Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking is a factually powerful read. The book itself is split into four parts. In this review, I will talk about the part entitled, “The Extrovert Ideal”.
“Strangers’ eyes, keen and critical. Can you meet them- Confidently– without fear?” – Print Advertisement for Woodbury’s Soap, 1922
The section begins with a reflection on the creation of the ideal business man and the transition from a society based upon morals to a society based upon personality, or as historian Warren Susman put it a “Culture of Character to a Culture of Personality”. It is pressed into the readers mind from the beginning a tone of biased among an introvert studying a simple fascination of the extroverted “ideals” and natural to learned traits and behaviors.
Quoted from Cane herself “In a Culture of Character, the ideal self was serious, disciplined, and honorable. What counted was not so much the impression one made in public as how one behaved in private. The word personality didn’t exist in English until the eighteenth century, and the idea of ‘having a good personality’ was not widespread until the twentieth.”
It was about the industrialistic new society that was being created that moved the discipline man out of the spotlight to platform a man meant for selling the spotlight. The twentieth century brought on a less agricultural outlook and created today’s urban culture. The extroverted businessman was a key part played in this development, because along with the big production belts came a need for someone to sell those products to ordinary people who didn’t simply leave their house with the intention to buy. Thus the salesman was created. Since business circulates business the best people to be in business was not the people who knew laws and philosophy and the real antics of things, but rather the people who knew how to talk and sway into other peoples wants. They needed to be confident, loud, a natural improviser of charm, attractive, and an overall energetically open person. The need for these people to sell and exist was what created the American idealistic personality/person. Everyone wanted to be these people so that they could be something.
Since this bar in society was created, they noticed the difference in natural salesmen and their counterpart opposites. The closed door operators were the people who simply were not this, and so they were not this “something” everyone wanted to be. Introverts were not noticed out of praise, they were noticed to contrast the extroverted agenda society had created at the time. Ads like the one that Cane began the book with, and I quoted to begin my article were used to entice sell factor from the need to become this type.
Parents taught haughtiness and over activity to perfect these introverted limps in the child’s personality. This spiked the anxiety and insecurity in the average person, and continues to grow over time. Ads and TV shows portray larger than life men and beautified perfect women. No wonder the years that followed this transition created such a divide and objective to personify yourself as largely and widely as possible.
Crane does a wonderful job of telling the transition and the importance to stay in-tuned with your extroverted side as much as possible. She does not leave the underlying pieces of opposition out though, as she sees and details the difference and the utmost importance that both extroverts and introverts are necessity to keep the ball rolling.
I found this book, or rather, this book found me at a bookstore in Seaside, FL. I was staring at a book beside it when a man came up and pointed at it and told me, “I’m not an introvert, but my friends who’ve read it are telling me that it’s a great book. Just thought I’d let you know.” And I am a big believer in fate, so this book was mine the second that happened. I find it reflective, a real penny for your thoughts kind of book. Reflection to society and the society your grandparents grew up in and the similarities, showing the times aren’t that different after all. Maybe a bit more or less extreme in some places, but the cracks and barriers in preferable personalities is a common strong suit that plays a roll in both.
