“And maybe I’ll lose because they’ll say I’m not a nice person,” Trump told conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on October 9. “I think I am a nice person. I help people. I like to help people.”
— from an op-ed by Toluse Olorunnipa in the Washington Post, October 29, 2020
When I visited the Pagosa Peak Open School yesterday morning, to drop off some blueberry muffins and popcorn for a couple of classroom parties — my granddaughters both attend school there — many of the kids, and some of the staff had dressed up in Halloween costumes. (Or perhaps they were “Fall Festival” costumes?)
There’s something magical about pretending to be something different than what you are. Maybe be a prince or princess for a day. Maybe, be a dragon, or a pirate, or a superhero.
Of course, there’s also something magical about pretending, day after day, to be the person you want other people to think you are.
Knowing thyself… might that also be magical?
Legend has it, that upon entering the temple at Delphi in ancient Greece, a person was treated to three aphorisms. The first was “Know Thyself”, carved into the stone above the entrance to the forecourt. The next maxim was “Nothing to Excess.” The final piece of advice was “Surety Brings Ruin”. The ancient Greeks considered Delphi to be the center of the world, marked by a stone monument known as the omphalos, ‘the navel’ Stories tell of famous prophesies delivered by its oracle, a priestess with psychic powers “chosen from among the peasants of the area.” The temple seems to have been a sacred site as early as 1400 BC.
This information comes from Wikipedia. It might be true, or it might not. It might also be true that American philosopher and politician Benjamin Franklin once commented upon the difficulty of knowing one’s self:
“There are three Things extremely hard; Steel, a Diamond, and to know one’s self.”
With all our amazing access to global communication, it’s hard to tell what’s true and what isn’t. But ‘knowing thyself’ has been a problem since the beginning of time.
I imagine I was around 9 years old when my father — a high school English teacher with an abiding interest in philosophy — showed me how a Venn Diagram works. On a sheet of paper, he first drew two interlocking circles.
I had no idea where he was going with this.
Inside the left-hand circle, he wrote: “Things you know about yourself that other people don’t know about you.”
This was easy to understand. As a 9-year-old, I understood that I harbored certain secrets about myself, that I had never shared with anyone else. So far so good.
Next, he wrote in the right-hand circle, “Things other people know about you that you don’t know about yourself.”
This made grammatical sense, but it was a mind-blowing concept for my 9-year-old self. I had never considered the idea that other people knew things about me that I didn’t know about myself. Was this even possible… that I had aspects to my personality that other people could perceive, but that I knew nothing about?
Then my father filled in the space between the two circles. “Things you know about yourself that other people also know about you.”
Now the diagram made perfect sense. On the left side were things only I had knowledge about, and about which the rest of the world was ignorant. On the right side, the things other people knew about me, but about which I was ignorant.
And the intersection: knowledge, about myself, that other people also shared. Surely, that covered almost everything that could possibly be known about me?
I could easily deal with the left side… and the intersection…but it was difficult to wrap my head around the idea that other people knew things about me that I didn’t also know. That just seemed… unthinkable. I lived in my body, and went everywhere my body went. The words I spoke came out of my own mouth. The decisions I made were made by no one but me.
Was it really possible that I was ignorant, or unaware, of aspects of my own actions and personality? My father seemed to be suggesting that this was indeed the case… and he was a pretty smart guy.
A mosaic from excavations in the convent of San Gregorio in Rome, featuring the Greek motto, “Know thyself”.
I introduced today’s editorial with a quote from President Donald Trump, spoken in an interview with right-wing commentator Rush Limbaugh on October 9.
“And maybe I’ll lose because they’ll say I’m not a nice person. I think I am a nice person. I help people. I like to help people.”
A fair number of people, I’d say, believe that President Trump is “not a nice person.” In fact, it would appear that millions of people believe he is “not a nice person.” But President Trump seems to believe the opposite — that he is indeed a “nice person.”
As an English teacher concerned with clear, unambiguous communication, my father hated the word, “nice”, with a passion. I’ve inherited some of that attitude. What does that word even mean? That you like to help people? That you’re willing to pretend you’re fond of someone whom you actually detest? Or what, exactly?
At a campaign rally in Janesville, Wisconsin earlier this month, President Trump considered the idea that he might lose the November election.
“If I lose, I will have lost to the worst candidate, the worst candidate in the history of presidential politics. If I lose, what do I do? I’d rather run against somebody who’s extraordinarily talented, at least, this way I can go and lead my life…”
Our Daily Post readers will have various reactions to these comments, but we might be able to agree that President Trump was not being “nice” when he referred to his opponent, Joe Biden, as the “worst possible candidate in the history of presidential politics.”
Does President Trump know himself?