identity and self expression

“The Wolf of Wall Street” is a 2014 movie starring Leonardo DeCaprio as “Jordan Belfort”, following his career journey from being a regular old stockbroker on the trading floor, to running boiler-room-style scams on penny stocks, to performing elaborate pump-and-dump schemes from his own brokerage house, Stratton Oakmont.

Aside from telling the story of Belfort’s financial crimes, the movie also displays the other, much more entertaining aspects of his life: hookers, drugs, cars, and boats.

Obviously, this has nothing to do with “Wall Street” as it does with “The Wolf”. The aesthetics of this movie, as well as the personality and mannerisms of Leonardo DeCaprio’s character, have had massive influences on the public image of Wall Street and the world of finance as a whole.

Stereotyping is and has been a natural emergent property of human socialization. Reducing people from souls of immense depth and complexity to simple categories of behavior allows our small monkey brains to grasp the concept of a “person”. Being able to predict and model the behavior of other people is incredibly valuable to successfully participate in society.

As we spend more time with a person, we do away with thinking about them merely as a collection of different tendencies, and our mental model of them becomes much more ingrained and nuanced. We tend to treat people we’ve known our entire lives differently — they are simply more “human” in our heads. Any stranger might as well be a video game NPC.

Stereotypes are informed by the higher homogeneity of small micro-behaviors, characteristics, tendencies, and moral values across a group of people. Accents are an example of a tendency that may form part of a larger stereotype. Combine an Indian accent and an Internet/over-the-phone scam, and you arrive at the infamous “Indian scammer” stereotype. When you think of a “hippie” (or at least, when an American thinks of a hippie), you typically picture a person with long hair, wearing brightly colored rainbow clothing, plays the guitar, maybe owns a van, is anti-war, and smokes marijuana.

This begs the question: Why do stereotypes fit so well? Humans are, after all, complex beings. We all have our own interests, needs, desires, and dreams. We were all raised differently and we have all had different experiences.

One possible explanation for why this happens has to do with “being predictable”. Compressing people to mere concepts and patterns doesn’t necessarily just go one way — people can themselves compress their own personalities in order to fit into an existing societal mold that they choose for themselves.

Since stereotypes are a tool for us to infer characteristics of a person from their other tendencies, if a person has a desire to be perceived as having certain characteristics that they deem desirable themselves, they will then adjust themselves to conform to “stereotypes”, ideas, and molds that are associated with those characteristics. For example, someone that values modesty, minimalism, and humility may express those values in the way they dress. This is the simplest form of self-expression — directly connecting ones actions to the values one holds.

The error comes when we confuse expressions of values with the values themselves.

For example, take Andrew Tate, an internet personality most known for his pro-male beliefs. Someone that aligns with Tates’ views on mens’ role in society, may, in a subconscious attempt to express their ideology, adopt other traits of Tate that aren’t necessarily connected to Tates’ original ideas; namely, his mannerisms, the way he dresses, and his obsession with Bugattis.

One can argue that there are connections, albeit weak, between those traits and the original ideas Tate expresses — speaking in a bold, arrogant manner may, in a manner of speaking, represent the idea of male strength that Tate values. However, it is here where stereotypes start to prove less useful. It is here where stereotypes do the most damage.

For example, tattoos in Western society are discriminated against because tattoos are typically associated with people from a lower socio-economic bracket. Then, because of the stigma surrounding them (and the people that wanted to express their indifference with being stigmatized), tattoos were then associated with rebellion. On the other hand, the art of “Henna” — the practice of staining the skin with a plant-based paste — has been practiced in Pakistan, India, Africa, and the Middle East for over 5000 years. Fundamentally speaking, they are no different — they are both done for the purposes of decorating the skin with figures. However, Henna is regarded with much more elegance and respect. It is only in Western society that a false equivalence was created — that tattoos, by virtue of their popularity among the lower class, are “dirty”.

With the internet and the increasingly globalized nature of the world, the rate at which any one person with Internet access discovers and experiences new things rival that of monarchs from centuries before. Each of us have an incredible opportunity unique to our era to become human beings with extreme depth and substance. It will be a waste to worry so much about fitting arbitrary social boxes.