The social self

When you want to show yourself to another, you take a picture. With a few clicks you can share it with anybody. There are many reasons to share a photo. Maybe you just want to show your face; or you want to show a funny situation in which you were involved; or something bad happened to you and you want to tell about it. Whatever the reason is to share a picture of yourself, all such pictures have one thing in common: in one way or another, even in negative situations, you try to show your best side in the given circumstances or anyway a better side. Hardly anybody wants to present him or herself as a wretched little creature, or with sleepy eyes just after s/he has woken up in the morning. If the photo is to be shown to strangers, giving a positive impression is even more important.

When the French philosopher Montaigne (1533-1592) wanted to picture himself for his family and friends, of course, he couldn’t take a selfie or had made a photographic portrait. He could have made a painted portrait of himself, – and such portraits exist – but he had another idea: He thought that the best way to present himself was to write about himself. And so he did and so he wrote his Essays. They pleased many people and they still do, for they are still widely read. Because of this we know what kind of person he was, or rather many people think so. But do we really know Montaigne? Even the most honest person can give only a subjective image of him or herself and such a self image is always distorted in some way. It’s your image of how you see yourself; not one how you are. It’s a first-person view and as such it is always a subjectively distorted if not dressed up self-view. Why would it have been different for Montaigne?

If you realize this when making your self-picture, it wouldn’t be that bad. Maybe you don’t know in what way your self-view doesn’t fully represent the way you are, but once you know that you might be wrong about yourself, you are basically open to corrections. But alas, this is often not the case. Often it is so that people unknowingly present themselves better than they are. Even more, some do so intentionally and think that it’s okay. There can be good reasons for this, of course. You want to have a better position or you want to be accepted by others, for instance, and then it is a bad idea to be negative about yourself. The problem is, however, that, once you have painted such a better self-image, you tend to think that this is really how you are. You are going to believe in your own false image; in the image you have first dressed up. Many people fall into this trap set for others. This was already noticed by the French writer and nobleman François de La Rochefoucauld. A century after Montaigne he wrote: “We are so used to present a distorted image of ourselves to others that in the end we distort ourselves for ourselves.” La Rochefoucauld saw it happen in his own social environment. If in his days you wanted to be a successful nobleman, you had to take part in all kinds of intrigues and conspiracies in order to gain a higher position in the pecking order of the nobility and at the court. And you had also to present yourself better than you were, with the psychological consequence that you went to believe your self-created distorted image. Being a sharp observer, this didn’t escape La Rochefoucauld’s attention.

As said, there can be good reasons to dress up your self-image a bit, but there is risk that you will forget your self-distortion. In my blog last week we saw how social media try to manipulate your self. But that’s only one aspect of what the social media do, albeit an important aspect. The social media are also a source of self-manipulation. Take a look at the profiles of people in Facebook, Instagram, and so on. Take especially a look at the photos and look how people present themselves. What you see are nearly only happy lives and handsome people; people presenting their better selves. That would be nice, if it weren’t so that increasingly people are going to believe that life fundamentally is that way; and they are going to believe that they are as they are in the pictures of themselves they have uploaded. “If my life is not that way, there is something wrong with it; if I am not as in my pictures, there is something wrong with me.” That’s what they are going to believe. More and more I get the impression, to give an example, that if people aren’t handsome they think that they have failed. So they make themselves handsome. In the Internet you can do it by using FaceApp (an app for improving a picture of your face), or in real by using makeup. In the same way you can adapt other aspects of yourself. In your profile description, in your chats .... And in the end you become your self-presentation, or rather you think so. But, whatever you do in order to dress up yourself, you cannot change the facts. As Montaigne said, even on the highest throne, you have to sit on your buttocks. Why should you hide that? If it leads to soreness, it’s better to use an ointment.