In the eyes of Others

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. ”Aristotle

Man is a social being, and his social potential is too immense to be contained yet for some reason or the other most of us seem to end up confined into the compartment that our social group has allocated to us. That compartment by itself is dynamic and rarely fixed. In fact it varies depending on the people whom we hang around.  In our own inner circles we all play a very distinct role which may not be always a true reflection of our whole entity. These roles often are but a fraction of our true self that our friends appreciate us for having and we find ourselves constantly obliged to bring that part out to the public for further acknowledgment. This is how I have moved from being the overachiever, to the atheist, to the altruist, to the student activist, to the slacker, to the drama queen, and finally to the most recent role of the scheming snake. Effectively, I have found myself and lost it so many times across the years but rarely had it coincided with any of those images that the rest of the world enforced on me. Anyway, enough of using myself as the illustrative example and on to the matter at hand today.  

Jean Paul Sartre said that people who live in society learn to see themselves in the mirror as their friends see them. Needless to say, this is one of the many reason that man is my idol. Now forget about the fancy French philosophers, the elaborate metaphors and the hidden messages, this is plain and clear: we convince ourselves that we are who the people around us see us and it isn’t until we have learned to observe what is going on outside of us that we can realize what truly lies inside of us.
We are very different from one another. Some people embrace the differences while others search for a unifying model. Thus conformity is born and whoever dares to be different is penalized and marginalized. Sometimes the distinguished person is even idolized and copied till they all resemble him/her and he/she becomes no longer different. You see society is constantly trying to quench diversity.  The unsuspecting victims fall into the trap and find themselves adhering to a role, an image, a purpose in a group. Your little social family grows and integrates more people so that you get to enforce your own vision on the new comers. Eventually you lose contact with who you were before all of this started to the point that you simply become the person you were told you are. You see at this point, no matter how deeper you dig, you will never find the answer inside of you because you are a reflection of where society put you, a reflection of the place you took or were given.  Perhaps this is not absolutely wrong. Perhaps the outsiders are more capable of seeing who you truly are, perhaps your ego won’t let you see your misdoings. Let’s face it not everyone is going to be brilliant, caring and nice. Perhaps truth is not inside of you, it takes great soul searching to try and remember who you really are and what you want, it probably is safer to rely on how the insightful others perceive you.
If you did not sense the sarcasm in the last few sentences, then I must tell you your intelligence exceeds the normal limits, take a shot at mass and energy equations, dye your hair white and you might just become the next Albert Einstein. (Did you note the snake like behavior here?)

If not in others and nor inside of us, where do we find ourselves then? Here’s the thing, we don’t. At least I don’t think we do. A human being is too much of a complex entity to be classified into small roles; humanity is too broad to be summarized by how we interact in society. Introverts have icebergs that the external worlds cannot see and extroverts have the best bits hidden deep inside of them. I am not saying society has got it completely wrong and that singled out people are always victims. I am saying that it is not society’s role to confine us into the spot it wants. All the images people have of us probably have some degree of truth to them yet my main motive to write this post stems in the revelation that whatever image some limited individual has of us ends up being the image we believe to be true of who we are and the world becomes a little bit dumber as every bright person loses his true self and conforms.  If you find yourself confined into a person you are not then please by all means walk away, there are people out there who will see a different side of you and you can stay around them till the next need for entourage change arises in you. After all, “the only consistency in life is change”. This goes on and on till you reach that end point that is self acceptance and self realization after which you become indifferent to the changing variables around you. 

Make no mistake though, no matter how much you change, society rarely does and maturity is exclusive to selected few regardless of how old you get. To mention the Aristotle quote in the beginning of this post, if you succeed you will become a God and as most deities learn in time, it is a lonely job to have.

Ali.