What drives this desire for distraction via the transposing of the self? Previously, I talked about how idle distraction serves as a type of anesthetic to our ineffectual selves. Here, distraction as transposing of self is an avenue for self-forgetting or self-escapism. Similar to idle distraction, what we are attempting to escape is our sense of--or the very reality of--our ineffectualness, inadequacy, and defects. How many people in your life (whom you know well) are pillars of fortitude, security, self-confidence, self-love, and identity? I am not saying that self-efficacious people do not exist in the real world. Just that it is extremely rare to come across these kinds of people. The truly cynical version of myself would say that the wholly self-efficacious person is just an illusion and that perhaps it is only a function of not knowing the person well enough. If you are one of these truly self-efficacious people, then congratulations, and please write a book about how to be you.
It is terribly difficult to become a stable, self-affirming human being. So many things could go awry in our upbringing--imperfections of rearing either by commission or omission. On an even less controllable level, we do not get to choose our environment or our particular culture until we reach an age where we are quasi-independent and then we are already so immersed in it that we either cannot escape it or we don’t even notice it (Like a fish’s conceptualization of water [cf. “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace]). Even more outside of our control is the macro culture in which we operate. In a culture that is always offering and demanding more and better and prettier and faster and stronger and skinnier, how in the hell are we supposed to mature into stable and content human beings? Is it really so hard to understand why so many of us feel deeply flawed? We are like flowers expected to blossom impressively and unceasingly while subsisting only on a diet of brackish water, and then castigated when we fail to meet the impossible expectations.
Operating daily in this environment with such a deep sense of deficiency inexorably leads to some form of self-loathing. This is painful. When you combine the painful self-loathing with the sense or actuality of ineffectualness then the resulting condition is often one of helplessness and hopelessness. We feel deeply flawed and wish to change but have neither the power nor the ability to do so. It seems like common sense, therefore, that we clamor to escape this condition—this self—as constantly as we can. We fear that to continue to struggle in this state will invariably lead to a reinforcement of our deficiency and consequently of our hopelessness.
In what ways is it carried out? “The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves,” writes Eric Hoffer, “the greater is our desire to be like others” (True Believer, p. 99). This latent, or in some cases manifest, dissatisfaction with ourselves fuels the desire for escape. The two predominant ways that we transpose (i.e. escape) ourselves are displacement and projection. With displacement, we attempt to offload the undesirable and unseemly parts of ourselves by supplanting them with the identity, features, or characteristics of another. The more this other is (over)abundant with that which we are lacking, the greater is the displacement. This is why it is no coincidence that celebrities are so obsessed over by the masses. They are, or at least are perceived to be, the platonic ideals of beauty, charisma, power, confidence, and intellect. They so completely embody all those things that we so woefully lack that the pull toward displacement is as natural but also as strong as a small meteorite toward a giant planet (was going to say star but that’d be too punny).
Although this kind of displacement occurs most obviously within this realm, it is not completely contained to celebrity worship. More subtle and routine displacement takes place on a daily basis with other “normal” human beings. The level of displacement is proportional to the degree to which the other embodies that which we lack. It happens in “real time” with coworkers, friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers. But today it mostly transpires in the digital world of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. And this is where it intersects with that other avenue of transposing: projection.
Where displacement is the substitution of desirable aspects of others for undesirable aspects of the self, projection is the broadcasting of the idealized self to others. Now, although I am obviously not an expert on the history of this behavior, I feel relatively confident in presuming that some form of this projection has occurred as long as we’ve been hominids that walk upright and gather together into groups. It makes sense that we would project a certain type of ourselves when out in public that would be quite different from the private self. Not many people would feel comfortable interacting with the scruffy, disheveled, basketball-shorts-with-no-underwear-and-shirtless me that is my private self. So when I go out I need to present myself in a halfway acceptable fashion. This does not happen only with regard to our physical appearance (although that’s a large part of it), but also with our personality.
