Quote:
Quote by: Rive  Or are we the products of the world around us? Do we act of our own will, and choose are own paths or are we doomed to follow, even subconciously? |
I don't see why it can't be both. The world around me influences me, certainly, and I react to it, but the way in which I choose to react reflects me and only me. Even in following, I am making a choice that represents my own values and ideals, although it may only represent that I feel they are unworthy and should be sublimated. But that is ever my choice, and mine alone; nobody else follows in quite the same way that I do.
Sure, we wear masks with other people -- but those masks are molded to our faces. I think of our public personas as similar to the classic stories about the burglar who tried to make false fingerprints and stick them to the ends of his fingers -- I think it was out of latex, but it might have been wax or something else -- and then left fingerprints, willy-nilly, whenever he committed a crime. He was surprised when the police showed up at his door, until he found out that the oils of his fingers had melted and reshaped his fingerprint prostheses into perfect casts of his own fingerprints.
That is what happens to our masks. No matter how unlike us they may be at the beginning, as time goes on they take on more and more of our true features, until they are indistinguishable from the face beneath.