Since the time of Cain and Abel, we have been amazed at how different the personalities of brothers can be. In more recent times, the dilemma has been posed as follows: How is the personality of children and adolescents formed, by the influence of their parents, or by that of their schoolmates? Eminent scholars of socialization such as David Rowe, Judith Rich Harris, or Malcolm Gladwell, are of the opinion that the true shapers of children are not parents, but peers of the same age, and the most classical evidence in favor of this hypothesis is the absence of accents in the language of the children of emigrants schooled in the host country, since language is free of genetic influences.
The inability of Adam and Eve to influence their children is also well known in the case of scientific or artistic celebrities. For example, Mr. Paul Einstein and Mrs. Pauline Koch, Jews who believed they had assimilated with their German neighbors, sent their first-born son to a Catholic school in Munich, where he was assaulted by classmates every year of his stay, for being Jewish. Mr. Charles Mathieu and Mrs. Lucienne Andrée Saint-Laurent educated their eldest son in a school in Oran, then French Algeria, where, due to his defiant lack of virility, he suffered the martyrdom of daily teasing from his schoolmates. The helplessness in which these parents placed their children in the face of HATE leads us to think that their influence on the achievements of both geniuses is the same as the influence of the emigrant parents on the accent of their children’s language, and, consequently, that CREATIVITY, like language, is free of genetic influences.
In the opinion of eminent sociologists, social EMOTIONS are the way in which social norms are unconsciously imposed on the individual. Emotions are a transitory state triggered by external stimuli relevant to the organism. They are externally detectable bodily and mental states, such as anger, affection, the desire to dominate, fear, hatred, shame or pride. School-age children and adolescents in the process of socialization are relentless in their pursuit of those who are different, and our evolutionary past has designed the social emotion of hate, held for to those who dare to deviate from the homogeneity of the group. Evolutionary psychologists affirm that human beings have brains that think that we are still in the savannah, and that we are part of a herd of hunter-gatherers whose members see any individual difference as a serious threat to the group.
FEELINGS occur when emotions penetrate our consciousness. Emotions have a bodily expression and, therefore, are observable, while feelings are private. Emotions are universal. Feelings, on the other hand, are unequal private experiences, which vary from place to place and from one person to another. What one person experiences as pain, another may experience as pleasure. What the Munich and Oran bullies would experience as legitimate pride, Albert Einstein and Yves Saint-Laurent experienced as painful suffering. The biographers of both document how the bullies correctly fulfilled their homogenizing function, and Saint-Laurent and Einstein assumed that they were different beings, separating themselves from humanity, giving themselves over to their dreams and fantasies.
According to Antonio Damásio, feelings, in evolutionary terms, helped prolong the impact of emotions by permanently affecting attention and memory, and opened the possibility of creating new, non-stereotyped responses. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman has shown that our memory has evolved to store the most intense moment of an episode of pleasure or pain. Only the intensity matters. Thus, where biographers tell us the years of BULLYING endured, Kahneman sees an accumulation of moments of suffering in THE EGO THAT REMEMBERS, which is the part of the mind that records and organizes what we learn in life. Being separated from the herd at school age leads to lifelong loneliness, which is what biographers unanimously note. But internally, in the private world of FEELINGS, the lonely have the option and the time to imagine a possible and alternative future world. The general population, including bullies, live in the immediate future (the present does not exist). The victims of bullying, by virtue of their loneliness, have the enormous advantage of living for many hours a day in the medium and long-term future, weaving a story (novel?) that starts with a fiction or a hypothesis and ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, whose title is TRIUMPH.
The general population, including bullies, waste most of their time in daily rituals based on superficiality. The paradigm, as Randall Collins has noted, lies in everyday conversations, 95% of which are pure superficiality, things that are talked about for the sake of talking. And it is very likely that the imagination of the general population, and their thoughts as a whole, are like their conversations, extremely superficial. Loneliness (forced) allows the circuits of the brain dedicated to social interaction (superficial) to be reassigned to other tasks, which creates the biographical opportunity to imagine an alternative future (the possible worlds), which normal social life suffocates.
The blind generally develop excellent hearing, which is a compensatory skill which arises when the parts of the brain not used by sight are used to hear. They don’t usually achieve perfect pitch because, unlike Beethoven, once their excellent hearing makes everyday life bearable, they stop improving. Many individuals, bullied in childhood by their peers, redirected the loneliness that was imposed on them, to specialize professionally and compensate for the wrongs they have suffered. But most of them did not progress any further once life became tolerable for them. For others, perhaps those few for whom their FEELINGS were the most devastating, and their loneliness the most extreme, are today in the pantheon of virtuosos whom we must credit with creating what Eduard O. Wilson would call a Star Wars civilization, built with Stone Age emotions, supported by medieval institutions and extra-terrestrial technology.
Do not forget that randomness has also had its importance. Claude Cohen Tannoudji received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, thanks to the fact that he was not one of the 25 Jews murdered in Constantine (Algeria), his hometown, by the anti-Semitic pogrom of August 5, 1934. It is amazing the blindness we have regarding the survival of HATE in our environment, despite having suffered it. How long will it take for the tomb of Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint-Laurent in Marrakech to be destroyed by the Almoravids, or the Almohades or the Benimerines, Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, or whatever the next wave of fanaticism will be called?