The French philosopher Blaise Pascal observed that most of us lead a double life, curating the life we wish to show others while burying in darkness the shameful part of us we’d like to hide. This dual existence is both exhausting and unsustainable. If you come from a family rife with addiction, you’ll know that addicts live double lives, and maintaining one life while concealing the other works until it doesn’t: bankruptcy, unemployment, an overdose, hospitalization, an arrest, imprisonment, and all the rest.
Of course, not all addictions are alike. They exist on a spectrum. Some will destroy us faster than others. Some addictions may not lead to illegal behavior but they will nevertheless slowly kill us so that we slog through life like a zombie and die having squandered the life that was given to us.
Some addictions are shameful and scandalous and we wouldn’t want to get caught dead being seen in the middle of performing some form of moral debauchery or other. However, some addictions are so common that they become part of a cultural norm. Because most of us are afflicted with the addiction in question, it doesn’t seem so bad. It may even seem normal, acceptable, and expected.
The addiction in question is our unquenchable thirst for public approval and admiration. Pascal identified this universal craving for public approval and the way this addiction eviscerated our morals. Pascal saw that we crave admiration more than we crave the cultivation of our intelligence, decency, and moral character. We’re not content with being admired for wealth, conspicuous material goods, or positions of power. We want people to believe that we are morally exceptional and we will go to great lengths--often relying on deception, manipulation, subterfuge, and other immoral schemes--to convince others of our moral superiority. As a result, there is a yawning gap between who we are and who we pretend to be. In his book Pensees, Pascal put it this way:
We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine. We labour unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real. And if we possess calmness, or generosity, or truthfulness, we are eager to make it known, so as to attach these virtues to that imaginary existence. We would rather separate them from ourselves to join them to it; and we would willingly be cowards in order to acquire the reputation of being brave. A great proof of the nothingness of our being, not to be satisfied with the one without the other, and to renounce the one for the other! For he would be infamous who would not die to preserve his honour.
Pascal’s scathing judgment of our “nothingness of being” has a lot of truth to it, but I daresay the genius philosopher has written a caricature of the human condition. There appears to be a streak of misanthropy in Pascal’s analysis that results in exaggeration at the expense of complexity. While it’s true many of us are guilty of squandering our lives curating an image of self at the expense of our moral character, most of us only desire admiration so much as it is an instrument to help us create meaningful connections with others. If I play the piano, I want people to admire my musical ability while at the same time connecting with the music. If I am a comedian, I want people to admire my comic brilliance while at the same time connecting with the hilarious absurdity I point out about the human condition. If I am a college rhetoric instructor, I want my students to admire my intelligence while at the same time connecting with my lesson’s relevance to their lives. If I am a friend conversing with others about our shared past at a social gathering, I want people to admire me for my extraordinary memory while at the same time connecting with my storytelling.
Pascal was a genius who penetrated to the root causes of our desire to fabricate an image to the rest of society, but most of us are more complicated than Pascal’s characterization. We are hungry for deep connections and only seek to be admired as part of the deep connections we can forge with others.
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