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A PRESIDENT AT PLAY

PHILOSOPHY







Some of the reason why we are less confident than we might be is thebecause of a fundamental difference between what we know of ourselves - and what we know of other people, especially impressive, grand, enviable people whom we might wish to emulate or learn from. We know so much about our hesitation, our shyness, our clumsiness and our insecurity. We are desperately aware of how lazy we are, how sentimental, how vain and how absurd.  We have intimate knowledge of our disgusting bodily habits and revolting moral weaknesses. We know about all sorts of deeply embarrassing things we have done; messages we sent, advances we made, gauche sentences we uttered. And yet of those enviable, distant others, we know - comparatively - so very little. We have no evidence that they ever woke up in the middle of the night sobbing at their stupidity or repulsiveness. We don’t know how anxious they are in meetings. We can’t tell what levels of despair they experience at the start of a new week. We don’t know how silly and child-like they can be. We know them only from the carefully edited self-portraits they put out to the world. Out of ignorance and undue self-suspicion, we therefore discount ourselves as plausible players from the start. Surely no one who farts as we do has ever made it to high places; surely no one as needy has ever won esteem. Certain legendary figures are kind in letting us see some of the reality behind the mask and, perhaps while holding a baby aloft, hinting at more human, gauche and vulnerable dimensions. But where we have no such information, we should imagine what we haven’t been shown. We need to recall at all times the structural imbalance between what we see of ourselves - and what we know of those we admire. We aren’t necessarily so inept or so daft: we just know a lot more about us and a lot less about them. We should dare to try; everyone is to be found on the toilet at least once a day.
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