With roots that extend far into our personality and perhaps biology, and that we would be incapable of ever extirpating.

But in truth, shyness is based on a set of ideas about the world that are eminently amenable to change through a process of reason.

Because they are founded on some touchingly malleable errors of thought.

Shyness is rooted in a distinctive way of interpreting strangers.

The shy aren't awkward around everyone.

They are tongue-tied around those who seem most unlike them on the basis of a range of surface markers: of age, class, tastes, habits, beliefs, backgrounds or religions.

With no unkindness meant, we could define shyness as a form of "provincialism" of the mind.

An over-attachment to the incidentals of one's own life and experience that unfairly casts others into the role of daunting, unfathomable, unknowable foreigners.

On contact with a person from another world or "province", the shy allow their minds to be dominated by a forbidding aura of difference.

They may, silently and awkwardly, say to themselves that there is nothing to be said or done because the other is famous while they belong to the province of the obscure.

Or because the other is very old while their province is firmly that of 20 somethings.

or because the other is very clever

while their province is that of the non-intellectual;

or because the other is from the land of very beautiful girls

while they hail from the province of average looking boys.

This is why there can be no grounds to laugh,

to hazard a playful remark or to feel at ease.

The shy person doesn't intend to be unpleasant or unfriendly.

They simply experience all otherness as an insurmountable barrier

to making their own goodwill and personality apparent.

We can imagine that in the history of humanity,

shyness was always the first response.

The people over the hill would have triggered the feeling

because they were farmers while you were fishermen,

or they spoke with a lilt in their vowels while your diction was monotone and flat.

Yet, gradually there emerged a more worldly,

less exclusive way of relating to strangers:

what we might call a psychological "cosmopolitanism".

In the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome,

prompted by ever increasing encounters between peoples who lived very different and mutually unfamiliar lives,

thanks to developments in trade and shipping,

an alternative to shyness developed.

Greek travellers who worshiped human-like divinities

learnt that Egyptians revered cats and certain birds.

Romans who shaved their chins met barbarians who did not.

Senators who lived in colonnaded houses with underfloor heating

encountered chieftains who lived in draughty wooden huts.

And among certain thinkers,

an approach developed that proposed that all these humans,

whatever their surface variations, shared a common core,

and that it was to this that the mature mind should turn in contact with apparent otherness.

It was to this "cosmopolitan" mindset

that the Roman playwright and poet Terence gave voice when he wrote:

"I am human: so nothing human is foreign to me"

and that Christianity made use of

in rendering universal sympathy a cornerstone of its view of existence.

Someone becomes a cosmopolitan

not on the basis of having a buoyant or gregarious nature

but because they are in touch with a fundamental truth about humanity,

because they know that irrespective of appearance,

we are the same species beneath,

an insight that the tongue-tied guest at the party

or the awkward seducer in the restaurant are guilty of implicitly refusing.

Traditionally, rank or status have been major sources of shy provincialism:

the peasant felt he could not approach the lord,

the young milkmaid stammered when the Earl's son visited the stable.

Today, in an echo of such inhibitions,

the boy of average looks feels he could never hang out with the beautiful girl,

or the modestly-off lose any ability to talk to the very wealthy.

The mind just fixates on the gulf:

my nose looks like a child modelled it out of plasticine,

yours as if it had been carved out by Michelangelo;

I fear losing my job

while you fear that the expansion of your business into Mexico

won't be as profitable as you'd forecast.

The cosmopolitan is well aware of differences.

They just refuse to be cowed or dominated by them.

They look beyond them to perceive,

or in practical terms simply to guess at, a collective species-unity.

Shyness does have its insightful dimensions.

It's infused with an awareness

that we might be bothering someone with our presence,

it is based upon an acute sense that a stranger

could be dissatisfied or discomfited by us.

The shy person is touchingly alive to the dangers of being a nuisance.

Yet, in most cases,

we simply pay an unnecessarily heavy price, for our reserve around people

who might well have opened their hearts to us

if only we had known how to manifest our own benevolence.

We cling too jealously to our province.

The pimply boy doesn't discover that he and the high school beauty

share a taste in humour and a similarly painful relationship with their father;

Races and ages continue not to mingle, to their collective detriments.

Shyness is a touching, yet ultimately excessive and unwarranted way of feeling special.