About a year ago I subscribed to a streaming channel offering a variety of long form lecture series; 12-24 hours on different subjects without many visual cookies to entertain the attention deficit viewer. It’s deep diving a topic.
One series I binged was about performance and stagecraft. In the opening lecture, the woman waxed philosophic on acting and how, as people, we're constantly "acting" in an effort to get something from others. It doesn't have to be nakedly selfish. We can be trying, or trying to appear, to behave altruistically but it doesn't matter. We've departed authenticity for Manipulation Island: we’re acting. We’re still monkeys dancing for our emotional and psychological lunch. Of course she’s right.
Merciful Brevity Tangent: We can’t help it. With apologies to any “visually challenged” and/or “hanicapable” readers, inherent deception is as much a part of being human as two eyes and walking upright. It’s given us politics, of course, but interactive deception has also kept us from self-annihilation, at least to now. Inherent deception was social evolution; a usefully competitive trait that developed as naturally as the foreskin. Here’s a practical example: I’m going to tell you that out of fake respect for the reader’s time, the author won’t include his whole sermon here. In reality, the author doesn’t feel the need to respect or manage what you do with your time. I don’t feel like organizing, adding, and editing 2,000 more words! See how that works? It sounds better and reflects better on me to say, “I’m mindful that you’re busy” than “I’m disorganized and lazy right now and this is all I feel like telling you at the moment.” Everyone does this! And everyone knows it! But, it’s a stupid game we play where we think WE are the only ones who get away with it! I digress. You’re welcome!
I’ve had varying degrees of success and have also failed miserably, but for 17-years I’ve been obsessed with finding authenticity; seeing myself, others, and the world as they are. Over the last couple of years, I've come to see that her ever-present thespian mask is what disguises, conceals, or completely encases our cores inside protective isolated granite.
Why?
Maybe the answer is related to what I used to call the Quixote Complex; my unwitting glimpse at Jonathan Haidt’s rationalizing and litigating elephant. Self-deception runs deeper than public performance fuckery. Again, why? The more I learn about We The Chimps, the more I see that it’s because behind these masks, performances, and constant unconscious deceptions lie faces that, when glimpsed next to the pretty public masks, are hideous. Far beneath these funhouse mirror reflections, behind the black rooms of conscious self-perception where no one can get to us (including ourselves) we know it.
Freud called the beasts prowling our psychological dungeons the id. That beast is why we’re the only species who purposely self-domesticate. That beast lurks just beneath that “thin veneer of civilization.” I’ve long been raising warnings flags about Blank Slate pseudo-science. Ignoring the beast won’t kill it. It just makes it more dangerous.
The Internet’s anonymity and freedom from first person and direct accountability has given the herd permission to remove its masks; Freud’s id has been digitized and unleashed upon itself.
At one point I thought our online avatars are just playful digital projections of who we wanted people to believe we are. I think that’s true but doesn’t go far enough. In addition to performance-based validation addiction, this tech has simultaneously unmasked the contorted crazed face of humanity and unlocked our ego's dungeon. These aren’t simply deceptive narcissistic avatars, though they are that as well. The Internet is inadvertently introducing us the shameful, self-suppressed parts of who we are, collectively and “authentically.”
Despite the ever-present, predictable, and transparent proclamations otherwise, I think I finally understand why I could never find much genuine authenticity except in mythologically rare cases. I should be thanking my lucky stars!
The Phantom Public? Mr. Lippmann should have collaborated with Rod Serling on a Leroux project.
(FBP2002 v2.0)
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