I have met five versions of the same man in one week.

At work he says “good point” to a man he doesn’t respect, and means the tone, not the words. Out drinking he laughs half a second after everyone else and tells the same story a little louder each round. With his close friends he decides where the night is going, and they let him. In his parents’ house he argues like a teenager and picks up the bill like an adult. With everyone else he is already leaving — polite, unbothered, checking his phone.

I wonder which version is truly him.

I used to think one of them was the real one and the rest were masks for fitting in. That somewhere underneath there was a man sitting still, pretending, playing whatever the room needed, and if I waited long enough I would meet him.

I have waited.

I am still waiting.

As a kid I grew up watching animals on Discovery Channel. The chameleon fascinated me and I disliked him at the same time.

Here was a creature so defenceless that his whole strategy was to not be seen. Afraid to stand out.

I remember thinking I would never be that.

Whoever I am, whatever I am no fear, nothing to hide.

Then I got older and someone I had let close changed colour.

Maybe betrayal. I still can’t tell.

The situation shifted, and the version of them I had let close stopped appearing.

I wanted to call it deceit, because deceit leaves someone underneath to be angry at.

Someone I used to know.

But now I wonder —

is there someone underneath?

Let’s take a walk.

I am not who I think I am.
I am not who you think I am.
I am what I think you think I am.
^{Took me a while to get it.}

Which brings me back to the chameleon, where I had the animal completely wrong.

He does not change colour to disappear into a leaf. He is an ambush hunter — his weapon is stillness, not disguise.

And here it gets interesting.

The dramatic colour change has almost nothing to do with predators. When researchers compared species that change a lot with species that barely change, they concluded that most of the colour changes are signals to other chameleons.

The colours are for rank.

For the right to possess.

For fights and fucking

So the colour change is not hiding.

It is the opposite of hiding.

It is a male telling another male to back off, or telling a female he is worth her time. Brief, loud, aimed at his own species.

Now, that stopped me.

Because that is exactly what the man in the first paragraph is doing.

He does not change in front of a tiger.

He changes in front of his manager, his father, his friends, people whose opinion of him decides something.

The colours of his personality were never for the environment.

They were for the audience.

So here is what I still don’t know.

Does the chameleon have a true colour underneath, or are all its colours simply its colours?

And was there ever a true someone underneath the person I let close?

Or was that a colour too?

Meet Erving Goffman. He wrote The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in 1959

When he watched hotel staff, he saw a waiter walk into the dining room smooth and deferential, and heard the same man profane and complaining in the kitchen moments later.

Same man. Same shift.

One door between them.

I can attest to it.

I lived with Rogers tech support.

There are two of him.

Goffman’s point was not that the waiter is fake.

His point was that this is what people do.

Not a personality laid over some pure self. The performance itself is the basic unit of social life. We are always performing for somebody, and the performance changes with whoever is watching.

Here is the part that matters.

He refuses to put the real self backstage.

The kitchen is not the truth.

The kitchen is another room.

Different audience.

My father always said, when in Rome, live like the Romans.

He wasn’t teaching me manners.

He was telling me how people work, and I heard it as manners.

Which leaves one problem.

What about the room with no audience?

Do this.

Sit in your car alone.

Music off.

Nobody is watching.

Are you performing then?

For whom?

Is there a true self in there, or have we just moved the audience inside?

Because there is someone in that car with you.

The one who decides whether you did well today.

The one who remembers what you said five years ago at 2 a.m. for no useful reason.

The one who watches you fail and immediately begins writing commentary.

Call it the inner voice. Self-talk. Conscience. Whatever you like.

Those names make it sound like company.

It isn’t.

It is an audience.

And it is the only one you can never walk out on.

Second question.

I know why the chameleon does it.

Why do we?

Survival – I don’t buy it.

Someone wiser than me said life starts above survival.

It is why we ride motorcycles and jump out of planes.

When I looked closer I saw something simpler.

Rank leads to Access. leads to Mattering.

We want companionship, love, sex, ambition, status, influence, recognition – different words, different pleasures, but again and again they depend on having some weight in the eyes of other people. just for them to say – we MATTER.

Monks and hermits tried to live without Fuck and Rank.

But go and look at a monastery.

They didn’t leave the audience.

They changed it.

God. The abbot. The rule. The brothers watching you at prayer.

The people who tried hardest to leave one social world built another one with its own dress, rituals, hierarchy and standards.

So maybe survival is too small a word.

We do it because rank buys access.

Access gets you a say.

A place.

Attention.

Belonging.

Choice.

The right people picking up when you call.

Underneath all of it is something harder to admit.

Mattering.

Being the one who counts in the room.

Peacocking is for rank. Rank is for mattering.

So let’s run the chain.

Colour(Peacocking) is for rank.

Rank creates access.

Access lets us hold on to things – status, relationships, pleasure, influence, a say in what happens.

And under all of it:

mattering.

