Unsupported Speculation

“All that glisters is not gold“

– William Shakespeare

I have this funny idea that the previous centuries and even the ancient world, used to warn of a type of vanity by describing how it seems, rather than how it is.

Now imagine this: Say that Odysseus of The Iliad was not as smart as he seemed? What if instead he only lived life in a part of the mind that was completely full of itself? What if this part of the mind tended to only think of evil, and that preoccupied the majority of its cleverness? Lastly, what if this same part of the mind were as dumb as a stone in everything else?

This would be the explanation why he lost his mind and couldn’t return home in The Odyssey. ‘Home’ was symbolic of having lost his true self, and his long journey to try to get home represented the amount of time and effort it takes to excise such an influence from yourself, made more difficult because he would have to also give up the attractive idea of what an incredible genius he was.

You see a different twist of the same possible kind of warning in the story about Faust, who traded his soul to the devil in exchange for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. The story makes it sound as though if you made such a deal, you would receive your end of the bargain, but warns that eventually any deal with the devil will inevitably backfire.

But what I’m wondering is if instead such a person is only put into complete delusion about his capabilities and prowess? What if the devil only used his power to make you believe you were superior, though to everyone else they would know you were far inferior?

In that case, the devil could be said to have offered something it could never give, but he did have powers over pervasive self-delusion. And perhaps the prophesied warning in Faust that everything will eventually come crumbling down is symbolic for the eventual disaster of your life-affairs after making decisions as an evil moron for a long enough period of time.

A modern example may be Hannibal Lecter, the fictional genius, cannibal, serial killer. What if the author, Thomas Harris, was only making a joke about the enormous vanity of sociopaths, who all think that their doo-doo smells like roses, and will seek to utterly destroy anyone who inadvertently reminds them that it doesn’t? What if ‘Dr. Lecter’ is satire about what it’s like to be a sociopath, when all you are is a collection of contrived external appearances designed, by you,to give other people the very best impression of yourself?

It’s rather like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho making a big show about solving a crossword puzzle, when he can’t think of a single answer to write in it, Hannibal Lecter admiring Michelangelo’s “David”, and then wondering how he would cook one of the calves.