Antoine de Saint-Exupery called human communication "the only known luxury." The great writer is wrong in one thing: communication with his own kind for a person is not a luxury, but an urgent need.
Man exists in two forms - individual and personal. The individual is a biological concept. In terms of their biological characteristics, humans are very close to some other higher primates - in particular, chimpanzees.
The fundamental difference between humans and other animals lies not in individual, but in personal characteristics. If an individual is the result of biological evolution, then a personality is a product of social evolution, therefore, personal characteristics, unlike individuals, are not given from birth, but are formed in the process of social life in interaction with other people.
What role this interaction plays in human life is most clearly manifested in the example of people who were deprived of a society of their own kind.
Becoming a man
The "Mowgli phenomenon" helped to fully appreciate the role that communication with other people plays in the formation of a human personality. We are talking about people who have been isolated from people from early childhood.
In 1800, a strange boy was found in the forest of Saint-Cerny-sur-Rance (France). He looked 12 years old, but he could not speak, did not wear clothes, walked on all fours and was afraid of people. A logical conclusion was made that the child was deprived of human society from early childhood. Doctor J. Itar studied with the boy named Victor for 5 years. Victor learned a few words, learned to recognize some objects, but this was the end of his development, and at this level he remained until his death at the age of 40.
No less sad was the story of the American girl Ginny, who was kept in a darkened room in complete isolation by a mentally ill father from infancy to 13 years old. Specialists began working with the girl in 1970, but did not achieve much success: Ginny ended up in an asylum for the mentally ill, she never learned to live among people on her own.
There are many stories of this kind, but the ending is invariably sad: people have not been able to acquire a truly human appearance, remaining in an animal state.
Preservation of human appearance
The acquisition of personality traits and social skills in childhood does not guarantee their lifelong preservation. Like any skills, they require constant training, and in the absence of such they are lost.
Everyone can do a simple experience by spending some time in complete isolation (for example, in the country). After two weeks, it will be difficult to remember some of the words. However, because of the two-week isolation, nothing terrible will happen: having returned to the society of their own kind, a person will recover in a matter of days.
In the worst situation were the victims of shipwrecks, forced to live for years on uninhabited islands. The Scotsman A. Selkirk, who became the prototype of Robinson Crusoe, retained his speech skills thanks to the fact that he read the Bible aloud every day. However, after 4 years of loneliness, he was not immediately able to speak to the sailors who saved him. There are known cases when people lived on uninhabited islands longer than A. Selkirk, and then the personality changes turned out to be so profound that there was no talk of restoring speech or returning to normal life.
Thus, we can say with confidence that a person needs a person to acquire and maintain truly human qualities. In isolation from their own kind, neither one nor the other is impossible.
