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RE: Being Introverted is NOT a Personality Defect in Need of "Fixing!"
The cultural tendency towards extraversion in the US has its roots in the aftermath of the Great Depression... jobs were so scarce that what came to be named "The Cult of Personality" took over from simply being skilled and a "good" person of integrity. Now you had to sell yourself, in order to compete... and that's an extraverted activity. Alas, we have never really retreated back towards a more balanced perspective that values the attributes of both types for what they bring to the table.
I think it's older than that. I remember reading about some harpy of a British aristocrat that came to the States around the 1830s and was AGHAST at how forward we were...
OTOH, it could just be that those folks didn't bow and scrape...like she was used to ;>
Clash of cultures, perhaps?
Consider in the old world, people were born knowing their place. If you were a serf, you were a serf. If you were a farmer, you were a farmer. If you were part of the peerage, you were part of the peerage. People who came to the "New World" often did so to have a chance to set their own rules for where they fit.
I was thinking about this last night; survival on the frontier required extroversion. As much as the frontier image is of a lone family holding off an Indian attack, it was communities that really fought back
stretching that a lil further; I wonder how much extroversion was required by the explorers as they made contact with the Indians and set up trading