The Misconception: You celebrate diversity & respect others' points of view.
The Truth: You are driven to create & form groups & then believe others are wrong just because they are others.
You see yourself as part of some groups & not others, & you spend a lot of time defining outsiders. The way you see others is deeply affected by something psychologists call the illusion of asymmetric insight, but to understand it, let's first consider how groups, like people, have identities. & with both individuals & groups, those identities aren't exactly real.
Hopefully by now you've had one of those late-night conversations fueled by exhaustion, elation, fear, or drugs in which you & your friends finally admitted you were all bullshitting each other. If you haven't, go watch The Breakfast Club & come back. The idea is this: You put on a mask & a uniform before leaving for work. You put on another set for school. You have a costume for friends of different persuasions & one just for family. Who you are alone is not who you are with a lover or a friend. You quickly change like Superman in a phone booth when you bump into old friend sfrom high school at the grocery store, or the ex in line for a movie.
When you part from that person, you quick-change back. The person on your arm forgives you. He or she understands; after all, he or she is also in disguise. It's not a new or novel concept, the idea of multiple identities for multiple occasions, but it's also not something you talk about often. The idea is old enough that the word person comes from persona, a Latin word for the mask a Greek actor sometimes wore so people in the back rows of a performance could see who he was onstage. This concept--actors & performance, persona & masks--has been intertwined & adopted throughout history.
Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage, & all the men & women merely players."
William James said a person "has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him."
Carl Jung was particularly fond of the concept of the persona, saying it was "that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is."
It's an old idea, but you & everyone else seem to stumble onto it in adolescence, forget about it for a while, & suddenly remember again from time to time when you feel like an impostor or a fraud. It's okay; that's a natural feeling, & if you don't step back occasionally & feel funky about how you are wearing a socially constructed mask & uniform you are probably a psychopath.
Social media confound the issue. You are a public relations masterpiece. Not only are you free to create alternate selves for forums, websites, & other digital watering holes, but from one social media service to the next, you control the output of your persona. The clever tweets, the Instagrams of your delectable triumphs with the oven & mixing bowl, the funny meme you send out into the firmament that you check back on for comments, the new thing you own, the new place you visited--they tell a story of who you want to be. They satisfy something. Is anyone clicking on all these links? Is anyone smirking at this video?
The recent fuss over our oversharing culture & over the possible loss of privacy is just noisy ignorance. As a citizen of the Internet, you obfuscate the truth of your character. You hide your fears & transgressions & vulnerable yearnings for meaning, for purpose, for connection. In a world where you can control everything presented to an audience, domestic or imaginary, what is laid bare depends on who you believe is on the other side of the screen. You fret over your father or your aunt asking to be your Facebook friend. What will they think of that version of you? In flesh or photos, it seems built-in, this desire to conceal some aspects of yourself in one group while exposing them in others. You can be vulnerable in many different ways but not all at once it seems.
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