Let's Analyze!

I am currently reading a book called 'Presentation Of Self In Everyday Life' by Erving Goffman which, as you may have summized, is not exactly a pulpy romance (even though that would be pretty interesting). It's a book on sociology, and it's main thesis is, put in the crudest and simplest terms, that all the world's a stage. I mean really, the whole world's a stage, and this book is a playbill. In the world of Irving Goffman you're not a person, you're a performer, and the people around you are your audience and so on and so forth. Which sounds a bit mad when you first think about it, as well as alarmingly cynical, but makes more and more sense as you get deeper and deeper into the book.

I don't claim to be even halfway through this wordy and conceptual essay, but when i got substantually into this book I came to a somewhat scary realization: everything added up! I don't just mean that the world is stagey, or that some aspects are similar, but it works. perfectly. down to the smallest detail of human behavior. I started re-evaluating everything I did. I don't know why, but it disturbed me to think that this book could be true.

Why did it scare me so much? I don't completely understand myself. I mean, I've thought countless times that people were predictable, or that people make a drama out of ordinary life. But i never realized Just How Predictable We Are. And that scares me.

One of the basic concepts of the book is the theory of two different types of performers, cynical and sincere. The sincere performers tell mostly the truth, and generally believe that the truth is the right thing to say and therefore what people want to hear. (this is in daily life, and not a strict rule, you are not a cynic if you lie to spare a friends feelings.) The cynic performer, however, believes that they should tell people what they want to hear over what's true. For example, a doctor who uses a placebo.

I always considered myself to be cynic-leaning, but recently i've started to rethink that. This book surprised me because, in a way, i wanted it to be wrong. I wanted it to seem ridiculous, so that the world wouldn't seem like a performance. Because it's one thing for a teenager to mutter something, but a completely different thing for a whole book to prove something. It's a slightly heartless way to look at the world, and I'm not entirely comfortable with it. But am I lying to myself about really, ultimately believing something I don't want to? And just because I believe it, but don't want to, am I still a cynic?

No matter what other things it's done, this book has definitely made me think, and hard. Which, I suppose may have been it's purpose in the first place.