IV - ROLE

What behavior is appropriate? It depends on what you are trying to do. What you do obviously affects how you pragmatically realize your goals. To dig a hole you need to move the shovel. Our actions also determine our relationships with people, with ourselves and with others.

The range of things we do is limited and fairly consistent. No one person comes close to performing all possible human activity. Rather, our actions are chosen to support the roles we play in life. Some roles are part of the formal structure of society. You might be a mother or a bank vice-president, or both. Others have a looser structure, such as the role of being a sympathetic listener. If you become identified with a role, others expect you to perform it and become anxious if you do not. They need to perform their roles, and theirs interact with yours. They expect you to do your part.

The smooth functioning of society is founded on the interplay of a wide variety of roles. For life as we know it to move forward, much needs to be done. No one person can do everything. Society is a group effort. We each play a wide variety of roles born of a mix of our needs and those of others.

A role is always a restriction on possible actions. We should not live in just one role. Too much of the full enactment of life is missed. The power of a role tempts us to invest more fully in that role, to see ourselves as just that. When we do so, we limit our freedom to the boundaries of that one role. Great power comes at the price of freedom. The man with absolute power in a role is a slave to it because he becomes trapped in his role.

Identity
Who are you? I ask you this, and you will probably mention one or more roles. “I am a plumber. I have seven grandchildren. I am a stamp collector. I love classical music. I am Bob Smith.” These are all roles, even the name. Names carry a history, a gender, an ethnicity. They affirm our alliance with family. Names imply an image, a role we expect the bearer to play.

We are all a combination of roles, public and private. We cling to them as they guide us through life. We assume they are who we are, our identity. We identify ourselves through our roles. But they are what we do, they are not what we are. What we are is people. We may wish to think of our roles as an absolute characteristic of ourselves, something that cannot be changed, but goes without saying. One might then say “I am a baker.” One may have a long history as a baker, or vast baking skills, but to say “I am a baker” is to position oneself in a particular area in the spectrum of human possibility.

Whoever you think you are causes you to assume roles that limit who you are. These limits are both good and bad. They help you know what to do. At any moment there is an infinite number of choices of what to do next. Nearly all of them are outside of your roles and thus you ignore them as inappropriate for your present situation. With limited alternatives what to do next becomes an easier and quicker decision.

However, those same limited alternatives make it harder for you to learn and grow, to be open to change. Role boundaries are a convenient way for you to structure your life. With time you get used to them and your reality shrinks to fit what is thinkable in your roles. Qualitative change demands that you be open to new roles, that you have the courage and self-confidence to take them on, to become a new character, someone you never were before.

The roles we play evolve throughout our lives. Most of us as adults do not play the roles of children. Transitions in life are points of role shift. Graduate from school and the student role will not play anymore. Marry and begin some form of the spouse role. Get a new job and there will be some shift in role. The birth of a child, the death of a close relative, a move to a new city and other major changes will cause roles to shift. But not just big events move a role. Everything we do and the normal ongoing events of the world shift our roles, even if slightly and slowly. However, the outside world is not the only determining factor in the roles we play. If it were, any two people in the same situation would act the same way, which, in general, they do not. Why not?

Roles and Morals
The answer is in basic story structure. A role is the demonstration of the evolution of a particular moral package. No two people embody the exact same moral package. From our moral positions and the relative priorities we give them at any particular moment come values by which we choose our actions. Different morals produce different actions. Experience further complicates the picture, as do which abilities and resources we posess. The results of any actions, both in the world and within ourselves, raise new moral questions that reflect back into our moral package and drive further action. We are always faced with the question of “What is the best thing to do right now?”, and examples from our own past or from the lives of others are inherently inaccurate.

Our moral package is the basis of our roles, but our roles are also the basis of our moral package. A moral package is a way of seeing the world. Also, by implication, it is a set of priorities of action. A is good to do anytime. B is good to do if the circumstances are right. C can go either way. D is okay only if justified by unusual conditions. Don’t do E at all. Every role has a different set of circumstances and priorities. If one changes roles, the priorities must change, as they also will as the role evolves through life. Not all our action priorities will shift, because there are many morals that will be fairly constant for anyone throughout life.

Your moral package can be seen as a collection of prioritized morals. It can also be seen as your repertoire of roles. A role is usually defined by a set of actions appropriate to it (what you do) or by its relation to society and the world (who you are). But a role can also be defined as a particular, limited moral package, smaller than that of a person but larger than that of a character. Anything done by a living person forms part of the complexity of life.

If you accept a role, you accept the moral package it represents. Otherwise, you cannot play the role. Is it possible to play role A-1 and not accept its moral package? No, because now you are not playing role A-1, but role A-2, which is giving the appearance of A-1 but holding back on belief, and you accept the moral package of A-2. If you don’t believe in Jesus, you are not a Christian, even if you go to church, pray, sing the songs, and put money in the offering basket.

Since no two people’s lives have consisted of identical moral demonstrations, everyone has a unique moral package, although there is much similarity among them. Thus, since roles are morally determined, no two people can ever play the exact same role. Since life drives our moral progression, we cannot be what we were yesterday. But the culture does not demand an exact performance. Close enough to the ideal is sufficient. But what if we stray?

We have a moral package, yet often we do not live up to the one we or others think we should have, resulting in our being judged as having done something wrong. This arises from the differences between the role we are actually playing at any one time versus that which we think we are playing, that which we want to be playing, that which others think we are playing, and that which they want us to play.

There is in normal human life a fair bit of deception of others in the role that one plays—convincing them that one’s actions are not what they seem, or that the intent of the action is not one they disapprove of. The same action can be indicative of a wide variety of roles, depending on motive. “Why are you doing that?” can be another way to ask “What role or what moral are you demonstrating and is it one I support?”

We also do not confine ourselves to a single role, but play many semi-simultaneously—parent, friend, worker, stylish person, good citizen, cultural enforcer, athlete, etc. The roles are all part of who we think we are, and we feel contradiction and anxiety in those areas where one role conflicts with another—we want to be able to play each well.

Role Interaction
We need others to play roles in our lives. We are social animals and depend on others to do their part. The roles we play often derive their purpose through their interaction with the roles played by others. We spend much effort to get others to play the roles we need them to enact.

Other people interpret their own actions in terms of the roles they are trying to play. If we see them in different roles, we interpret their actions differently. Much misunderstanding comes from this.

If two people are aware of each other, they are each a player in the other’s life. Each may have a starring role or be a minor character, but they are each a part of the other’s story.

A big problem in life is this: for Sally’s life to move forward, there is a part she needs to play, actions she needs to take. But that forward motion also needs Raymond to take certain actions, which he probably will not take on his own, because he has his own agenda. There is a role she can play in his life which will cause him to do what she needs him to do. What does she do? Does she play the role most proper for her own self, or does she devote her efforts to getting him to play the right role for her? What role does she play; who is her character; who is she? This problem is compounded by all the other people in her life and her need to have them perform their proper parts.

There are several strategies we use to cope with this problem. One is to have a loosely structured agenda which has tolerance for a range of behaviors in others. Another is to move one’s agenda forward in a segmented fashion, so that progress in areas A, B, and C need not happen simultaneously. Another is to define one’s own role not as a source of action but as a stimulus to action in others, so that working on other people is one’s role.

However, the problem is not so easy as just selecting a successful role strategy and playing it well. A new role requires new actions. If actions are to be anything more than superficial pretense, they must be grounded in our moral package, which is not changed lightly. Our morals run deeper than our awareness.