enough about politics to reject it, enough about political information to refuse it, enough about their political responsibilities as citizens to evade them." Riesman believes that more than half the adults in the U.S. are Indifferents-Old Style or New Style...
...INSIDE-DOPESTER is an other-directed type who in political style is just the opposite of the inner-directed indignant. The inside-dopester knows, but he doesn't care. (High competence, low affect.) Riesman takes his text for the inside-dopesters from St. Paul, Acts 17:21: "(For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new things...
...Communists, everyone has noticed, seem better able to define their goals and pursue them with relentless energy. That again is to be expected. The Communist scarcity economy is still work-oriented. Red leaders are inner-directed (completely gyroscoped by Marx, Lenin and Stalin); most of their subjects are old-style indifferents. But the Communists, says Riesman, "have become perhaps the most reactionary and most menacing force in world politics" precisely because their picture of the world, while sharply focused, is out of date, and history will not run backward...
...biting criticism of progressive schools as they are today and use it to attack Philosopher John Dewey and the whole movement of progressive education-which in Dewey's time, Riesman believes, was a liberating force working against the main lines of a culture where character was inner-directed. Educational reactionaries who want to go back to the little red schoolhouse have set themselves an impossible task. They cannot return to inner-direction because the U.S. cannot return to the days when technology and the population situation made inner-direction appropriate...