There’s this ritual. It’s called Fraud. What you do is, you list out all your good qualities and all your bad qualities. Then you immediately attribute all your good qualities to other people, and all your bad qualities to yourself. Of your good attributes, those which you have acquired from others, copied from them, in fact, note that almost all of them are vacuous, or secretly egotistic. Whenever you write a word, observe that there lie ten thousand facts behind that word, ten thousand parameters of the world, and you don’t know half of them. Strictly speaking, you have no right to say anything about anything. At this point, you should begin to suspect you’re a fraud. This is the point of Fraud, but let’s take things slowly. Look at the way you present yourself; enumerate your possessions and your attitudes; examine your stances and your body language. Note the way you hide yourself from others, so as to prevent them from seeing within. Observe the fraudulence of your self, your persona and the relationship between them: a trio of deception, self-deception, and meta-deception.
Make a list of all your original ideas. Immediately cross out one fourth of it: those ideas were put there by advertisements. Remove a further fourth: those ideas you consciously copied from your heroes. Realize that you subconsciously copied half of what remains. The remaining, now you think about it, is what a robot would come up with if you told it to take the other three-fourths and put them in a blender. The result is about as palatable as grabbing any ten random items from your fridge and making a smoothie out of them.
Fraud is like a game. Ever play this game?
Realize either that (A) you just want to be liked, and your every action is a reflection of that fact, or (B) you don’t want to be liked, because you know you’re fundamentally unlikeable. Whether you chose lemma A or B, feel very sad about your choice.
Make a list of all your favorite music, your favorite books and films and shows and and and. Read all the reviews of the items on your list. Note that all the positive reviews fail to apply critical judgment. Note that all the negative reviews are right. Reconsider your list of all your favorite music, your favorite books and films and shows and and and.
At this point, Fraud should have become self-sustaining. Realizing your own fraudulence is further proof that you just want to be great at everything and loved and liked and respected and do all the right things and think of all the great things, which is quite obviously not what you present yourself to be, which means you’re a fraud. Griping about Fraud like you are the first person to gripe about Fraud is further proof of emotional stunting and a continued intellectual adolescence.
Ever play this game?