Unless I’m surrounded by people that I feel completely comfortable with, then the self that I am presenting is in some way contrived--either to be more affable, humorous, serious, professional, competent, or whatever. In other words, we suppress the aspects of the self that may seem less desirable either to ourselves or to others while simultaneously projecting the aspects of ourselves that may seem desirable. We do not limit ourselves to projecting features of ourselves that we might actually contain. Often, we attempt to project a certain characteristic so that people believe that we contain this feature when we actually do not. However, to anyone else who is halfway perceptive this will usually come across as pretentious and inauthentic.
With social media, the opportunities for projection of the idealized self have added a completely new world to the typical scenarios of the past. We still have to project our idealized self in the “real world” when we go to work or to the movies or wherever. But that is only contained to the relatively few people we interact with face-to-face on a weekly basis: family, friends, coworkers, strangers. By comparison, our digital selves have abundantly more “connections” than our actual world could ever comprise. With the amplified audience comes the increased capacity for validation via “Likes” and comments.
This does not exist in the real world. When we walk into our workplaces in the morning we don’t get bombarded with compliments; when we say something in a meeting we don’t receive a litany of praises. More likely than not, we’re barely noticed because, like us, everyone else is too concerned with their own self. Additionally, our digital selves are constantly “on,” continuously projecting that idealized version of ourselves that was once just confined to our public interactions. Lastly, the projecting of an idealized self on social media is much simpler in comparison to the public self projection. In the real world, I have to actually control my emotions and urges and behaviors and speech, I have to interact with potentially unexpected people or situations, I have to adapt to different situations and act accordingly. Not so much with the digital world. The blend of audience/validation capacity, continuous broadcasting, and comparative ease make the digital world extremely attractive to the idealized self.
The digital world is unrivaled in its capacity to allow individuals to construct and maintain a projection of their idealized self. I can exaggerate the features of myself that I accept, inject characteristics about myself that I lack but want to project, and control my environment much more than I can in my real life. Look at all the pictures of me doing fun things in fun places with all these fun people. Check out this cool picture I took of this great meal I ate for my 29th birthday. How many Likes will this status update get?
However, this fertile digital ground for idealized-self projection can be a proverbial two-edged sword due to the fact that it is a panoply of other idealized selves. Everyone else is also broadcasting how adventurous or cool or interesting or perfect their lives are. The interchange of all these idealized digital selves can then interact with that other form of self-transposing—displacement—to create a projection/displacement competition. When I am confronted with your idealized self, suddenly my idealized self does not seem so ideal anymore; this then leads to a surfacing of the actual/flawed self and a form of displacement ensues. However, instead of the full-bore substitution that takes place with celebrities, a different procedure materializes.
When displacement occurs with the famous, the perceived gap between the first-rate representation of features in the celebrity that we grievously lack can easily engender substitution due to the chasm of difference that exists between myself and the celebrity. But this chasm does not exist between me and a “peer” in the digital world because I perceive myself to be more-or-less equal with the other people in my “social network.” When a peer appears to contain an exceptional characteristic superior to my own it is met with jealousy and envy—not substitution—because to substitute would be a tacit admission of the peer’s fundamental superiority. Therefore, rather than displace myself via substitution, I displace by projecting a more exaggerated version of my idealized self. Others in my digital world then view this exaggerated idealized self and a similar sequence ensues.
With our idealized digital selves, we can forget or at least temporarily escape our flawed selves by eliminating anything other than flattering pictures, pruning out everything that is banal about our lives, and repressing all defects. We escape our ineffectual selves by way of transposing (projecting) ourselves into an idealized self. Because we can so effectively escape our deficient selves by projecting this idealized self, and because the digital self offers such an alluring alternative to the milieu of “real life,” our digital selves have become increasingly vital to our overall identities. When the actual self is experienced as flawed and ineffectual, yet the digital self can be projected as an ideal, the resulting tide is one away from enrichment of the actual self toward transposing to the digital self.
Which finally brings us back to the Niagara Falls story. Everyone arriving at the Falls and instantly snapping a selfie and posting it to the digital world is a symptom of self-transposing. The Falls do not matter to our actual selves. Of what nourishment is a natural wonder to a self that is vapid? This is not so different from watering empty flower pots. No, what matters--what is vital--is the projection of this “experience” as part of the idealized self. This experience means nothing unless we can broadcast it to others as part of our idealized self. We are constantly striving not to enrich ourselves through the enjoyment of life, but rather as our own PR firm marketing us to the digital world.
