Slate Star Codex recently wrote a post about the lives of people who took pills to give them various superpowers. The yellow pill gives you the ability to search and read the minds of anyone you see. This is the story of the woman who took the yellow pill:
“Nobody is the villain of their own life story. You must have read hundreds of minds by now, and it’s true. Everybody thinks of themselves as an honest guy or gal just trying to get by, constantly under assault by circumstances and The System and hundreds and hundreds of assholes. They don’t just sort of believe this. They really believe it. You almost believe it yourself, when you’re deep into a reading. You can very clearly see the structure of evidence they’ve built up to support their narrative, and even though it looks silly to you, you can see why they will never escape it from the inside. You can see how every insult, every failure, no matter how deserved, is a totally unexpected kick in the gut.
When you chose the yellow pill, you had high hopes of becoming a spy, or a gossip columnist, or just the world’s greatest saleswoman. The thought of doing any of those things sickens you now. There is too much anguish in the world already. You feel like any of those things would be a violation. You briefly try to become a therapist, but it turns out that actually knowing everything about your client’s mind is horrendously countertherapeutic. Freud can say whatever he wants against defense mechanisms, but without them, you’re defenseless. Your sessions are spent in incisive cutting into your clients’ deepest insecurities alternating with desperate reassurance that they are good people anyway.
You give up. You become a forest ranger. Not the type who helps people explore the forest. The other type. The type where you hang out in a small cabin in the middle of the mountains and never talk to anybody. The only living thing you encounter is the occasional bear. It always thinks that it is a good bear, a proper bear, that a bear-hating world has it out for them in particular. You do nothing to disabuse it of this notion.”
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I think removing layers of internal filters for the sake of authenticity, along with publicly constructing a personal Mosaic of Ideals is in essence an attempt to maximize perceived cognitive dissonance, and therefor has a similar effect (but to a lesser degree). i.e. it breeds depression. I’m frequently depressed because I am very aware of many ways in which both myself and others are insufficient to the experiences and demands of living. Recognizing that people are fallible may be one of the greatest discoveries since evolution. Seeing this as beautiful (or at least accepting it as the reality), and as a result being able to have a positive outlook on life even in light of ubiquitous insufficiencies, is the focal ideal.
