Quote response

Henri Bergson wrote the following quote, “Society is suspicious of all inelasticity of character, of mind and even of body, because it is a possible sign of a slumbering activity as well as an activity with separatist tendencies, that inclines to swerve from the common centre round which society gravitates. In short, it is the sign of eccentricity. It is confronted by something that makes it uneasy, but only as a symptom – scarcely a threat, at the very most a gesture. A gesture, therefore, will be its reply. Laughter must be something of this kind, a sort of social gesture.”
This quote really interests me because I can agree with the first part, but as soon as he starts talking about the gestures, I find things become a little arguable. When he writes that society is suspicious of inelasticity of character, body and mind; he makes a really good point. People become very uncomfortable when people don’t change. If someone has a straight face all day long, without laughing or showing any emotion, you may even feel threatened.
People that are “different” from us in such a manner tend to be categorised. We think of them as weird, or odd, maybe even not human. When someone walks by you in a long leather coat, sunglasses, straight face, heavy black boots, black shirts, black pants, everything dark. Chances are you’re going to take a couple of extra steps to go around this person because they are different from what we are used to. Bergson says that when we see a person like this, there is some kind of fear within us that says, please don’t hurt me, or don’t do any bad things; so we result to looking at them with a smile or some gesture of comfort to us. We know smiles to be a thing of comfort, so we refer to them when we see an “out-of-place” person walk around to make us feel safe. I don’t always agree with that because I find in my case, I look away from people I may threatened by not to draw any attention to myself.

-Laurenz S