This is going to seem a little off the wall but the biggest breakthrough for me in understanding others came from a documentary on dogs on NG. Part of the documentary dealt with an experiment going on in Siberia with silver foxes. Scientists went through a process of selecting the tamest silver foxes each generation and breeding them. They did the same with the most aggressive. After 7 generations, the tame foxes were like dogs, friendly, followed you around, basically pets. The aggressive ones you couldn't get near, they appeared rabid although they were not and wanted to tear you apart. And then someone had a brilliant idea. What would happen if we took one of the aggressive cubs at birth and placed it with a tame mother and other tame pups? Would it grow up tame like it sees its mother and the other cubs behave around it , or would it grow up aggressive? Well it grew up , killed all of it's siblings, eventually it's surrogate mother, and proceeded to act like a rabid fox.
Moral of the story is, even though we live in a society with norms, go to school, grow up around others and learn behavior, there are certain personality characteristics that are ingrained in our genetic makeup. Some people are more aggressive than others, some people are more confrontational, some people cannot stand being wrong, some people are arrogant. It is not who they choose to be, it is who they are, and we must accept them for it. On the other hand, people must also learn that not all behavior, ingrained or not, is acceptable in a community. Preferably sooner rather than later. Preferably by reason rather than pavlovian conditioning. Hopefully when he gets past the anger and pride there will be a valuable lesson in all this for him to learn.
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