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I endeavour to be an open book, because everything else makes me anxious. That's it. It's not complicated.
This is one reason I've just put my real face on my twitter account. I even made my birthday public. One persona is enough hassle as it is. If I want to role play as someone else I'd go play D&D with @tjohnlinward. That's fun.
My rhetoric gets modulated between conversations, and the references might change, both terminological and symbolic, but I like to keep myself integrated. If I say something on here it is because I believe it.
It's easy for people to start questioning my motivations, or my biases, or any of the usual discursive tools of hermeneutic suspicion, and that makes me anxious, because it makes *me* question them.
Some people see these discursive moves like duelling stances, manoeuvres, or feints, because they don't think they're really asking the other person to question themselves, only socially positioning them for rhetorical advantage. The sword isn't real, after all.
This is the default attitude of people who've been trained in debating societies. Sophists, basically. Most people aren't that bad, but they're willing to don a mask now and then, especially when they think their opponent is wearing a mask too. I don't like wearing masks.
It doesn't matter whether you think you're just playing. My brain doesn't work that way. My brain will try to make your position as strong as it can be, and if your position is 'Pete is hiding something' then it will start taking apart this 'Pete' fellow to see if that's true.
If you want to see what the failure modes of this look like, read this, which was my first real attempt at exorcism by sincerity: https://deontologistics.co/2017/12/22/transcendental-blues/
But I don't want to pretend this is bad. I'm now sufficiently integrated as a person that I quite enjoy it. There are some downsides, mainly regarding what things I can and cannot ignore. The upside is that I don't worry about who I am and what I think.
Once more, this is not for you, but for me. This will let me go to sleep without some spandrel cognitive process tick away in the background, perhaps generating dreams of me arguing with a simulated interlocutor. That's how these things work.
And if, after all this, you are tempted to say 'Isn't this all a bit IRRATIONAL for a rationalist?', well... no shit? The Geist is willing but the Leib is weak, and we're working on improvements: https://deontologistics.co/2018/02/11/on-neorationalism/
Chill dreams to all.
