Main Character Syndrome
Tell me about how you've conquered it -- I'm sure you've rehearsed the answers.
You can feel the programming today, I promise you, it’s easy: go try to tax your brain for harder forms of imagination. Take a math problem if you hate math, or some dense reading about a subject that you have no interest in, and just try to complete it. Watch your brain at work: how long does it take before you are no longer trying to solve the problem — how long before you get distracted by another thought? Even if you refocus yourself on the problem a dozen times, the issue is that you keep getting lost and you don’t know why.
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If you hear a hundred voices in your head, you aren’t a genius. You might be a schizophrenic, but that’s probably not true either. After all, if the schizophrenic knew all the voices were their own doing, they wouldn’t be a schizophrenic. So let’s clear the difference up now: you hear a hundred voices, but you’re not a schizophrenic because those voices come from characters that you created.
The characters themselves aren’t any more or less real. In your mind, they might be more logically consistent (or wildly inconsistent) with stereotypes you’re familiar with compared to the characters that you think a schizophrenic would make up.
The real difference between the two is not in the characters at all but the behaviors they produce. A schizophrenic would go unseen if the voices in their head told them to act as normally as possible, all the time. The voices in your head do just that. No, they aren’t telling you to “wear clothes today”, but unless you’re Steve Jobs and dress the exact same everyday, your voices did take some part in the decision to put on clothes today.
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This isn’t the super-ego we’re seeing, unless you use the term as a catch-all for any defense mechanism that rounds out your ego behavior (i.e. in the case that ‘id’ wants and the ‘ego’ is behavior, the defense mechanisms that prevent behavior from creating change either become ‘super-ego’ or deserve their own category). How about we forget Freud altogether and move on?
This is a case of main character syndrome as it has been so aptly named. You may want to call it modern narcissism but I wouldn’t make that claim (while they are both rooted in mischaracterization of self, main character syndrome and narcissism seem to be another level of recognition and denial apart, but I am not sure in which direction. Narcissism is the defensive product against internal unreliability as you adapt yourself to the unreliable images of the world, whereas main characters have either yet to spend enough time to produce this unreliability or have recognized the unreliability as consistent and therefore have come to only rely on internal markers (despite their unreliability and instability, we at least feel as if they are more easily modelled and managed)).
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When the voices come to distract you during your math studies, pay attention to the form they arrive — the voices never give you the answer for math, they don’t even give suggestions for what you should do next — the voices see only the end: the voices manifest as an interview of you, where you’ve already solved the problem. Maybe you’ll be like Grigori Perelman: you’ll prove the Poincaré conjecture, reject the $1-million prize, and hide in your cave. That story places you as a main character who is: math genius, unique, not-part-of-the-system — you’ll get to please those that care about math, displease the credentialists, and deprive everyone of your genius when you hide back in your cave.
I hate to break it to you, but that story isn’t real: Perelman never gave the interview that you’re giving in your head, for the award you never won, that he did win for real.
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“Your prettiest headshot tells me nothing about your brain; but the prettiest of heads must have to be empty.”
The only story this quote tells: you are the main character.
Any headshot, any person, the same story: your opinion follows, without connection, without basis, from the reality before it. Headshots mean nothing, yet conclusions are still formed from that nothing.
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