Complimentalist/Complementalist?

I would attempt to verbalise the sound. But it would be pointless. And perhaps even childish. In any case, if you ever took the time to stop and listen, and I mean really stop and listen, you would hear it yourself. Not that I recommend it. The sound of decay is unsurprisingly traumatic (perhaps even mortally so) to most.

But yet it goes on around us. One of our early actions is to filter it out so we can effortlessly glide like wafting spores through our existences without being constantly reminded of the inexorable mortality of everything. Huxley tells us remarkably coherently of these filters that we build intrinsically for ourselves to support our own efficient function. He does not distinguish between those that are self-imposed and which are societal and therefore externally imposed, even if indirectly deriving from internal impulses. Much of our early life, unconscious as it is, is spent constructing these filters.

Indeed I often wonder if those parents that do not impose order on a child (the ultra-liberal, almost laissez faire approach) are actually doing it a huge favour, or a colossal disservice. They choose not (or try not) to force the child to build the same filters as them, to constrain his or her views to align with that of society. This should shape the child better for the basic social interactions but may well stunt his or her own creative and intellectual development.

Thus the child becomes a complement to the world. In extreme cases, when he or she fits all too perfectly then he or she (I'm getting bored of this politically correct pronoun nonce-sense) could even be said to be a compliment to it. The parents have shaped the child to fit the world so perfectly that they have paid the mores, modes and methods of global culture the ultimate accolade - to shape a person in its flawless image and shadow.

But each human being can be more than a complement or compliment to the world. He (I've drawn the line) can be a substitute. Think of the truly memorable people. They are memorable because of the changes that they cause - that they substitute their view and their will for that of the world. Thus is history and our collective memory formed. This can be in political, economic, social or even moral life.

Truly alternative individuals, truly radical substitutes do not change the world. For we reject them, both individually and collectively. Sometimes this is quite right - Hitler's vision of Aryan supremacy was not the way forward - but sometimes and indeed more often it is because the substitute version of the world that the individual offers challenges our assumptions or narrow self-interest too greatly. The truly astonishing individuals are those that succeed despite rejection, despite the established interests that they work against, despite the leagues of potential losers who assemble against them.