There’s a little-used term from Cassirer that appears to me as one of the ‘missing links’ of identity (and meaning)…

Personate.

There are various modern senses of the term, however, what I mean to indicate is something rather radical. That it is natural to humans, inherent in our essence, so to speak… to desire to »personate other beings. Other minds. Collectives.

I mean this is the kind of fundamental sense that it is natural for us to eat food, speak, walk… breathe.

There’s this bizarre script-imperative in the shambles that masquerade as our social contexts, that each of us is an ‘individual’. Implied are bizarre ideas such as that we are one person, indivisible, relatively static of trait, asset, vulnerability… in short ‘character’. That we are ourselves, alone. All of this is nonsensical, though it can certainly be pretended, even enforced in specific ways. We lose that we would ordinarily gain by deep social relation when those relationships are counterfeited or become primarily transactional.

From this perspective, one might take the ‘multiple personalities disorder’ evidence, not precisely as evidence of primary pathology, but secondary, in the sense that those exhibiting this behavior are in the peculiar situation of having what is generally (but ambiguously) present in everyone … become explicit. There are many ‘people’ within me that remain generally unexpressed, until and unless the alchemy of meaningful social context, role, motives… intervenes to evoke them.

We’re suffering today. From a lack of meaningful roles to personate. And I suspect that, for at least some population, it’s like suffocating in a place we sense but cannot articulate. The idea that we’re static individuals in nonsensical, and humor stands in start contradiction to this idea… because there’s at least one ‘other’ within us… if only the one who laughs when the standing travesty of ‘ordinary’ life and thought, expectation and behavior… collapses into hilarity, as the mind of this other rises, through a »joke… into direct conflict with its shadow…