A man’s social life is just a very well-orchestrated charade. As Shakespeare had so well said – all world is a stage. May be the bard did not mean it in the same way as I mean. I think that the way one pulls oneself around in the presence of any other person is a just a well-played role in the charade mentioned above. The amount of time we spend in figuring out what to wear to work, what to say, and what to do, so as to create a ‘good impression’ can be explained only in this context. Recently it has been joined by questions of where one buys, where one dines and where one goes to movies, too!
Living the way one really is, at heart, requires no mental effort – it just comes naturally to us. Alas, very few are blessed with such a “presentable” real self. For most of us, this real self needs some sort of make-up before it can be paraded out. The amount of make-up is dependent on the level of closeness between the person (s) we are interacting with. For close members of the family, spouses, siblings, we might be putting on a very light make-up. Yet, who can, in all truthfulness, say that they reveal their all to anybody – their spouse, their kids, their parents, or even to the Almighty?
Is this bad? Speaking from a purely evolutionary perspective – anything that exists is not bad in itself. As I have already said, this play acting is merely a way to cover up our un-presentable self. If, god forbid, this ‘self’ was to emerge in all its glory, it can hurt many persons. Most individuals will have some clashes – they may be competitive (as in a business scenario), they may be related to tastes (one might not really like one’s spouses dressing style), they may be related to expectations (parents who might think their kids are losers) etc. Everyone aspires to be clash free; yet, the sad reality is that these clashes do exist. So, our playacting helps us avert the actual playing out of these clashes. So when a friend asks how well he played, you do have to say he played well. That’s the rule.
However, any play acting cannot, as a rule, be carried on for long. The difficulty of carrying on an act depends largely upon the amount of deviation from the real – the amount of ‘make-up’ we put on the real self. The really contorted displays of ‘self’ we put out to, say, business clients, cannot last more than the few hours of the presentation. The slightly modified ‘self’ we put out to school / college friends can last through the course. The minimal make-up ‘self’ we put out to spouses, kids, parents or siblings may well last a lifetime. Yet, for all these acts, we do need breaks, of ‘me-time’, where one’s true self can emerge, in the safety of complete privacy. Without these periodic ‘blow offs’, any act would be difficult to sustain, and we know how essential these acts are in keeping the social relations largely amicable.
So here comes the role of ‘transparency’. What ‘transparency’ actually does is to diminish the ‘me time’, and bring more and more part of our lives into public domain. People react by extending their ‘stage shifts’, working extra hours on their ‘self’; in other words, striving even harder to maintain the cover. All this while the supporting intervals of pure privacy are diminishing, and there is no opportunity to blow off the tension of the act. Ultimately, there is only one logical conclusion. The act breaks apart, and realities come out, to clash violently. No one is better off.
Anybody who has been noticing for the last few years would see that as a society, we seem to be more intolerant and more dissatisfied than ever before. So much of rioting and ‘protests’ were not so common earlier, and the rate of growth is alarming. There may be many reasons for that, but I think that the mushrooming of media is the main culprit. It has chipped away at all the act and left open the sores and wounds which pain us today. There are things one might tolerate, but one might not like to be seen tolerating – so put a camera this way, and you get the intolerance. There are things we might do, but would not like to be seen doing – put a camera this way, and you get inaction. There are stunts that we might not like to pull off, but we might not like to been shirking from it – put a camera this way, and you have 50 % of the rioting that is going on in this nation – ‘defending’ the faith, ‘defending ‘the language, the region, the nation, what have you. Many of these problems would have reached an amicable compromise, had they not been under the glare of spotlights. The society, unfortunately, does not have enough patience to play act 24 X 7.
The advocates of ‘transparency’ are very vocal. Unfortunately, this whole debate itself is subject to the laws of transparency – it is the ‘right thing’ to be seen supporting 'transparency'! Well, the main point put forward in favour of transparency is that it brings out the conflicts in the open, where the general pressure of the society helps their resolution. I would say that most of these conflicts are hidden by acts only because resolving them would exact a higher price than that incurred in hiding them. Then, there are some natural conflicts, that can never be resolved. The conflict of buyer and seller, the predator and the prey, and the like wise. Bringing out the truth of these relations will not solve the problem, but actually accentuate it by making it ever present. What is so sacrosanct about transparency itself, if all it leads to is conflict?
To conclude, we must say that there is a naturally ordained level of transparency in this world. What we show and what we hide is a blend perfected over millennia of human evolution. Let’s not disturb it in the name of some misplaced sense of ‘ideal’.
