No one I have ever met is like me in any way. I am different, a species unto myself, a speices of single individual. Everyone I have ever met has a face. I don't. I don't. I don't have a face. I can see my hands, my legs, my chest, my abdomen, but I have never seen my own face, except reversed in a mirror, or distorted to fit the two-dimensional geometry of a photograph, or a video. But I have never seen my own face and I never will.
I go through the world almost haunting it, wondering if I am real, and seeking to prove my reality by my effects on the world around me. I am very self-conscious about my lack of face. It makes me fundamentally different from everybody. It makes my unique and also alone.
Often, when in public, I experience a sudden qualm - I have no face,and I must take care not to bring attention to myself, so I behave in an outwardly normal fashion, all the while feeling much as I do when I dream of walking around naked in public.
Very probably everybody I have ever met has experienced this same sensation of psychic nakedness, this sense of alienation that comes from the self-knowledge that 'my' experience is unlike any other that I can see. We react to this knowledge in a very visceral way. We don't like the isolation that comes from self-knowledge, and most of us do a very good job of going through our lives pretending that we are no different from others.
This is what motivates us to adopt a style of dress, a style of thought, a mannerism, a culture. We seek to blend in with the crowds we see around us - all those people who have faces. We seek to hide the fact of our own psychic nakedness by pretending we are no different from those we see.
This drive to avoid our individual nakedness if very strong - one of the strongest drives obsessing our species. It is this fear of psychic nakedness that drives us into clannish behavior, the entire gestalt of 'us against them' thinking. We make enemies in life partly to bond more closely with people we want as allies. We adopt the biases of those around us, their conventional wisdom, party lines, their tastes - all for the sake of proving to ourselves that we are real. Faceless though we may be, we are accepted by a particular herd, share this herd's fears and cravings, and therefore we must be real. Since they accept us, we must, be like those people who have faces.
But we are different. Each one of us is fundamentally different from all others. Each of us is a species of one. And all our attempts to camouflage our nakedness by identifying ourselves with a group fail to change the fundamental fact of our isolation. No matter how I try, I will never see my own face, but I see your faces attached to whole bodies.
Many people become violent when they are reminded that, like the emperor in the fairy tale, they are indeed walking around without any clothes. People want so urgently to live the illusion of being one human among many that they sometimes become murderous when a prophet insists that they strip away their illusionary garments and accept the fact of their psychic nakedness. This is why Socrates was executed, Jesus was crucified, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated and John Lennon murdered. They insisted on telling the truth, refused to accept half-lies, deceits or fantasy.
This 'fear of facelessness' also helps the politically-minded find the leverage to put themselves in positions of power. It is by pandering to the general fear of psychic isolation, by pandering to the illusion of 'community,' 'society' that the political mind finds support. "Put me in power," promises the politically minded, "and I will protect your herd for you, saving you the trouble. I will protect your herd from crime, war, poverty and pestilence, and you can then go on living happily with nothing to disturb the illusion that you are part of the herd, that you are 'one of us.'
The fact that no politician has ever delivered on his promise (putting the practical value of political philosophy far below that of astrology and phrenology), and the fact that all politicians usually bring about results precisely opposite to those the politicians claim to seek, does not seem to have diminished our curious enthusiasm for politics at all.
This is indicative of the power of our fear of psychic isolation. It makes no difference whether it does what it claims to do - so long as politics, or whatever else we use, helps us to avoid being alone with our own naked selves, we don't generally give a damn whether it works, or even whether it increases the level of real evil in the world.
This knowledge of our own psychic isolation is very frightening and very painful. It can make us neurotic, can provoke periods of psychosis. It is in part by their unique reactions to this private knowledge that 'I am different from everybody else' that we define certain personalities as 'sociopathic'. Solitary confinement is a very tough form of punishment - even the most socially maladapted find pain in being forced to confront their fundamental isolation and psychic nakedness.
But we can get used to it. We can get used to talking about without our faces on, and we can get comfortable with the sense of psychic isolation that comes with it. With experience, it comes to be less painful, even enjoyable. When we have dumped the weight of the compulsion to avoid confronting our own psychic isolation, we find we are less emotionally fatigued. We have energy to pay attention to those things which otherwise exhaust us after a few moments.
It becomes infinitely easier for us to understand our own selves, to much greater depth, and with much greater clarity. It also becomes much easier to understand the world around us, with all its ceaseless uncertainty. Illusions we cling to for the sake of asserting our 'reality' become unnecessary, for with familiarity, we learn that 'reality' and 'unreality' are bound together in an intimte dance, impossible to separate (Science is simply Magic wearing a new suit.) 'Reality' and 'unreality,'like Space and Time, are two aspects of the same phenomenon.
And then what happens is taht we start meeting others who have traveled down this same path, others who have also come forthrightly to terms with their own sense of isolation. Wtih this mutually shared piece of knowledge, we discover another level of companionship, one which is a deeper companionship because it is not based on avoidance or denial or shared illusion, but on self-knowing.
And it's only by facing our own psychic nakedness, and accepting our own real/unreal natures, that we can learn Peace. If Peace is what you really want, then you must learn to understand yourself.