An excerpt from a journal entry dated 21 July 1985 followed by a comment.
There is often little or no personal reality in human relationships. They are often nothing more than formulaic transactions. When I saw C.T.K. on Friday I told him, sincerely, that he looked good, healthy. He felt obliged to return the compliment -- he couldn't just graciously accept it; he had to interpret it as the opening move in a social transaction.
I would like to think that it is possible to instantiate social roles, playing them, as we must, but without being played by them, that is, without allowing oneself to succumb to the illusion of being identical to them.
It may be that some people are social-transactional, and thus pure social surface all the way down. In such people there appears to be no person beneath the personae, nothing below the masks, poses, roles, no spiritual substance. Social interaction has lifted them above the merely animalic, and so they count as human in one sense, but they have never glimpsed the possibility of a further step from the merely social to the truly individual.
The project of radical self-individuation is beyond their ken. I had a colleague like that, a man stuck at the level of ego-games and oneupsmanship. In a 'conversation' with him I never had the sense that any communication was taking place. So it came as no surprise when, in one of our 'conversations,' he asserted that a person is just the sum-total of his social roles. Nor was it a surprise when I learned that he was working toward a second Ph. D. in sociology!
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