Deconstructing Natural Artifice

Koffee With Karan is a chilling show, where fakeness has been weaponized and raised to a destructive work of art, decoupled from its social and evolutionary foundations, treated not as the superego’s imposition but as an abstract skill, to be practiced and refined. Beautiful almost. Perfection is a virtue, wherever it is to be found. My attitude towards artifice (bad) is patently unimaginative. Boring. Uncharacteristic in its meta-conformity, conforming with the agreed practice of derision for the conformity of fakeness. Deconstructing my views on artifice is the first step to climbing out of this lazy trough.

There is a difference between personality and Personality. If I disconnect my PFC, I have a combination of psychometric attributes, the big 5 traits for instance, that is my individual personality, a natural state of being most in line with my bodily intuition. Above this I layer a thinking, reasoning mind, that constructs a Personality. By all definitions, Personality is artifice. We weren’t born with it. Years of interaction with friends, family, and strangers provide us with the empirical data we need to construct this Personality. If all is artifice, we can no longer judge someone being ‘true to themselves’ vs someone being fake. We can only judge if someone’s particular artifice is functional, reasoned, reliable and harmonious. When these particular parameters fail, we label the entire thing as artificial instead. But by ‘be true to yourself’ we don’t mean strip away the reason from your naturally endowed personality, deconstructing the artifice. It is not impossible to be as trapped by the Persona of being true to oneself as by that of conformity or politeness or propriety. One isn’t able to be discerning and flexible with situations where one would personally prefer to act properly rather than naturally, making truth itself an artifice. So how do I define artifice with precision while matching what we intuitively intend it to denote. One mode of analysis is to identify a relationship between degree of correlation between Personality and personality, assuming the former takes behavioral precedence.

1. Negative: I ignore my personality. I behave based on external norms. This has risks and benefits

• Norms are emergent: This means it works for most people. Most people fall under a common swathe of the bell curve, meaning these norms come naturally to them. What happens to those whose personalities fall outside the bell curve? A low correlate means you are suffering alone, taking solace from the democratic nature of external norms though suffrage has been denied you.
• Norms are intelligently designed: If norms are made in order for us to overcome natural proclivities and coexist in peaceful society, then artifice is the basis upon which our society thrives. A low correlate is a necessary evil, and signifies a well-adjusted individual prioritizing long-term non-zero sum outcomes over short-term natural drives
• Norms are irrelevant: Times have changed, and norms must need change with them.

2. Zero: This implies random behavior. On the plus side, there is no personal dissonance in this case. It only manifests as unreliability and instability, not as artifice, since there is no pattern to my artifice and my being true to myself. There are many ways this happens

• I’m not intuitive enough to know what my personal utility function is in a given situation
• I’m not smart enough to know what the social utility function is
• I’m driven primarily by bodily drives that supersede even personality, like hunger, sleep that vary moment to moment. I have no stable Personality
• I have no rules about situations that call for P vs p in maximizing overall utility

3. Positive: This is the one artifice to rule them all.

• I understand my individual personality traits, identifying their strengths and weaknesses in social situations
• Where they are strong I have no need to even have a P
• Where they are weak, I construct P in a way that creates least dissonance with p.
• If this is not possible, and P/p in a certain situation are polar opposites, I properly evaluate the utility of dissonance/conformity vs consonance/nonconformity.

That last point is the crux of the problem. We admire the emotional maturity it takes to construct a functioned/reasonable artifice that is in harmony with a stable personality. But this breaks down when the natural individual personality is so at odds with the rest of society that basic norms that 99% of people take for granted as entirely natural, actually cause immense dissonance and pain. Unfortunately the fact that you are such an outlier, evidenced by the fact that for 99% of people the norm in question is no trouble at all, ensures that while computing utility, the cost of nonconformity (assumed to be proportional with the number of conformists, the unanimity of subject) becomes prohibitively high, too high to choose consonance. What results is conformity, with a huge cost of dissonance (dissonance is like feedback noise, self-magnifying, the fact that I find a very basic norm problematic itself becomes problematic, ad-insania), manifesting in the sort of pained discomfort we are quick to label uncharitably as artifice. Uncharitable, but not necessarily illogical. Consider I exhibit event A = the pained discomfort of artifice. You have to calculate the Bayesian priors of P(X/A) where X is

1. I am so off-the-charts unique that even basic norms entail dissonance cost for me, norms that are too basic for me to risk nonconformity
2. I am unaware of my natural personality
3. I am incapable of constructing Personality with high correlate with p
4. I am neglectful of situations where p supersedes P, for instance

• where norms are not utility-maximizing,
• where individuality would benefit the interaction
• where the receiver is intelligent enough not to pander to the necessity of conformity.

A charitable calculation would give the benefit of the doubt to me and go with Option 1 as highest prior probability. Charitable but not logical. The definition of off-the-charts unique is that one does not encounter these data points often, meaning the probability is very low. On the other hand, it is logical to infer from experience that most people are either incapable or unwilling to put in the effort needed to refine the distinction between p and P, for any of the reasons 2,3,4. Of these reasons, 4c is a direct attack on us. In 4c, the artificer is accusing us of being mindless indoctrinated sheep incapable of receiving authentic expression. Depending on how secure we are therefore, we react to artifice with either pity (2), contempt (3), irritation (4a, 4b), or anger (4c). It is a sobering thought, because artifice makes me angry and not annoyed/contemptuous/pitiful, a reflection more of my own intellectual and social insecurity than of the underlying vice.