Personae Non Grata

As a teenager, I once wrote an entire essay arguing that the indefinite article a/an is the first sign that you’re dealing with an imbecile. What, for example, is the difference between someone who says “I am Catholic” and someone who says “I am a Catholic”? Or someone who says “I am liberal” and someone who says “I am a liberal”? The difference is that the first person is giving one (of possibly very many) descriptors of him- or herself, while the second is identifying entirely with a social role. The same can be said of someone who says “I am a nerd” versus “I am nerdy,” someone who says “I am a spiritualist” versus “I am spiritual,” someone who says “I’m a Yankees fan” versus “I like/love/support the Yankees,” and so on. Would you call yourself feminist or would you call yourself a feminist, because only the former is a person. The latter is an artifact, a thing, altogether cobbled from the  hearts and minds of others.   

I’ve grown up a lot since writing that original hate-speech, and I now consider it to be rather reductionist, but the principle of the thing is still valid and in fact I now consider it more apt than I ever did before. From Carl Jung – and expounded upon by Joseph Campbell – we learn that the very words person and persona come from the Latin word for masks that were used on-stage by actors in Roman drama, through which they “sounded” (per-, through; sonare, to sound) their lines. The reason for this is pretty simple: nobody came to a play with a program featuring a dramatis personae or list of characters because there weren’t any printing presses, so in order to remember who was speaking you needed only to look at his mask. If whoever is talking looks like Oedipus, then whatever he’s saying is what Oedipus is supposed to say. In society, according to Campbell, “one has to appear in one mask or another if one is to function socially at all; and even those who reject such masks can only put on others, representing rejection.”

In that one prescient sentence, Campbell predicts the hipster subculture about a half-century before its inception.

So we’ve all got roles to play, and we’re supposed to behave according to the parameters associated with those roles. Idealists like to argue that we should strip off our masks and live in a more natural state – which just underscores the point, since that’s exactly what idealists are supposed to say. In reality, we cannot, in our present civilized state, ever strip away our masks or entirely step out of our roles because of just how deep they go. We pretend we don’t like criminals, for instance, but in fact in a tacit way we mostly feel that criminals have a place in society; they are on the opposite side of the balancing-beam from philanthropists, and they provide paying jobs for cops, judges, security thugs and jailers. What we really don’t like is unpredictability. This is why “crazy” people get locked away in institutions and/or medicated into vegetation, regardless of whether they are actually a threat to themselves or anyone else – it’s because they’re unpredictable. An insane person might walk into a grocery store and start doing a strip-tease for the potato chips, and that scares us – or anyway it scares our social leaders – far more than an armed gunman. At least armed gunmen act like armed gunmen, in a predictably ruthless and naughty way.

It warrants noting that there really is a way to live outside of behaviorally-constrictive social roles, and it’s the way we all live as children before we get shipped off to the factory (elsewhere referred to as a “school”) to have our spontaneity stripped away and replaced with predictability. That’s what schools really teach, incidentally; you can jolly well learn readin’ and writin’ and ‘rithmetic at home with your parents, but only by having both stern adults and a densely-packed peer group referring to you over and over as “the nice boy” or “the mean girl” or “the joker” or “the scholar” or “the jock” or whatever do you get pigeonholed into the role that’s supposedly your identity. Before this process occurs, however, we are as malleable as clay, being totally different people in each and every setting in which we find ourselves. Naughty, nice, friendly, lazy, courteous, quiet, loud, thoughtful, reckless… we respond to our environments the way chameleons respond to colors. And in fact it’s the very spontaneity of pre-adolescence that Zen people and their ilk aim for in their practice. The end game of non-attachment doesn’t mean letting go of your television; it means letting go of your supposed identity and, ultimately, your very self.

But that’s for Zen people. As for the rest of us, we come to adopt our social identity as our actual identity not because we’re lazy or sheep-like but because, contrary to a silly cliché, we only see ourselves in other peoples’ eyes. Everything we exude, every action we take or appearance we assume creates an impression in others, and it’s that impression that shapes our conceptions of ourselves. Which seems simple enough and is actually pretty self-evident, but for the following: when we focus too much on the impressions we make on others it makes us appear to be fake, our identity mere affectation. True, in the strictest philosophical sense all identities are fake – if by “fake” one means inorganic or not so of its own accord – but, like the film buff who detests spoilers and behind-the-scenes stills, we loathe actually seeing that fakeness. Nobody goes to a puppet show to appreciate the wires. And the fakeness of identity is nowhere more obvious and ingratiating than in people who identify themselves wholly, emphatically, and exclusively with the details of a single social role.

You don’t have to look far to find examples of this. Leak a story or start an internet meme that associates toughness with eating radishes, and the stores around every frat house will suddenly be radish-free. Plaster pictures or stories all over the place linking rock-a-billy music with Sailor Jerry-style tattoos, linking Dr. Who with steampunk, linking hippie music with hula-hoops or tight ropes (call it a “slack line” all you want; it’s still the same thing I saw in the circus when I was nine), linking night-clubbing with bright things in martini glasses (seriously, as a former bartender, how in the hell do you dance holding onto a cosmo or an appletini? I can’t even carry one of those things without spilling it all over me), linking rap music with sagging jeans, linking snowboarding with silly hats… and those aren’t even hypothetical examples, they’re real ones…. Anyway, spread the idea that thing X is intimately associated with thing Y, and everyone whose identity is solely and obsessively fused to one of them will ravenously snap up the other. 

I don’t often quote psychologists – indeed, I don’t often even acknowledge them – but I do have a few favorites, including the abovementioned Jung. Another of my favorites is A. H. Maslow. Known principally for his “hierarchy of needs,” Maslow was also the first prominent psychologist to make the seemingly heretical claim that pleasure might not be a mere by-product of gratified biological urges and may be an end in itself. Being happy for the sake of being happy, instead of as a reward for good works – imagine such a thing! Another of his contributions was the notion that personal identity is real, or that it can be real, but that it’s often hidden under a rolling snowball’s worth of accumulated bullshit. Said Maslow of finding one’s identity:

The loss of illusions and the discovery of identity, though painful at first, can be ultimately exhilarating and strengthening.

Yes, it’s painful to cease being the center of your own attention, the precisely-crafted model of a comfortingly narrow role within a comfortingly narrow subset of the larger and more impersonal culture that surrounds it. You will no longer be an Alpha Nerd if you admit that while you like The Big Bang Theory you don’t like the original Star Trek; no longer be an Alpha Bro if you admit that while you think Axe Body Spray smells okay you also think wearing a ball cap at a 45-degree angle looks ridiculous; no longer be an Alpha Hippie if you admit that while you think getting stoned is fun you also find that eating organic burritos all the time gives you painful gas; no longer be an Alpha Hipster if you admit that while you genuinely enjoy American Spirits you have always thought Pabst Blue Ribbon tastes like someone wrung a gym sock into a can… No, I’m sorry to say, once you start letting go of some of the prescriptive baubles of your selected subculture you can no longer sneer at everyone else like they just limped onto the field, but at least you’ll be one step farther from obviously and overtly fake. Mix it up enough and you might just pass as no more fake than the rest of us.