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Notes -
Another thing I wanted to comment on:
"even to themselves" - This is not unusual or controversial. The human mind has always done this, cultivating and presenting its 'avatar' to itself. The PR department of the mind does not just work in relation to the external world, but in relation to the internal world as well. This fiction, the self, is covering up a committee. It will lie constantly and produce a 'person' who is supposed to be competent and reliable and 'in control'. To be able to convincingly lie in this manner to the rest of the tribe, it must convince itself first.
I believe this is all complicated and put into overdrive by the internet life we are all now living, and by the mass surveillance state. People's minds construct an "always on", always watching, always judging, always performing world, because that is how the external world now exists. The most effective prison constructed by a surveillance state is the one built up and reinforced daily inside each human head.
It used to be just individuals with social anxiety, and in a more extreme form, schizophrenia (I'm not saying schizophrenia is simply extreme social anxiety, but this seems to be one part of the disorder), who constantly felt watched and judged due to an overly intense activation of this 'world inside the mind.' Now it's almost everyone. This is in part due to the extreme dominance by the left brain hemisphere in modern people. McGilchrist writes convincingly about this, at length, in his books.
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