Cameras were set up in New York City and Dublin, Ireland. Passersby in each city could see people in the other city on portal-shaped screens connected to those cameras. Less than a week after their installations, these screens were shut down because some people behaved inappropriately in front of them. One New Yorker said, "[H]opefully, when it comes back, people will use it as it was intended."
How no one involved in this portal art project anticipated this kind of thing is beyond me. How a resident of New York City could be optimistic about human behavior is equally bewildering.
I tried to fit in. I struggled for years and have still had no success. I learned that people had expectations they couldn't reveal. Socializing was a game, and the rules were kept secret in order to keep people who couldn't guess them from playing. I was constantly on the outside because I was only capable of being myself. For all of my early life, this was baffling. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong.
Marginalized, I could say how I felt. It didn't matter what I said. There was no one to judge me for expressing my darkest thoughts because I was utterly alone. On one hand, this was freeing. On the other, it was miserable. I eventually embraced the pain of isolation as being worth the freedom that came with it. I could walk around in any terrible mental state and no one would have any idea. At first, I felt like I was hiding in plain sight. Then, I came to realize that there was no one to hide from. I wasn't an invisible person. I was nothing. I became angry that my authenticity didn't matter. I'm not angry about that anymore. Letting go of the belief that I must matter to others has been a part of my maturation. Even though I've let that go, I can still point to it and talk about what it shows us.
In profound isolation, you can be honest about hating humans and wanting to die. You're only free to be your authentic self and to say how you really feel if you're in exile.
This can tell us that the ability to be dishonest is important if you want to integrate. Pretense is an adaptive social skill. Normally-social humans are good at lying. Inauthenticity is the rule. Total authenticity is alienating, and that's why it takes courage. What this tells us is that humans aren't best adapted to focus on individuals over tribes and that degrees of dishonesty and manipulation are important to social cohesion.
People lie about what they think about other people. Making this clear is important to me. Humans hate and distrust each other, but they pretend they don't. It would take monumental denial to genuinely believe that people naturally look for opportunities to be altruistic. The fact that every human society has failed to prevent violence and abuse despite reliably reaching moral consensus that it's best to prevent them should be evidence that they are inherent to human nature. But, for whatever reason, people feel that they need to dissemble their feelings and beliefs about what humans really are.
You just can't trust humans. In fact, humans aren't trying to be trustworthy. They're trying to fit in, and that means pretending.
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