Other-directeds and Decentereds

In his 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd , David Reisman divided humanity into three parts: the tradition-directed, the inner-directed, and the other-directed. The last were distinguished from the first by the fact that they looked to the present rather than to the past for direction: “What is common to all other-directeds is that their contemporaries are the source of direction for the individual – either those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly acquainted, through friends and through the mass media. This source is of course ‘internalized’ in the sense that dependence on it for guidance in life is implanted early. The goals toward which the other-directed person strives shift with that guidance: it is only the process of striving itself and the process of paying close attention to the signals from others that remain unaltered throughout life.”

Reisman recognized that other-directed selves were unstable. They aimed to maintain a stable identity, yet at the same time wanted to keep in the good graces of their contemporaries. While tradition-directed individuals looked back for guidance to a past that was over and done, fixed and unchanging. The ancestors did this and that, and died doing it; one who takes his cues from what they did will have a stable set of instructions for life. But other-directeds want to keep up with changing fashions, opinions, tastes, feelings, sentiments. Other-directeds end up as decentereds, as Walter Truett Anderson says, “eager to conform, yet always in some doubt as to what exactly it was that they were to conform to.”

This is in part a result of what we now call globalization, the breakdown of the boundaries between inside and out, familiar and strange. As Reisman says, “The other-directed person is cosmopolitan. For him the border between the familiar and the strange – a border clearly marked [sometimes physically marked – PJL] in the societies depending on tradition-orientation – has broken down. As the family continuously absorbs the strange and so reshapes itself, so the strange becomes familiar. While the inner-directed person could be ‘at home abroad’ by virtue of his relative insensivity to others, the other-directed person is, in a sense, at home everywhere and nowhere, capable of a superficial intimacy with and response to everyone.”

There is no doubt something to lament in the collapse of tradition-orientation into other-orientation, and other-orientation as Reisman describes it is a kind of pathology. But I wonder if there’s another dimension: I wonder if the breakdown of the boundary of strange and familiar is in some way a reflex and result of the boundary-bursting cross of Jesus.