Clean chain.

Maybe too clean.

Because a clean chain gives you a prediction.

If all of this runs on mattering, then a man who is finished mattering should stop.

Nothing left to climb.

Nobody left to signal to.

No posture.

Only whatever is underneath.

So, let meet him

Joseph Stalin.

Dictator to half a planet.

Nobody above him. Nothing left to win. He did not even have to pretend to answer to anybody, A roman emperor had to flatter his senate. Stalin – No

By the chain, he is done.

He has arrived.

He can stop. eh!

Instead he became the biggest peacocker who ever lived.

His face in every room.

Parades built to be photographed.

Purges staged as public theatre so the whole union could watch and take the lesson.

A permanent broadcast saying one thing:

Do not mess with Stalin.

The man who should have escaped the display was running it at a scale almost nobody could imagine.

And look at the way the display worked.

Almost none of it needed to be said.

He never had to stand there explaining that he was dangerous.

That is the trick of colour.

Words are claims, and we discount claims.

A man can say anything.

But posture, tone, silence,  when somebody enters a room – those feel different.

We read them as facts.

Goffman had the split already.

What you say.

And what you give off.

Stalin’s whole apparatus was manufactured give-off.

Fear engineered to look like a fact about the world.

So the chain breaks.

And it breaks at the last link.

Peacocking can produce rank.

Rank can produce access.

But mattering does not finish.

There is no amount of it that completes.

Because rank is not something you own.

It is granted.

Daily.

By people watching.

And in Stalin’s case, what they granted was submission.

Which means the peacocking went both ways.

Václav Havel wrote about a greengrocer in a communist shop putting the official slogan in his window among the onions.

He doesn’t believe it.

Nobody really reads it.

He puts it there because not putting it there would be noticed.

The actual message is simpler:

I am obedient.

Leave me alone.

Havel’s point was that the system does not run only on belief.

It runs on participation.

So Stalin’s rank existed because an entire country got up every morning and behaved as though it existed.

He displayed power downward.

They performed submission upward.

Two performances holding each other in place.

The day they stop putting up the sign, it is over.

A man who is loved can rest.

A man who is feared cannot.

That is what the top of the game pays out. A show with no closing night.

So, Is there an escape?

We went to the top and found a man who could not stop.

So go to the bottom.

If the top of the game is a man with everything to protect, the bottom should be a man with nothing.

No rank.

Nothing to lose.

Nobody whose opinion decides anything about his week.

By the chain, he should be still.

So look at the men who went there on purpose.

The monks.

A lifetime of practice.

And still: the abbot, the brothers, the rule, God.

Their own clothes. Their own gestures. Their own ladder.

The beggar’s bowl became a rank of its own. Ouch!

Same animal.

Different room.

There is one case I cannot close.

The yogi in the Himalayas.

Not the monastery version.

The real one.

Alone thirteen years. No order. No robe. Nobody to impress.

And the reason he might escape is not that he is alone.

Alone is easy.

Sit in your car and see how alone you actually are.

The reason is stranger.

They say he stopped seeing others as others.

If that is true, there is no audience left to build.

Not a man resisting the stage.

A man who cannot assemble one anymore.

I have never met him.

I am told he exists.

I cannot rule him out, and I am not going to pretend I can.

I am not saying he is a better version of us.

I am saying maybe he knows what it means to not perform. But I don’t.

The Last Colour

I don’t think so, is there an escape from peacocking?

Not at the top.

Not at the bottom.

You can sit on a throne of gold or hold a beggar’s bowl.

Same animal.

Different colour.

Here is the only thing I have left.

Some of us notice.

You catch yourself changing colour halfway through the sentence.

Your boss walks into the room and your tone changes.

Someone attractive appears and suddenly you have opinions about music.

Your mother calls and you are seventeen again.

You hear yourself say “good point” and know perfectly well you do not think it was a good point.

For years I thought noticing proved there was a real me underneath.

The observer.

The one who caught the performance.

The honest one.

Now I am not so sure.

Maybe the one doing the noticing is only another colour.

A later performance judging an earlier one.

Maybe that is why we laugh at old photographs of ourselves.

Look at that idiot.

The shirt.

The hair.

The angle.

But that boy did not think he was pretending.

He picked the shirt.

He picked the angle.

He looked at the photograph before putting it up and thought:

yes.

That is me.

He was as sure then as I am now.

That is the part I cannot get around.

Now, I will get up from this desk and do it again.

I will say “good point” to men I disagree with.

I will play complaince with power until i can afford to be noncomplaint

I will be one man with my friends, another with my father, another at work.

Not because I finally discovered which one is fake.

Because I am beginning to suspect that is the wrong question.

Maybe there is no true colour waiting underneath all the others.

Maybe the mistake was believing authenticity meant staying one colour.

The chameleon was never lying.

All its colours were real. And so, apparently, are mine.

Happy Peacocking