As the World Began: On Dragons and Communication

The following is an essay I wrote for my COM100 course; the assignment was to write a paper explaining how I influence communication and how communication influences me. I tried to be a little creative with the rather boring topic and here's what happened (oh, and I added some pics for good measure):

Communication is arguably the most influential force in managing human identity, interaction, and activity. In fact, just about every event in a person’s daily life could be demonstrated to be related to how that person sends, organizes, interprets, and responds to the verbal and non-verbal messages that he or she receives. From phone calls to kissing to waving goodbye there are very specific messages that are being relayed from person to person; therefore, it is easy to understand why healthy communication is an essential part of living a flourishing life in society. This brief discussion and analysis will focus primarily on how communication influences the individual and how an individual influences communication; since this essay is intended to be partially autobiographical, statements that refer to the author in the first person should not be perceived as egotistical, but should rather be understood as his attempts to offer a sincere explanation for what he believes and how he came to believe it. Furthermore, I will use a dragon (call him “George”) to illustrate my ideas about how I understand and influence communication; George should be understood as a hypothetical character who, although he exists in a dragon’s body, actually thinks and interacts as a human being; therefore, his examples can be applied to real people (such as myself, assuming that I am not a dragon). The purpose of this brief essay is to demonstrate that an individual’s worldview (as defined below) is ultimately what influences his identity, which in turn shapes the way he communicates, which then determines how he interacts with other individuals, and that those interactions will either reinforce or readjust his worldview depending on whether or not he chooses to apply or ignore the new information gleaned from his interactions.

For the purposes of this essay, I will define a worldview as a complicated network of related assumptions (regarding the nature of time, space, reality, origins, humanity, and so on) that determine how an individual’s knowledge and awareness is interpreted. Although every person possesses a worldview, not everyone will actually reflect upon its content or be consistent in applying it – but they have one, nonetheless, because of the impossibility of the contrary. For example, George the Dragon may respond to me, “But I do not believe that I have a worldview, because I am a dragon, and dragons do not believe in anything,” when the fact of the matter is that his statement is, in and of itself, a worldview because he has just admitted to having a number of related assumptions that is affecting his perception; he is at least assuming the following things: 1) that he does not has a worldview, 2) that he is a dragon (a safe assumption, and one that would be dangerous to argue against since dragons pride themselves in what they are and are known to respond to any opposition with claw, flame, teeth, and other unpleasant interactions), 3) that dragons do not believe in anything (but George is a dragon [assumption 2], and he must believe that his statement about not believing in anything is true, otherwise he would not have said it [or he makes him self to be a liar or perhaps just ignorant]), 4) that I can understand his response, 5) that language exists, 6) that time exists (it took him about seven seconds to give a response that was ordered in a sequential manner), etc… Therefore, since George the Dragon has a network of related assumptions that are determining his perception and interpretation of knowledge, he indeed possesses a worldview.

Since it has been established that every individual (including George) must have a worldview, we must now understand how that worldview will order, shape, and affect identity, communication, interaction, and reinforcement. George has already admitted that his primary identity is related to his “being” (that he is a dragon), not to his “doing” (that he is a village-pillager). Although his “doing” (eating peasants, burning villages, and swatting away those pesky knights in shining armor) may constitute a secondary identity, we can safely assume that his worldview forces him to think of his value and worth as stemming from who he is, not what he does. Because of this, George will have an easier time managing his identity and avoiding an identity crisis. Let’s say, for example, that one day George accidentally flies into a tree and he ends up crippling his wings, breaking a leg, and losing his vision. Since George’s primary identity is not based on his ability to fly, walk, or see, he will not have to go through the painful process of readjusting his worldview (a component of an identity crisis). Although perilously injured, he remains a dragon. Furthermore, because George sees himself as a dragon, he will communicate in accordance with the social norms associated with how a dragon should interact. He will probably be loud, violent, aggressive, inhospitable, rude, and demeaning towards others in both his verbal and non-verbal communication. Finally, George’s interactions with others will either reinforce or readjust his worldview (and therefore his identity). If, one day, a fellow dragon sees George soaring high into the clouds, freefalling all the way back down to earth, and then doing it all over again and again (a ceremony in which dragons communicate with their “soul” [a non-material entity]) and the dragon says to George, “there’s no point in communicating with your soul, you see, because all you are is a biochemical mass existing in a material universe.” George will probably see this as an attack on his very worldview (and therefore his identity), and so he must either demonstrate that his worldview can handle this new information, or he must readjust his worldview in order to accommodate it. So George responds: “I actually agree with everything that you just said, except for that word ‘all.’ I agree that I am a biochemical mass, but I do not believe that that is ALL that I am.” This new information that he received from a communicative interaction with another individual could be accommodated into his worldview, thereby reinforcing who he is and what he does.