I remember the day I attended the opening ceremony of a new semester as a university freshman. Everyone around was busy making friends with many people they had just met, the people that they would be studying together with for the next few years. Each time they exchanged names, they shook hands and smiled to each other. Those were all good and courteous introductions, but I felt as if something was strange: the first time I made friends during preschool, I do not remember asking a stranger their name while shaking hands. In fact, I cannot recall clearly how we made friends, and somehow everyone was already in good terms with each other. If children can be friends that easily, I thought to myself, why would we need to act very courteous to each other? I see that while courtesy grew from the demand of the society, it can also hinder budding friendship and create relationship wall among people.
The existence of courteous actions comes from the fact that people we mostly meet in society are people that we do not know. However, we have to act in such a way so that we do not initiate any conflict and so that we will be able to please others. In order to accomplish this, a set of rules of society is established so that people can refer to these rules when in doubt of what is generally considered a good or courteous action and what is not. In some culture, it is important to show courtesy to someone who lent us a car by filling the car with fuel before returning it. This is an unwritten rule that is expected of everyone, and indeed most people will agree that this is an act of courtesy because it relieves the car owner of the need to refill his car’s tank. However, whether the deed itself is actually courteous or not ultimately depends on each person’s perspective. The car owner, an odd one perhaps, might complain that the fuel used to fill his car’s tank does not fulfill his standards and feel offended because we might have damaged his car! Therefore, rules of courtesy are important, but they are not everything when it comes to relationships.
How we interact with others has a great impact on what they think we think of them. If we start calling someone using the title “Mr.”, thinking that it is generally more polite to do so, he will probably think that we respect him and we think of him as someone that possesses a higher social status so that it is more difficult for us to approach him. That in turn will make him try to approach us instead, but still without dissolving the vertical relationship, which makes the relationship somewhat rigid. Human relationships can be this complicated, but simply put, if we start acting very courteous to someone, he or she will recognize that we do not open ourselves to a close friendship with him or her.
Acting based solely on courtesy is equivalent to building a relationship wall between us and other people, because whenever we interact with others, we are acting as “a courteous member of society”, not as who we actually are. This courteous persona then stands in as a bridge, or rather, a wall between our real character and the people we are interacting with. There was a custom in my previous high school where all students were expected to greet a teacher briefly whenever they met one. We had this courteous habit for 3 years. Whenever we see a teacher while passing by the faculty office, in the corridors, or in the restrooms, the first thing that came to mind is always to greet “good morning” or “good afternoon”. When we received something from a teacher, it would be a “thank you”. However, the excessive usage of those words made me wonder if we were actually meaning what we are saying. Those greetings were often said with uninterested face, showing that the act of greeting was solely done out of obligation, not out of good will. Acting courteous as what the society demands, it seems, is equivalent to wearing a mask. It is a mask that provides convenience, but repels true connection with other people, a lonely mask with a smiling face on it.
The act of good manner and courtesy appears out of the need of good relationship between members of society. However, the excessive usage and overly rigid implementation of courtesy rules will bring out the contrary: they loosen relationships and create distance between people. Therefore we should be able to freely choose when to act courteous and understand the real reason within those actions so that we will not be trapped in the grand play called “social life”. Last but not least, I would like to quote a line from a song by Achmad Albar: “Mengapa kita bersandiwara?”, “Why do we pretend?”
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