It is terribly difficult to become a stable, self-affirming human being. So many things could go awry in our upbringing--imperfections of rearing either by commission or omission. On an even less controllable level, we do not get to choose our environment or our particular culture until we reach an age where we are quasi-independent and then we are already so immersed in it that we either cannot escape it or we don’t even notice it (Like a fish’s conceptualization of water [cf. “This is Water” by David Foster Wallace]). Even more outside of our control is the macro culture in which we operate. In a culture that is always offering and demanding more and better and prettier and faster and stronger and skinnier, how in the hell are we supposed to mature into stable and content human beings? Is it really so hard to understand why so many of us feel deeply flawed? We are like flowers expected to blossom impressively and unceasingly while subsisting only on a diet of brackish water, and then castigated when we fail to meet the impossible expectations.
Operating daily in this environment with such a deep sense of deficiency inexorably leads to some form of self-loathing. This is painful. When you combine the painful self-loathing with the sense or actuality of ineffectualness then the resulting condition is often one of helplessness and hopelessness. We feel deeply flawed and wish to change but have neither the power nor the ability to do so. It seems like common sense, therefore, that we clamor to escape this condition—this self—as constantly as we can. We fear that to continue to struggle in this state will invariably lead to a reinforcement of our deficiency and consequently of our hopelessness.
In what ways is it carried out? “The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves,” writes Eric Hoffer, “the greater is our desire to be like others” (True Believer, p. 99). This latent, or in some cases manifest, dissatisfaction with ourselves fuels the desire for escape. The two predominant ways that we transpose (i.e. escape) ourselves are displacement and projection. With displacement, we attempt to offload the undesirable and unseemly parts of ourselves by supplanting them with the identity, features, or characteristics of another. The more this other is (over)abundant with that which we are lacking, the greater is the displacement. This is why it is no coincidence that celebrities are so obsessed over by the masses. They are, or at least are perceived to be, the platonic ideals of beauty, charisma, power, confidence, and intellect. They so completely embody all those things that we so woefully lack that the pull toward displacement is as natural but also as strong as a small meteorite toward a giant planet (was going to say star but that’d be too punny).
Although this kind of displacement occurs most obviously within this realm, it is not completely contained to celebrity worship. More subtle and routine displacement takes place on a daily basis with other “normal” human beings. The level of displacement is proportional to the degree to which the other embodies that which we lack. It happens in “real time” with coworkers, friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers. But today it mostly transpires in the digital world of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. And this is where it intersects with that other avenue of transposing: projection.
Where displacement is the substitution of desirable aspects of others for undesirable aspects of the self, projection is the broadcasting of the idealized self to others. Now, although I am obviously not an expert on the history of this behavior, I feel relatively confident in presuming that some form of this projection has occurred as long as we’ve been hominids that walk upright and gather together into groups. It makes sense that we would project a certain type of ourselves when out in public that would be quite different from the private self. Not many people would feel comfortable interacting with the scruffy, disheveled, basketball-shorts-with-no-underwear-and-shirtless me that is my private self. So when I go out I need to present myself in a halfway acceptable fashion. This does not happen only with regard to our physical appearance (although that’s a large part of it), but also with our personality.
Unless I’m surrounded by people that I feel completely comfortable with, then the self that I am presenting is in some way contrived--either to be more affable, humorous, serious, professional, competent, or whatever. In other words, we suppress the aspects of the self that may seem less desirable either to ourselves or to others while simultaneously projecting the aspects of ourselves that may seem desirable. We do not limit ourselves to projecting features of ourselves that we might actually contain. Often, we attempt to project a certain characteristic so that people believe that we contain this feature when we actually do not. However, to anyone else who is halfway perceptive this will usually come across as pretentious and inauthentic.
With social media, the opportunities for projection of the idealized self have added a completely new world to the typical scenarios of the past. We still have to project our idealized self in the “real world” when we go to work or to the movies or wherever. But that is only contained to the relatively few people we interact with face-to-face on a weekly basis: family, friends, coworkers, strangers. By comparison, our digital selves have abundantly more “connections” than our actual world could ever comprise. With the amplified audience comes the increased capacity for validation via “Likes” and comments.
