Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: October 24, 2010 04:58AM
This may be a larger-than-LDS situation. It may be a problem shared by many who have been raised in religious, intellectually restrictive, and authoritarian-oriented religions and denomination.
I know someone who was raised in a devoutly observant Roman Catholic family (a family who followed "the rules," and vitually without question) and, from first grade through high school graduation, was educated entirely in Roman Catholic schools. Later, as an adult, he left the Catholic Church entirely behind (he calls himself an "anti-Catholic" now, and has for many years), but his instinctive thought process is so gramatically passive that his work (he is a writer) has to be HEAVILY edited to recast most of his passive sentence constructions into active ones. He is so "passive" in his thought process that, even when he has conscientiously rewritten the same material several times, he is almost entirely "blind" to his persistent passive writing habits...and even though this unacceptable writing pattern has been pointed out to him by countless editors, etc. throughout all of his career.
There is a somewhat related thinking process that illustrates what I mean: I once read something that--when I checked it out as well as I could--turned out to be absolutely true. In Russian fairy tales, stories of all kinds, observations about life, etc., problems tend very heavily to be solved by outside forces of some kind (deus ex machina solutions, "miracles," coincidences, accidents, etc.), rather than by the thoughtful or instinctive efforts of the people facing the problems, whatever they may be. In traditional American stories, beginning with stories told to children, someone has a problem and they tale it upon themselves to figure out how to solve the problem--which may well involve others working in cooperation with them, as a part of a team or partnership of some kind, but regardless of the input from others, the person with the problem is an active force in seeing the problem through to its solution. In Russian stories, the person with the problem is essentially passive, and more or less waits around for someone--or something--else to intervene and solve the problem for them.
A similar pattern, and for similar reasons, can been observed in traditional Japanese culture, and this is why the Japanese are awarded so few Nobel Prizes (something that the Japanese themselves are fully aware of, but feel essentially helpless to do anything substantive about). Within Japanese-in-Japan culture, the necessity to conform to everyone else's expectations works from birth against any individuals who might, under other cultural situations, do outstandingly original scientific, etc. work. It has nothing to do with intelligence, but everything to do with HOW one is taught from birth to conceptualize reality.
Which is to say: this kind of "passive" thinking is, for many or most people, a consequence of culture--whether that culture be Mormon, or Roman Catholic...or something like Russian or Japanese.