Asshole Lane

We are called social animals.  The ten of us here must be social.  Or else we’d be out prowling after mates, hunting down prey, foraging for roots, and scrounging for firewood.  And the males among us, we’d be scouting neighboring tribes in order to threaten them into submission, or if that didn’t work, to mercilessly eradicate them.

But we have agreed to a Toastmasters social contract, so we have set down our weapons and instincts of aggression for gentler forms of interaction, perhaps—communication.

The greatest strategy for survival we have is to craft our identities into a brand, so that we may thrive and prosper in this environment for our mutual benefit. 

Our narratives become our identities, and our identities become our brand.  If we are not an individual brand-name, what are we?  Appearance is essential, my friend.

And, Lord knows, we are surrounded by the fictitious who have attached all kinds of pretended virtues to themselves.  I give you two exemplary stories of deceit.  A New York politician, promoted himself to win the votes of those whose heart go out to victims.  He said his grandparents were Holocaust survivors.  He said his mother was in the south tower on 9/11.  Neither was true.  He promoted himself to those whose wallets go out to the prosperous, saying he worked at Goldman Sachs. That also was not true. But he won his election.

Then, there’s the scholar who received her PhD. from a prestigious Ivy League school, writing her thesis on the Sacred Rites of the Mohawk and Mikmaq tribes.  In order to gain entrance into those sacred rituals and tribal secrets, she told the tribal elders she was Mohawk and Mikmaq. Pale-faced lie.  A disrespect to tribal elders, and a disgrace to academic values. 

Oh, just one more.  A local on-line newspaper in San Francisco boasts its local neighborhood newsgathering that features ethnic reporters Nina Singh-Hudson, Tony Ng, and Leticia Ruiz.  Those were the names on the bylines.  Only problem… there were no humans attached to those names.  The news-gathering was all done by Artificial Intelligence.

You see why we need branding.  You see the need to craft our identities into a name that people not only recognize when they hear it, but also think of what we want them to think about us when they hear our good name. You do see why?

. . . to protect ourselves.  To have a “good name” indicates that when we speak, our words hold to a standard of truth; when we make a promise, we vow to stand by our word. But we’ve been taught to pretend that we are something other than who we are since childhood.  What else was Halloween for, but masking ourselves, trying on other personas? And Halloween has become a popular celebration for adults as well. In school, we often paid attention to instructors when we’d rather have been playing in the neighborhood with our besties.  We dressed up and acted nice when the relatives came over for those endless and restricting holiday visits.  Pretty soon we had become domesticated, yes, Baaah, social animals.   We learned how to live up to others’ expectations of what they wanted us to be in their lives.  Our teachers and parents taught us how, how stretching the bonds of truth by being just a bit disingenuous helped us craft our brand.  Disingenuous is another word for insincere. The best story we learned was how we did something we really didn’t do, so that our brand lived up to our great expectations.

But to have a good name means what we say has some agreement with facts, that we have to be true to what we are.  Those two statements—to be in agreement with facts, and to be true to what we are….they’re two of the definitions of the word authentic.  You could look it up, if you had a real dictionary.  ne who doesn’t cheat.  What comes with being authentic is that we are believed, even trusted.   And doesn’t that open all doors for us!

So, it’s obvious isn’t it.  Heehaw, heehaw! The choice we have.  To either be authentic or such good story-tellers that we are trusted, anyway.  The line between truth and fiction is as thin as the electronic wave that carries our words to each other during these meetings. And, when you think about it, who of us doesn’t want our lives to become better by the telling of it?

I understand that in Tik Tok there is something called the main-character syndrome.  Since we’re all the main characters in our lives, it really does make sense to dramatize our behavior.  If we don’t, who will?  And appropriate pinches of exaggeration make for better brand recognition.  The other people in the main-character’s life—they are called the cast, just actors playing parts, or even less, the audience.  Is that sustainable for relationships?  To think that others in our lives are merely our fan base?

The examples I have cited to you, the socializing I described, and the branding that we’ve all gone through indicate that the truth about ourselves isn’t a requirement for survival.  So, why bother being true to what we are if that doesn’t play well to our audience, especially when people already believe that the part we play is really us.  And remember, appearance is of the essence!  Your choice--true to ourselves or true to the main character in a fabulous series.  Those choices help us determine what type of social animal we want to be. Hawoohahawooh! (wolf howl) And sorting through a moral dilemma is always easier than having to kill your dinner and seeing other people as enemy tribesmen that need to be threaten into submission.