Stories of Seclusion: He's Out of Step With the Times

Source: Joselius89 CC 2.0

Today's installment in my series on reclusiveness tells the composite story of "Steve," who became reclusive because his deeply held core beliefs are out of step with the times.

As with all of these stories, I change irrelevant details to protect against compromise in my clients' anonymity.

Thomas had attended the U.S. Air Force Academy and after completing his commitment, became an aeronautical and space engineer for Loral.

Thomas was conservative, especially when it came to affirmative action. Every time his son Steve would come home from high school with ammunition to debate him, Thomas would out-argue him. So Steve grew conservative.

But his more liberal mother encouraged Steve to go to U.C. Santa Cruz where he'd be exposed to "a fuller range of ideas." Ironically, attending UCSC hardened Steve's conservatism, perhaps in adolescent rebellion against the orthodoxy.

Everything Steve encountered: classes, on-campus speakers, TV shows, books, articles, movies, all had the same ideological foundation: We need to redistribute more from white males to women, minorities,and immigrants.

Steve tried raising counterpoints to professors' almost always leftist/redistributionist perspectives but never got support beyond polite acknowledgement. He also tried out his ideas with his dormmates. They were less tactful--ridicule and accusations of racism were common responses to Steve's opinions, for example, about the net effects of illegal immigration to the U.S.

Steve saw that UCSC had dozens of liberally oriented student organizations but not a single conservative or libertarian one. Because he was pro-choice, he decided to start a chapter of the Ayn Rand Society, the main libertarian national university-based organization. He publicized it on the UCSC website and at orientation and set up a recruitment table among the other clubs. Only three people attended the first meeting, which is one more than attended the second. So, Steve, sad and embarrassed cancelled any subsequent meetings.

Perhaps because he wanted to be a distinct person, separate from the group-think, Steve's anti-redistribution "pro-merit" core beliefs became central to his identity. So it's not surprising that he spent ever more of his college years by himself.

After graduating, Steve continued to try to find kindred spirits at MeetUps and on the Internet, but living in the San Francisco Bay Area, he found few. And those were mainly "old people who were weird."

Steve became more and more reclusive. His beliefs about justice were now core to his being and so each "biased" news story, each criticism of him, was an invalidation of his essence.

Steve is especially angry at what he perceives as liberal hypocrisy: claiming to celebrate diversity of ideas...unless you disagree with them. Steve said, "Then the celebration stops and the censure begins. The censorship from the Left is far more pervasive than the McCarthyism from the Right that the Left keeps harping on 70 years afterward."

Steve wants more friends and recognizes that to get them, he needs to suppress expressing his views about justice, but he can't often enough do it.

The 2nd edition of The Best of Marty Nemko is available. You can reach career and personal coach Marty Nemko at mnemko@comcast.net