Humpjones

Fake It Until You Make It 2: Build Thyself

Posted May 01, 2007 15 comments

Most people have a major life crisis at some point where they crack up and realize pretty much everything they do is a lie.  Most of those people get “back to normal” in weeks or months.  This is a shame.  It’s a realization you can fight, with varying degrees of success, for the rest of your life.  Or you can chew it over now: pretty much everything you do is a lie. How can you use this to create an authentic life, or at least some brutally insane performance art?

Read on.

Pretty Much Everything You Do...

Most people who meet you will never talk to you.  I don’t mean that you’ll never see each other again, even if that’s true, I just mean that the basic level of conversation in our culture is an automatic script.  What we consider our “personality” is just the sum of millions of binary likes and dislikes—“yes/no” responses to stimuli.  We recognize the stimulus again and we respond according to memory.  This is totally automatic, which makes it possible for you to be thinking a whole silent commentary or private monolouge inside your head while you’re talking to someone. 

There’s a (strange and worth investigating) sociologist named William Sims Bainbridge who believes the same thing and has been using mathematics and computer modeling to build up his evidence for decades now.

Personality capture is the process of entering substantial information about a person’s mental and emotional functioning into a computer or information system, in principle sufficiently detailed to permit a somewhat realistic simulation. This term draws an analogy with the widely used technique called motion capture, in which the movements of a human being are entered into a computer, usually by some kind of machine vision system, so they can be used to program realistic images of people in movies and videogames. If motion capture records the motions of a person, personality capture records the emotions, attitudes, opinions, beliefs, values, habits, perceptions and preferences of a person.

Any honest examination of human culture will lead to you a serious paranoid phase, although I would recommend you keep it at short as possible, they’re apparently unavoidable. 

Like a Lying Sack of...

Many people will try to trick you with many versions of this same basic con: it’s name is There Is Something Wrong With You.  That’s the foundation of manipulating another human being—you convince them that there’s something wrong with them.  After that, you can start discussing your plan to fix them. 

But watch out for that first maneuver, you’ll see it everywhere in this modern world—you need to be Enlightened, lose weight, read Chomsky, work out, or recieve orders from the government.  You need to be more attractive, you need to try LSD to really understand the Universe, you need to learn X, Y, and Z.  Fill in the blank for six thousand years, multiply the result by 6 billion human beings, add guns.

I AM HERE TO TELL YOU THAT IT’S ALL A CON

It seems reasonable to assume that after thousands of years of human culture, at least someone has Figured It Out.  This is actually not a reasonable assumption at all—it only seems that way because we’re humans, living on our small parts of a small planet called Earth and since that’s all we know by direct experience, that bias guides all of our thinking.  Don’t be hypnotized by the flashing lights—the amount that humans do not know is exponentially vaster than what little we do know.  One thing we do know, is that most of what we know now, we will discover to be wrong in the next century. Such is progress.

Everyone is Just as Insecure as You

I will always remember when I realized I’d become a cool kid.  It spooked the living shit out of me at the time.  I was so arrogant, self-loathing and emotionally inept that I still thought I was a loner weirdo when in fact, I was one of the popular kids the whole time.  I would urge you to learn from my experience.

Do you look to other people for cues on how you should feel, react and behave?  Of course you do, the question is how much.  Here’s the central concept of this series:

If you wake up every morning and tell yourself for 20 minutes that you’re popular, attractive and charismatic, how long will it take before you are popular, attractive, and charismatic?  More importantly, is there any difference between people percieving you as “cool” and actually being “cool”?

I would like to sumit something for your consideration—it’s actually better to delude yourself on this one. If you’re really popular, that’s a feedback loop between you and all the kids who like you (or just fear and avoid you—same thing, right?).  If you have a mathematician in your family, ask them about feedback loops sometime....they’re never in control and they can change completely in an instant.  Social interaction, especially in High School, is a script of token exchanges. 

So would you rather be constantly looking for re-assurance and positive feedback from the fickle herd?  Or would you rather provide all of that yourself?  This is truly a no-brainer.  If you provide your own fan club—some of us even take it as far as creating whole religions based around ourselves—then you never need to worry about anything but yourself.  The demons that haunt the sleep of prom queens and quarterbacks will be unable to see you, let alone torment you.

And that’s a beautiful thing.

To Do Good, You Must Learn Evil

As Timothy Leary once remarked, “if you want to do good, you’ve gotta feel good.” He was correct—give it 10 minutes of rational thought and ask yourself how you could make the most effective and positive contribution to improving life on Earth.  Does it involve being depressed, bitter, angry, confused, sick, poor, etc? Probably not.  (If it does, send me an email, I’m curious.)

So that’s the ethical thrust behind this project.  Remember, this is not idle hedonism—nothing wrong with that—this is to help you become a better person.  Remember Uncle Tom from the last column?  That’s Tom Waits, for those of you whose parents lack taste.  Do you think Tom Waits was born a gravel-voiced, multi-instrumentalist, impeccably dressed drunken jazz-blues crooner? Do you think Micheal Jackson used to fuck up his moonwalk all the time in front of the mirror?

So that’s the vista—the mountaintop, baby.  We’re all lying to ourselves, we’re all lying to each other, it’s all just a game that most folks take way too seriously and can’t play with any grace or style.  ...but what about you? Does this paralyze you with despair or anger?  Or does it energize and liberate you?  Is the Universe infinitely empty and meaningless, or it just a big, beautiful blank canvas for you to create your own meaning upon?

If you’re even reading this, I have to assume you’re learning towards the life-positive end of the spectrum (or researching how to exterminate us mutants, which is adorable).  Tomorrow we’re going to take a look at Mr. Leary again—his model of human development, specifically—and we’ll start browsing through the catalog of archetypes, looking for the Mask that best suits who you would like to “be”.

And of course, by “tomorrow”, I mean “anywhere from tomorrow to next week.” GET OUTSIDE.

Filed in: Zeitgeist

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