We Pretend These Truths To Be Self-Evident
Born in Shakespeare’s theater, self-evidence came into being at play's end.
That’s when Juliet and her Romeo--dead a moment ago--reappear as actors who take their bows. An audience of nameless and nobles, masters and apprentices, serfs and queens can now cheer and clap. From every stratum of society, all manner of person confirms by their applause what the return of Romeo and Juliet means: This play was a fake.
The party and the love? The fights and the balcony? The sex and the swords? The families and the feud? All fake.
And in the mirror of what is fake, everyone in the audience--named or ignoble, master or apprentice, serf or queen--reflects in exactly the same way, as equally real.
Because if the theater collapses or catches fire everyone will have to run, actors and audience alike, the queen no less than the rest. But Juliet and her Romeo? Those roles? They will be fine. They will be fine because real bleeds and fake does not, that’s the difference.
Only in the self can this difference be known.
Only a “me” or an “I” can know this knowing, and know it is knowing it.
On stage can everything is possible. In the audience, anything might be believed.
You might play Romeo, I might play Juliet, or vice versa.
I might even play you, you could play me. But one weird impossibility is that while we can play at being anything, even one another, we cannot be each other.
Being a self is to know this, to see the measure and boundary of “I” and “you.”
This singular self, defined by what it is not and against what is fake?
This is a revolution.
And “I am not fake and therefore I am” will bends the knee of every royal “we.”
Now the self measures out in singular units. Now each of us who is not fake has a self. Now, after Shakespeare, what is self-evidently true changes how the world adds up process and authority.
Out with the old math of all plus all equaling one--queen or crown—and in with the new math: one plus one equals all.
Where the old sum of authority ended, the essential calculus of democracy begins: We, the people. We the selves.
What Shakespeare invents, Jefferson and Franklin codify.
We pretend these truths to be self-evident they might have writ.
Because we choose our drama, we play the roles of state.
We act out the characters of representatives and senators.
And we choose one among us to costume up in the Office of The President.
We choose someone who serves us because they know, in the role, they are a fake.
Words are arrows. They do not bleed. And not understanding that tends to be fatal.