Everyday is Halloween
“Sometimes we don’t do things we want to do
so that others won’t know we want to do them.”
Today evening I was watching “The Village” by M Night Shyamalan for the second time in my life. I watched it once long long ago and I hated its ending. I wanted to know if my wife would agree with my opinion, so we watched it together. The female protagonist spoke these words, the words I missed when I watched it the first time and it triggered an avalanche of thoughts in my head. After a few minutes, I remembered a quote by Tim Burton.
Both the dialogue and the quote mean the exact same thing, it is just not very apparent.
The first title I thought of this blog was ‘The masks we wear’ but it would be too obvious and kind of redundant Halloween theme. Many-Face god is someone who is worshiped by a cult of assasins in the HBO series Game of thrones. To celebrate its last season that was recently aired, I chose this title. These assassins don faces they collected from dead people as masks to hide their true appearances. In a way this is a more apt title for this blog. You’ll understand the correlation by the time you finish reading this.
Are you truly the person that others perceive you to be? I would confidently wager that you are not. If you honestly say yes to my previous question, I don’t have any words for you. You are truly a rare breed.
If you answer the question as No, then think of how many people truly know you?
There is no shame in accepting this. Majority of us behave or try to behave in such a way that is expected of us. School, college, Work, Friends and Family. Each of these situations expect you to behave in a certain way and portray certain set of values and attitude. it is a combination of Peer pressure and Social obligations.
If one removes all these obligations would you still make the same decisions? I know I wouldn’t. Most of our actions are a result of a thought process “What will people think of me if I don’t/do this?”. This is very good in a way. This may be the main difference between a human and an animal. Animals always do things based on their primal instincts. Humans have mastered the art of suppressing the natural instincts. I say suppress for a reason. These urges are still very much a part and parcel of everyone’s genes. The funniest thing is that humans are also self centered and give a name called ‘Conscience’ to this act.
Even for the sake of argument, I cannot ask you to tell me how you would react when there are no social obligations. Because they are ever present from birth to death. But there are 2 situations in life where one cannot and will not suppress their true nature. One is when they are alone and the other is when they are under tremendous amount of pressure.
Lets look at each of these situations. When you are truly alone and have nothing to do, what runs through your mind? What do you want to do? Is it different than what you would do if your partner/friends/family/co-workers are with you? If you answered yes to my first question and yes to this question, then you are lying to your self. Welcome to the club of ‘Many-faced Gods’.
Now the other situation, when you are under severe pressure. Here the true self comes out without any effort. Its not in your control. the survival instincts of your brain kick in and all other cognitive functions shut down. In such a situation you do what comes to you naturally, your brain forgets all the training you have given it over all the years distinguishing each and everything as good and bad.
I’m no Saint here. I’m also a Many-faced god(human). I’m a selfish person. It comes from being the only child or may be there is some of it in my DNA too. I never had to share as a kid so it was difficult to train myself to do that. Not just ‘stuff’, I also never had to share attention so my natural instinct is to crave for it. I’m condescending, which is a derivative tendency of anyone who has had lots of attention as kid. Like wise I’m egocentric, narcissistic, insensitive. A lot of people who know me (or think that they know me) wouldn’t associate these qualities with me. But honestly I’m all of these. I’m many more but I don’t want to reveal them and upgrade my designation from Sociopath to Psychopath.
The use of ‘I am’ instead of ‘I was’ is intentional. This is because I know what I am and I also know that I will always be that. I use these so called negative personalities in a positive way to deal with the social obligations that these behavioral traits are always in conflict with. But I have found out a way to use the conflict to my advantage. For example if I see someone not following traffic rules and they cause inconvenience to me. It hurts my ego. Instead of reacting to it I call my inner narcissist who appreciates my taking the higher road. That makes me happy and avoids a confrontation. I’m not saying everyone should follow me and try to turn their negatives to positives.I’m also not saying that I’m the master of my senses. I’m just saying that this is what I do or at least try to as much as possible.
In Batman begins there is a line that says
On the contrary, what ever we do we will always be what we are underneath. It is equally important to embrace what we are. You might argue that it is wise to be a Roman when in Rome. I’d say… sure be a roman but just remember but your actually aren’t.
Random thoughts of a confused primate 