we cycle through a series of selves

[woops]

(William James c. 1900)

And of course you have Whitman, "Do I contradict myself? OK, I contradict myself." Someone on Twitter last week said: Internal consistency of beliefs/behavior over time (i.e. "authenticity") is a psyop to undermine your own efficacy in the world. I think I might agree!

sounds like WJ was a master code-switcher, especially growing up with Henry

 

[sus]

This is a good read I think, it gets past the usual "we're many selves, depending on who we're around" basics and gets into the real quality of these selves, where they come from, the way they're "sticky":

The Intelligent Social Web — LessWrong

When you walk into an improv scene, you usually have no idea what role you’re playing. All you have is some initial prompt — something like: …

www.lesswrong.com

I suspect that improv works because we’re doing something a lot like it pretty much all the time. The web of social relationships we’re embedded in helps define our roles as it forms and includes us. And that same web, as the distributed “director” of the “scene”, guides us in what we do.

A lot of (but not all) people get a strong hit of this when they go back to visit their family. If you move away and then make new friends and sort of become a new person (!), you might at first think this is just who you are now. But then you visit your parents… and suddenly you feel and act a lot like you did before you moved away. You might even try to hold onto this “new you” with them… and they might respond to what they see as strange behavior by trying to nudge you into acting “normal”: ignoring surprising things you say, changing the topic to something familiar, starting an old fight, etc. In most cases, I don’t think this is malice. It’s just that they need the scene to work. They don’t know how to interact with this “new you”, so they tug on their connection with you to pull you back into a role they recognize. If that fails, then they have to redefine who they are in relation to you — which often (but not always) happens eventually.

Related, from Sam Fussell, the bodybuilder son of Paul Fussell (American midcentury lit critic who wrote Class, the pre-eminent book on American social hierarchy):

It took a long time to let it go and realize I didn’t have to change or alter my behavior, but if you slide into a slot, vocationally-speaking, it’s difficult not to end up behaving like that slot, because that is very much what people expect of you (and it satisfies them to fulfill their expectations).

 

[sus]

Sitting on the beach at Cascais, Portugal, my friend was telling me about Buddhism. One of the interesting things he said is that its view of self as illusion opens a space;, lets you give up the idea of singular identity. Lets you match your performance to the situation. (Flowing, adaptive; or hollowed, manipulative.)

 

[Clinamenic]

That was Whitman? Thats almost verbatim from Ulysses.

 

[sus]

Phil Rochat's Others in Mind is probably a big text in this space. This is a pretty neat blog-length treatment:

The Essence of Peopling

Sarah Perry is a contributing editor of Ribbonfarm. Nouns for human beings – “people” or “person” – conjure in the mind a snapshot of the surface appearance of h…

www.ribbonfarm.com

 

[sus]

That was Whitman? Thats verbatim from Ulysses.

Song o' Myself

 

[woops]

Related, from Sam Fussell, the bodybuilder son of Paul Fussell (American midcentury lit critic who wrote Class, the pre-eminent book on American social hierarchy):

it reminds me of what they say about the acting business, that it doesn't matter how much you want to play romantic leads, if you're built like a shithouse with a broken nose, you'll end up playing heavies

 

[version]

it reminds me of what they say about the acting business, that it doesn't matter how much you want to play romantic leads, if you're built like a shithouse with a broken nose, you'll end up playing heavies

It's become received wisdom that Brad Pitt is a character actor in a leading man's body.

 

[woops]

It's become received wisdom that Brad Pitt is a character actor in a leading man's body.

he gets a lifetime pass from me for inglourious basterds. basically what you just described

 

[version]

 

[sus]

it reminds me of what they say about the acting business, that it doesn't matter how much you want to play romantic leads, if you're built like a shithouse with a broken nose, you'll end up playing heavies

And if you read the Hotel Concierge piece "How to be Attractive" it's a very similar idea right? Find out what slot you're nearby, then do like an n+1 where you're a more interesting, more advanced, one-step-ahead version of that trope.

 

[sus]

The Mask (and Hypocrisy)

Nina C is hilarious and expertly uncovers some excellent psychological hijinx with masks We all wear masks here Questions Why and how do the masks give us license to say things we wouldn't get away with otherwise? Nina says she is a shy person in other situations is there a gap between our...

www.dissensus.com

Requisite link to mask-wearing, the etymology of "person" in "persona" (Latin for mask)

 

[woops]

And if you read the Hotel Concierge piece "How to be Attractive" it's a very similar idea right? Find out what slot you're nearby, then do like an n+1 where you're a more interesting, more advanced, one-step-ahead version of that trope.

if you want to overthink what might be attractive about yourself then yeh by all means do this

 

[shiels]

A lot of (but not all) people get a strong hit of this when they go back to visit their family. If you move away and then make new friends and sort of become a new person (!), you might at first think this is just who you are now. But then you visit your parents… and suddenly you feel and act a lot like you did before you moved away. You might even try to hold onto this “new you” with them… and they might respond to what they see as strange behavior by trying to nudge you into acting “normal”: ignoring surprising things you say, changing the topic to something familiar, starting an old fight, etc. In most cases, I don’t think this is malice. It’s just that they need the scene to work. They don’t know how to interact with this “new you”, so they tug on their connection with you to pull you back into a role they recognize. If that fails, then they have to redefine who they are in relation to you — which often (but not always) happens eventually.

It can be very frustrating and boring having to work with the restrictive idea of you that other people have in their head, I think a lot of my most annoying moments come from acting out to defy those expectations, sometimes being insincere and playing roles

 

[sus]

It can be very frustrating and boring having to work with the restrictive idea of you that other people have in their head, I think a lot of my most annoying moments come from acting out to defy those expectations, sometimes being insincere and playing roles

Yes! There is a desire to not be legible and a desire not to be manipulated or nudged. "you don't know me" / "you don't control me"

 

[shiels]

Yes it can be very brattish - and can come from feeling misrecognised and a desire to be seen and accepted whole with transcendent unconditional motherly love too

 

[sus]

he gets a lifetime pass from me for inglourious basterds. basically what you just described

I've always liked how the first 40 minutes of that film are just 2 scenes that closely mirror each other (dairy farm, Basterds interrogation), and one is shot/orchestrated to evince dread, fear, evil; the other is triumphant, all-American, baseball bats and hot dogs. And they're both incredibly sad and horrible to watch.

 

[sus]

NB Tarantino writes it so it's the Nazi officer—not the dairy farmer—who is brave enough to face the devil, to avoid compromising his conscience. "Get that medal for killing Jews?" "For bravery."

 

[sus]

And then after those scenes, we get something totally different, we see Shoshanna taking down letters from her cinema marquee, and the young German officer wants to talk about movies. And she's understandably hostile towards him—not just because public costs of being seen friendly a German would be so high, but because of her family no doubt. This is a different man, in a different uniform, in an army where every military-aged man in Germany has been conscripted. And on the one hand she's right to treat him this way, because this man would commit atrocity at the direction of his superior officer, would gun down a family like her own. And on the other hand she's wrong to, because so would his French soldier or American equivalent, so would her brothers so would she, in the same darkness. The color of the uniform is nearly beside the point when the evil is anthropologically universal. People in dark realities succumb to darkness. The only thing you can do, if you want to stay a human being is cultivate some kind of light or value beyond the darkness, something that's outside the violence, which is why this scene is nearly as sad as the two which come before it: that she cannot not cross national lines or acknowledge his humanity, that he wants to talk cinema and she cannot let him, that she refuses to give him any light, as punishment, so that darkness is his only parent.

 

[sus]

And then you find out the officer killed 200 people and is a hero. Sick, sick, society.