fine whine

I'm slowly sifting through the boxes and folders and binders that comprise my past, the detritus and artifacts portion of it at least. Somewhere in there I'm pretty sure I once wrote down an idea into which I put a lot of stock in high school: that being that I did not have a single personality, per se. My actions and reactions varied by the time of day and present company so much that at one point I had a list of some seven different Mikes (though it'd started out as nine or ten before I narrowed it down) in which I found myself, or bits thereof.

How was I to know that this was not a unique idea to me? Only now, when I flip through a book read on a whim (Tom Blass' The man who shocked the world: the life and legacy of Stanley Milgram) about a brilliant social scientist, that I stumbled across this snippet from his past:

By means which I am far from understanding, different girls cause me to behave differently in their presence. It is not volition that mediates these changes in behavior, but the direct, almost automatic effect of the presence of one girl or another, and it is quite out of my power to alter the effect of the particular girl I am with. So that what I am, my personality if you will, does not exist apart from my present company.

Stan Milgram wrote that in a journal days before Valentine's Day of 1957, long before starting the experiments that would propel him to wild fame and mild infamy. You know, the ones wherein he'd try to get some poor sap to "electrocute" another "test subject" (actually a good actor and confederate) by ordering him to do so. An overwhelming majority of people did so, pushing the "victim" far beyond the apparent limits of comfortable electrical shock. There's a lot more to this story, but I'm not going to talk about it when Tom Blass has already done it so well.