The Transparent Life
that we finally appear disguised before ourselves.
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The corrosive nature of secrets and lies is a common theme in literature as well as being a fact of daily life. We take it for granted people will prevaricate although some will actually carry it further and live a lie.
Shakespeare’s greatest villains were dissemblers – shape-shifting charlatans whose hypocrisy and duplicity knew no bounds.
So, the foregoing begs the question: why keep secrets, or lie at all?
Ben Franklin once wrote that three could keep a secret if two of them were dead.
The fact is secrets don’t stay concealed forever. Behind the desire to deceive may be the need to try to control or to create a false impression.
Such endeavours are bound to fail, however, and ultimately the truth will out, often with a vengeance and a backlash that punishes the deceiver.
In Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, Henchard tries to conceal his past.
When he eventually confides the truth to his friend, Farfrae, it doesn’t ease his conscience, but instead makes him paranoid.
He fears that one day Farfrae might use the truth against him. In the end, worry destroys Henchard and he dies a broken man.
Psychologists have long warned about the detrimental effects of masking our true selves.
Some people present a face to the world that is a facade and of course the problem with facades is that they constantly need to be shored up.
An inordinate amount of time and energy is expended in trying to project a false image of ourselves.
The simplest approach is to be authentic.
Transparency allows us to become who we really are and frees us from the worry that people might not accept us if we are honest and direct.
The irony is that if we hide behind an image, we can never be sure if people like us anyway.
Harper Lee in her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, paid her hero, Atticus Finch, the supreme compliment, saying he was the same in public as he was at home.
I can think of no greater praise than to say a person’s public and private persona match.
It’s beneficial for society and less stressful for us as individuals to confidently assert our true identity.
Both our sanity and our growth as individuals depend on it.
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