“All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
We barely get to know any people on this planet, or as mathematicians would phrase it: We get to know no one except for a finite number of exceptions.
Most people that we interact with, we only see the side they present at business meetings or the fake smile they use to get better tips. We can´t judge whether they are good people, whether they got their shit together et cetera. I think you can read a lot from faces, and that is why we judge people based solely on their appearance at first.
Here´s a fact: A male celebrity or model could fuck your girlfriend with 3 words he randomly chose out of a dictionary, appearance is that important. Now, appearance is made up of the following 3 aspects:
- Facial structure and symmetry. No surprise here.
- Body Composition and clothing style. No surprise here.
- Your presence / aura / energy / pheromones / voodoo magic etc……
Everyone´s heard one of those terms in Category 3, but what the fuck does that mean? It means that people don´t judge based on objective facts, but rather on subjective perception, which can be changed based on how you present yourself. In other words, what archetype are you, what category do you fit?
Probably this concept exists somewhere already, but I don´t read that kind of shit, so I came up with the idea for this article myself. My guess is, Jung and LaVey have written something about it before, guess I´ll look up some quotes to throw in for later.
“I was never the type that girls felt secure bringing home to meet their folks. I always met my dates at prearranged and clandestine places. The fact that I appeared as a ‘heavy’ undoubtedly elicited a certain appeal to Sweet Gwendolyn types. It was therefore understandable that aggressively passive women (yes, there is such a creature) gravitated to me. Eventually I realized that I was, because of my enthusiasm and naivete, becoming a slave to demandingly masochistic women. If that sounds like a contradiction in terms, it is. It is also a very real phenomenon, which can be depleting if unrecognized and unchecked.” – Anton LaVey
So what does this concept mean? Since analysing someone´s personality is too hard and bothersome, people mainly go by the labels others put on themselves or the ones being put on them by others.
People don´t bother to judge your actions rationally and then, when you behave in the same way as always, but it just doesn´t fit into the pattern, people are confused or say things like “You changed so much. You used to do this and that and blah blah.” People are unable (unwilling to the point of impossibility) to judge an individual as just that, an individual. It doesn´t matter who you are, what matters is how you´re selling yourself.
Now, as someone who´s always been a rational person, even in grade school, this is hard for me to accept. Still, it´s fact and now that I said it, it´s gospel.
“Mediocrity is the most effective mask a superior spirit can wear, because to the great majority, which is to say, to the mediocre,it will not suggest a disguise:–and yet it is precisely for their sake that he puts it on–so as not to arouse them, and, indeed, not infrequently to avoid this out of pity and benevolence.” – Nietzsche
The key is to make people put you in the right boxes and to seemingly believe the bullshit you´re selling.
E.g.:
A: We have to turn right here.
B: I´m pretty sure we gotta go left. (Someone disagrees, cue for stepping up your game)
A: Nah, I checked earlier as preparation, right is faster.
B: If you say so.
By saying that you are someone who prepares, you seem professional. Did you actually check the route earlier? No. Does this make sense to use if you´ve got no clue where you´re going? No. Does this work on everyone? No. Is it a tool to remember? Yes.
Note that your image or “mask” has to be complete. A gangster rapper crying, that´s bad for business. A democrat politician getting caught saying racist shit? Not good. An intellectual making grammatical errors? Not credible.
The more complete your mask is, and the faster as well as creative you are at coming up with bullshit and the more confident you are at it, as if you believed it yourself, the better you´re gonna do. That´s why so many people lie to themselves, because evolution incentivizes it.
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” – Carl Jung
This article is the maximum amount of quotes with a minimal amount of actual content, so let´s throw in one more:
“The Great Man… is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of ‘opinion’; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and ‘respectability,’ and altogether everything that is the ‘virtue of the herd.’ If he cannot lead, he goes alone… He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar… When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.” – Friedrich Nietzsche