People Never Change

To the amazing writers of 'House MD' and Hugh Laurie for unraveling the very many hypocrisies of human nature.

It is truly worth wondering how many of life’s problems would be simplified if one had the capacity to think straight, at all times. To look past the smog of circumstance and have a word with rationale. To broaden our gaze and make room for just another thought. To steel our mind, keep apart our misplaced ideals, uncompromising perspectives and emotional impulses and, for a moment, dare to stare at the face of reason.

When we don’t know the right answer, we usually settle with the choice that makes us feel better. That doesn’t make it good. It doesn’t even make it less wrong. There’s nothing that can’t be explained, eventually, but some of us become such masters in the act of convincing ourselves that our own lies start seeming more correct than the truth.

People become the basis of our actions and reactions, not our thoughts, like an excuse not to be decent in an indecent time. We either pine for the social approval of everyone we meet or if that doesn’t work, pride ourselves in being the bigger of two evils.

It is ironic that it is precisely what makes us human that makes us vulnerable. It is the very substance of an animal that keeps raging inside, chained and angry. Waiting to cut loose, prance around and unleash more of its kind. It is repressed but not extinct- yearning to break the countless shackles we punish itself with and for once, be in its own skin.

It is one of the great tragedies of life that something always changes. But people don’t change, they learn. Sometimes they learn to forget. But the most fundamental nature of a person- his instincts, fears, fetishes, passions- remains the same.

We learn what is more acceptable; what gets us through situations, what makes it easy, what pleases those who must be pleased and most importantly- what helps us tame the animal inside for as long as required. It’s not a method. It is a stupid trick that we attempt to master, perpetually. An institutionalization. The fact that we all pull the same trick on ourselves before each other only makes it stupider. But deep down, we remain the same, just piling on skins one over the other until we forget how we actually looked- what we were truly made of.

No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.

We all tell the same lies. It is funny how we can ever believe whatever little we think we do.