The MagazineRobert Benchley said that the world is divided between those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t. I am one of those who do, and would like to present a fresh such division. Here the little darling is: The world is divided between people who believe that what is most important about human beings is what they hide and those who believe that what is most important about people is what they do.  Andy Rash An old friend and I frequently have conversations that end up nowhere because we are on opposite sides of this divide. He is a Hide, and I a Do, man. As a Hide man, my friend is—no surprise here—a Freudian. Freud is of course the Hide man par excellence. For Freud nothing is as it appears, everything is in hiding: Ids are seething below stairs, in the attic Oedipus complexes remain unresolved, and though a cigar may sometimes be a cigar, it is more likely disguising something vastly more suggestive. My friend is also a devotee of the sociologist Ervin Goffmann, who holds that life is a theater in which we are all playing parts, wearing masks, changing roles—in short, that we are, under social necessity, hiding our real selves. I have only myself to go on here, but my sense is that, if you pull away the mask I present to the public, you will see underneath it the selfsame mask; remove that second mask, and, lo, there I am again, playing the same role of a mildly sly, slightly skeptical, outwardly conformist creature. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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