Well, the last vestige of hope that an early night would be possible has just gone, so I'm back to writing to soothe my angst. Whilst laying awake and listening to the (largely terrible) music pumping from several different rooms of the Halls of Residence that I have made my home this year, I started - for no discernible reason - to ponder the culture of two-facedness that seems to have taken over in many areas of life. Before I begin to examine this, allow me to apologise, for I feel sure that my writing language - already quite archaic - has become somewhat more antediluvian in the last few days. I must blame this on Dickens, for I've started reading Great Expectations again. Anyway, on with the treatise.
I have one friend who, next year, will be sharing a house with two people he really shouldn't be; one of whom he affects to despise and the other who he claims to be annoyed by. He'll not tell either of these people what he thinks of them (either that or the feelings he expresses when they are not around are false). Some would say this is a kindness and true, not hurting the feelings of these two people is indeed noble, but sharing a house with them is unwise if it is merely borne of a desire not to hurt them.
Other acquaintances of mine constantly talk behind each others' backs and present different faces to different people. The widely-held reason for this, which is hackneyed in the extreme, is that in modern society we all conceal our true selves behind masks as a protective measure against the persecution we might face if we were to stand, naked and unashamed, before the jury of our peers.
True, things seem to run fairly smoothly in my little community, despite the lying, but I still can't help but feel it is unhelpful to be dishonest with someone. The irony is, of course, that cultural conditioning means I do exactly the same things, even without thinking about it, to keep things ticking over nicely and avoid conflict. I've never told my former housemate that he lost my friendship - and perhaps worse, my respect - at some point during our co-habitation, nor have I told the newcomer to my friendship group that far from brightening my final year of study, as he has led himself to believe, he has in fact proved to be one of the very few people I shall not be sad to see the back of.
The inevitable consequence of frank honesty in this situation could only be a horrible cliquishness in our societies, eventually causing everyone to pick a side and become at odds with former allies. Perhaps our hiding behind those proverbial masks is as much protective of everyone else as it is of ourselves. Perhaps any two-facedness we encounter in our friends' lives keeps us from doing bloody murder on a regular basis.
On the other hand, the internal conflict caused by suppressing our feelings is equally damaging. Perhaps the most universal exemplar of this is one where more positive emotions are involved. For example it has, for many reasons (and you'll have to trust me that they are good ones), proven impossible for me to confess to being in love and the suppression of such a feeling always leads to depression, anger and existential crisis. Moreover, it is rare that suppression of these feelings is of any benefit to those around us, as in the previous case. This is perhaps where the masks we wear to protect our friends become less like the jolly lucha libre visages that they appear in my imagination and become something akin to Hannibal Lecter's prison muzzle, holding us back. And yet we are so accustomed to the mask that we very rarely rend it from our faces and present our selves to the world. Even those more emotionally balanced than I have sometimes to endure the bars across their mouth.
This pay-off of sacrificing inner peace for societal peace is a seemingly intrinsic human trait and must be conditioned into us at a very nearly genetic level by now. As societal animals, Pan Narrans (or Homo Sapiens for you traditionalists) must need a community so badly that we willingly subsume our individual self for the good of a society, even if that society includes some who we would rather not be in a society with.
Still, sharing a house with them is insane.
I guess the point is that no man is an island, but the bridges we build quite often have feet of clay.
Yet another pessimistic blog entry, and I apologise most profusely. Good night all.
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