by Leo Volont » Mon Mar 08, 2021 11:21 pm
Hi Voyager,
I was thinking of what you said about how nearly all of our activity choices are competitive. It really screws us up. I read of a study in which they went off to the islands somewhere to find people uncontaminated by our competitive culture and they set up a simple board game where there were only a minimal amount of squares on the board and just one piece which each player had a turn alternately moving the piece from square to square, and every time the piece got to the end of the board closest to one player he would get a dollar and the same for the other player. The islanders would ask "What's the trick?" and take turns moving the piece quickly back and forth back and forth until the Experimenters called off their very expensive experiment. But in the West the players would say "This is impossible! Nobody can win!" And the piece would stay in the middle of the board, each move being vetoed by the next players move. Conditioning in competition made idiots out of them.
Anyway, I was thinking of something fun to do that wasn't competitive. You should take up acting. Formally I suppose there are classes you can take. Yeah, I just took a look in the Self Help books, and there's books about that too. I was thinking that your hobby could be to select different personas for different parts of towns or for the different stores you go to. Be somebody different wherever you go. This would get you used to "Being In Character". You see, the trick here is that it would be useful that none of your Characters be angry or irritable .... or maybe one so you could go through the steps of anger artificially, you know, to see "the man behind the screen"... the mechanics of your anger so that it becomes demystified.
You know, so far I haven't seen anybody say so but if you did take Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to it's logical conclusion then you would tend to put all your thinking and evaluating in the service of maximizing all of your personal interests. When talking with other people it would no longer be important to be "honest" but you would be thinking "how is it best that I play this conversation?". We hear about "con men" that opportunistically go from one fake persona to another, but it is easy enough to imagine that there are scores of what we can ironically call "Self Made Men" who are idealized fabrications of what are simply the 'best laid plans' that these people could come up with. Like Andrew Yang who spend five minutes running for president and his big plan was to hand out free money (how original for a politician) but that guy was a regular 2 dimensional cartoon character, really kind of obviously just working to a simple plan, but it's amazing the number of people that took it at face value (but all the other "Phonies" saw the scam from a mile away.
I remember one story I heard about from England at about the turn of the previous Century, before the Wars changed everything, That common people were beginning to realize that it was possible to 'pass' for the gentile classes. The clothes were available. the only hurdle was language and manners. But there were etiquette books. Heck, everybody had access to the Jane Austen novels. and then there was annunciation and elocution. Going to the English "Public Schools " (not public at all so why do they call them that... they meant Very Private Schools for the Upper Class Only Thankyou Schools) but elocution classes were popping up in London and you could learn how to speak right just like My Fair Lady and Eliza Doolittle. But, yes, the story I heard this girl, the daughter of a cool miner in Manchester decided to escape her Class Fate and make herself a lady read all the books and took the elocution courses and got the cloths and went to the Continent to practice being Gentile English with the foreigners and just waited for an opportunity to insert herself in Society somewhere. Well, all things come to she who waits and she found her in and got married well and since she was a real character she became something of a matron of local society, that is, until her husband died and a few social rivals began to wonder where the hell she originally came from. Well, somebody cared enough to actually spend money on detectives and official poking around then confronted her with it: "You are just a daughter of a coal miner from Manchester!" She just laughed and said "I haven't been that girl for the last 40 years!" The idea there is that she consciously remade herself. I wonder if any of the Cognitive Behavioral Psychologists ever thought about their Therapy in these terms, of Acting, or establishing a Pretense. Often we see advice "Just Be Yourself" and it now strikes me as almost idiotic. We can choose to be whoever we want. Why would we want to be some random ordinary person when we could have the Custom Deluxe Luxury Model as easy as just BEING that? "Fake it until you make it".
