After more reading of The Lonely Crowd, I’ve decided I’m very much inner-directed, according to Riesman’s description of the type.  I got him wrong when I though his inner-directed type was similar to my rigidnik.  I now an unsure how his autonomous type differs from his inner-directed type.  According to Riesman, many of his readers, including colleagues of his, confused the two.  I now see why–and Riesman himself seems to consider it a natural mistake.  (He is excellently self-critical, it seems to me, but has surprising blind spots: for instance, about the possibility of innate psychological tendencies: he mentions such a possibility every once in a while, but quickly drops the subject, seeming to take social determinism the only important kind of determinism in the main body of his book–or so my impression is after not going very far in it.)

I’m also wondering how Riesman’s other-directed types ultimately differ from his tradition-directed types.  Possibly, I just thought, because their memories coincide with their environmental input?  They pray to whomever their tribal god is only partly because they’ve been trained to, but mostly because everyone else in the tribe is.  The inner-directed person prays to his god because of his indoctrination entirely: he more or less has to because he is part of Riesman’s inner-directed society and thus not sure of having the right people to imitate.

The autonomous person will differ from the inner-directed person only in that he will be much more likely to question his indoctrination.

* * *

Last night while lying in bed hoping for sleep to come, I suddenly had a few ideas for poems, two of which follow:

intuition + reason = moonlight + pond

I’m not sure whether they’re finished or not, or whether, if finished, they’re keepers or not.
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