Multiple personalities: we all have 'em

I once had a friend who I liked a lot.  He was a great guy.  Then another person very close to me, went to work with him – and couldn’t stand him. Really came to hate his guts.  That led me to a theory that everyone has 3 personalities:

1. how they deal with superiors
2. how they deal with peers
3. how they deal with employees

Some people have three almost schizophrenically varying personalities, while for others they are barely distinguishable – they treat the CEO much the same as the janitor. The vast majority of us, I suspect, are in the middle somewhere, partly depending on such factors as how attuned we are to social gradations, how much we are impervious or vulnerable to the particular authorities above us in a hierarchy, etc.

People are least themselves in the first role, more so in the second, and in some ways their true nature really emerges in the third role. (That is the problem with relationships that start in hierarchies; the lower-level person is likely to have a fairly clear sense of what the boss is really like in all his or her roles   – or at least in the truest – but the boss only sees the superior-dealing personality of the inferior.)

It seems pretty clear that many people are not truly “themselves” when dealing with their superiors, because they are keen to present an idealized view of themselves, and so are constantly monitoring and trimming themselves and their natural impulses and behavior.  Likewise, many people may be somewhat self-conscious among their peers, whom they remain anxious to impress, while in the presence of their inferiors, they are more or less at liberty to let their hair down

Another argument could be made that people are most truly “themselves” in the second role, of dealing with their peers. That might be especially true when they are with people who are their true peers – people they are entirely comfortable with.  Of course, nominal peers that one does not know well or with whom one is not comfortable could be said to not truly be peers – they are merely people whose (social) hierarchical position is ambiguous and yet to be firmly established. 

But I would argue that position #2 is the healthiest, the most prone to produce happiness, because it prodcues the right balance of a) self-awareness and self-discipline – so that one’s inner spoiled child is not set free to torment others as tends to happen when a person posesses too much power – and b) freedom to express yourself with minimal self-limiting and -monitoring. 

In the end, of course, there is no “true self” that lies underneath these relationships.  We are defined by the situations we find ourselves in.  That is why it is important to have a democratic, egalitarian, middle class society, including democratic workplaces, where role #2 holds true most of the time, and roles #1 and #3 are always provisional and temporary and situationally bounded.

Maybe this is an overly hierarchical way of looking at the world, but hierarchy does seem to be central to other primates, and I suspect that, although we are far more complicated, hierarchy is a one layer or facet of our reality much of the time.  Sometimes it might be obvious, as in the military or a corporation, while other times it might be a subtle phenomenon of status or social hierarchy, as among the members of the local club.