This does not exist in the real world. When we walk into our workplaces in the morning we don’t get bombarded with compliments; when we say something in a meeting we don’t receive a litany of praises. More likely than not, we’re barely noticed because, like us, everyone else is too concerned with their own self. Additionally, our digital selves are constantly “on,” continuously projecting that idealized version of ourselves that was once just confined to our public interactions. Lastly, the projecting of an idealized self on social media is much simpler in comparison to the public self projection. In the real world, I have to actually control my emotions and urges and behaviors and speech, I have to interact with potentially unexpected people or situations, I have to adapt to different situations and act accordingly. Not so much with the digital world. The blend of audience/validation capacity, continuous broadcasting, and comparative ease make the digital world extremely attractive to the idealized self.
The digital world is unrivaled in its capacity to allow individuals to construct and maintain a projection of their idealized self. I can exaggerate the features of myself that I accept, inject characteristics about myself that I lack but want to project, and control my environment much more than I can in my real life. Look at all the pictures of me doing fun things in fun places with all these fun people. Check out this cool picture I took of this great meal I ate for my 29th birthday. How many Likes will this status update get?
However, this fertile digital ground for idealized-self projection can be a proverbial two-edged sword due to the fact that it is a panoply of other idealized selves. Everyone else is also broadcasting how adventurous or cool or interesting or perfect their lives are. The interchange of all these idealized digital selves can then interact with that other form of self-transposing—displacement—to create a projection/displacement competition. When I am confronted with your idealized self, suddenly my idealized self does not seem so ideal anymore; this then leads to a surfacing of the actual/flawed self and a form of displacement ensues. However, instead of the full-bore substitution that takes place with celebrities, a different procedure materializes.
When displacement occurs with the famous, the perceived gap between the first-rate representation of features in the celebrity that we grievously lack can easily engender substitution due to the chasm of difference that exists between myself and the celebrity. But this chasm does not exist between me and a “peer” in the digital world because I perceive myself to be more-or-less equal with the other people in my “social network.” When a peer appears to contain an exceptional characteristic superior to my own it is met with jealousy and envy—not substitution—because to substitute would be a tacit admission of the peer’s fundamental superiority. Therefore, rather than displace myself via substitution, I displace by projecting a more exaggerated version of my idealized self. Others in my digital world then view this exaggerated idealized self and a similar sequence ensues.
With our idealized digital selves, we can forget or at least temporarily escape our flawed selves by eliminating anything other than flattering pictures, pruning out everything that is banal about our lives, and repressing all defects. We escape our ineffectual selves by way of transposing (projecting) ourselves into an idealized self. Because we can so effectively escape our deficient selves by projecting this idealized self, and because the digital self offers such an alluring alternative to the milieu of “real life,” our digital selves have become increasingly vital to our overall identities. When the actual self is experienced as flawed and ineffectual, yet the digital self can be projected as an ideal, the resulting tide is one away from enrichment of the actual self toward transposing to the digital self.
Which finally brings us back to the Niagara Falls story. Everyone arriving at the Falls and instantly snapping a selfie and posting it to the digital world is a symptom of self-transposing. The Falls do not matter to our actual selves. Of what nourishment is a natural wonder to a self that is vapid? This is not so different from watering empty flower pots. No, what matters--what is vital--is the projection of this “experience” as part of the idealized self. This experience means nothing unless we can broadcast it to others as part of our idealized self. We are constantly striving not to enrich ourselves through the enjoyment of life, but rather as our own PR firm marketing us to the digital world.
I am comfortable with and very much miss scruffy, disheveled, basketball-shorts-with-no-underwear-and-shirtless Craig.
ReplyDeleteThanks Joe. Miss you too bud. For several months you were witness to this version of me as I made my half-asleep morning saunter from my bedroom to the bathroom, punctuated only by your welcoming and bright "good morning!" being met with a gruff and slurred "gmgoord mgorninrg." And perhaps some flatulence as well. Thanks for not only accepting but actually missing this version of me.
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