Vanity Project: The difficulty of knowing that we look like ourselves
reallifemag.com
reallifemag.com
In a similar vein, it is often weird to see another person in one's trusted winter coat; as if they were wearing/assuming a part of one's identity.
"According to [Merleau-Ponty], perception is a behavior effected not by consciousness but by the body, but not by the body as a piece of the physical world, rather by the body as lived, a living body."[0]
Before I achieved a good wardrobe, I could literally feel the tension in a room as a result of wearing poor clothing. It is experienced as a vulnerability to social attacks... think the experience you get when your boss frowns at you, but this experience occurring in every room you go into. Without dress comparable to my coworkers, I had to adopt social behaviors which patched the vulnerabilities. (This occurs in the animal kingdom as well, for example, with behaviors such as stotting.) When I had achieved better clothing, I no longer had to worry about such behaviors, and could devote more time, and mind "power", to focusing on my own pursuits.
I am reminded of Virginia Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own": without some basic necessities one must adopt characteristics to appease the social dynamics around oneself. (I believe Machiavelli writes about this as well, regarding man's relationship to weather, but that's a looser connection.) Now imagine what it must be like to have food, shelter, no problems, good health, and $500,000 in the bank, versus a child in Sy ria. The psychological impact can't be measured.
We must keep in mind that we are all ships at sea, and even the smallest decision can be, and for the majority of individuals on earth is, fundamental to our survival.
tl:dr: When identity in relation to a group matters, unique behaviors sometimes occur to make up for weaknesses in other areas.
Let's say two men walk together in a market and meet a magistrate. The first man boasts that he bears scars from the building of the republic; the second man says of the first: "he bears the scars of an unpunished crime!" The second man's perception wins out; the first man is taken to prison.
When someone willingly characterizes another person in a negative sense, they turn lab coats into painters' coats. This diminishes not only the capacity of the individual with the changed description, but the capacity of `the republic' as a whole, through social stratificiation and description-based dominance, et. Yet it is frequently the case that the one who dresses his kin in a negative description is viewed as the more noble of the two, though in truth, he has reduced the capacity of another to think and act. We may ask ourselves what crime the first man may have been hiding, but we seldom call the second man to account, even though he has effectively maimed his brethren and his state.
These negative changes in description occur as a matter of course, and as of yet are unchallenged as a mode of social being. Competition is viewed to extend to such matters. We are enslaved by it in practice.
I personally believe the best system would be to take a human rights-dominated system -- that is, one predicated on human rights as sacred -- and spread this philosophy globally, identifying victims of negativism and propping them up. Rinse & repeat until negativists are natural outcasts, and always allow them to join in. Needless to say, prisons, killing in all forms, and torture would need to be abolished worldwide.