“Be as you wish to appear” said Socrates. That's easier said than done. When he said it he was living nearly 2,500 years ago in Athens, so the kind of stuff he had in mind was probably at the high-minded heroics end of the personality spectrum. You know, old-fashioned ideas like fighting for truth and justice, living ethically, demonstrating valour in the face of impossible odds; things that still have a little sway, especially in celluloid where Marvel superheroes battle it out in an endless supercharged loop of good vs evil.
Here, in the mortal reaches, the grubby reality is a little different. The annals of history are littered with the fatally flawed folks who occupy the slippery slope between the idealised fictions of themselves and the ick-inducing reality of their daily grind. They amply demonstrate that the space between how you want to appear and who you actually are is a vast and treacherous place.
Doom scroll on Instagram for a soul-destroying hour and you'll find the place jam-packed with influencers and wannabes who are selling the appearance of their lifestyles with wild abandon while aggressively filtering out the less flattering aspects of their lived reality.
Trouble is, they manifest in every walk of life: vegans who are secretly scoffing 800g, fat-marbled steaks; Tinder swindlers who are presenting themselves as card-carrying members of the jet set so they can steal your money and your heart; priests who are doing the lord’s work while diddling all his lambs; fit-fluencers selling diets while they consume industrial quantities of Ozempic; “best friends” sexting their boobies to your ex; government ministers championing the people while their snouts are deep in the state coffers; dodgy dealers who are not diamonds in the rough. So much smoke, so many mirrors.
The thing is, I assume we all know how “being as you wish to appear” went for Socrates. Badly. His prize? He got to swallow the old hemlock for far too much consistency in the “speaking your truth” department. He was authentic, and it was terminal. Turns out that sort of thing can backfire badly.
Look at Hunter Biden. He was living his truth. Getting jiggy with strippers, smoking crack cocaine, buying guns and girls while high, generally taking the low road. Every time. The guy was consistent with his nature, such as it was. Now he's been clean for five years. And that should be enough. I mean, what a turnaround in a battle with personal demons and everything. But the mess he left behind was grist to the political mill. It’s not as if he didn’t use his get out of jail free card when his father was his ticket to gas deals all over Ukraine and God knows where else. This guy was living high on the hog.
And his father “honest Joe”, the US president no less, has had to execute a complicated dance around his ostensible and actual self while trying to navigate by a faulty ethical compass. The straight and narrow is not the easiest path.
Doom scroll on Instagram for a soul-destroying hour and you'll find the place jam-packed with influencers and wannabes who are selling the appearance of their lifestyles with wild abandon while aggressively filtering out the less flattering aspects of their lived reality.
Joe Biden presented as a humble warrior for justice, albeit an increasingly doddery version. According to his own rhetoric, he was the only thing that stood between Donald Trump and the wholesale dissolution of the institutions of American democracy — hence the clinging to the trappings of power to the last. He would have us believe that he is the living embodiment of the great and the good — the guy who'd never use his power to cut a self-serving deal or rescue his prodigal son. He was the person who'd never use his power to sway the course of justice... until the final weeks of his presidency when he clearly cracked under the pressure of keeping up appearances and pardoned Hunter. In case his political enemies used the justice system for payback, he said. If you can’t beat them join them.
I never thought I would have to concede that, in the greater scheme of being exactly who you say you are, Trump, that very stable genius, has prevailed. Perhaps this is what the voting public wants — a shyster who doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it says on the box. This is the kind of week in news headlines that makes me want to pack it all in. I don’t mean swallowing the hemlock myself. No, just an intention to stop reading the news. What's in it for us other than the sinking feeling that in a world replete with snake oil salesmen the man with the bad hair and Florida tan really is king?
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