The hegemonic self unleashed

Have you ever caught yourself talking with your inner self? I am sure that at some point you asked your inner self a question...and got an answer. Now, how about an actual argument with that pretentious little guy? When that happens, it sometimes seems as if there were more than just two people wanting to have their say and have their voices heard; sometimes you get more than one opinion, and quite surprisingly, they all sound alike.
Many of us are so used to talking to ourselves (especially in this era of extreme individualism and egocentrism) that we often overlook the fact that what happens inside our heads is not a one-sided conversation, amonologue, but rather, some sort of deliberation, with many selves debating―or should we say clashing.
There is no place more undemocratic than the cluster inour minds. Perhaps, it would be more appropriate to talk about a confederation of selves. As in any confederation, there is a struggle for power, for supremacy. Some get their heads bashed, some manage to climb up near the top, and one―just one―gets to be the hegemonic self; the self you call “your-self”.
In other words, there is a whole universe inside us, albeit a rather chaotic one, governed by a few, fragile, laws. More important, however, is the idea that all those pugnacious selves were orbiting around you from the beginning. Sometimes there is relative harmony, and other times the collision looks like an encounter between matter and antimatter.
When you look at it this way, changes in our personality seem, ironically enough, less random. While it is true that there is no way of knowing which of your selves will eventually become “your-self”, the possibility of turning into something you have never been are remote. Don’t we sometimes say that a particular person is able to bring out the “best of us” or the “worst of us”, perhaps even our “dark side” or “nastier side”? All those egos were already there, and it only takes a spark to prompt a tweak.
For a more fundamental change in our identity, however, a simple spark will not do–it seems to take a bigger bang to shock the system. Immediately after that takes place, the quarrel gets settled, one of the brawling selves is put in command, and a new balance is created.
I have had the same group of friends since I was 15. A decade later, one got married, another is a struggling musician and a third one is a physicist, but all of them are, invariably, the same geeky dimwits from outer space they used to be. We still hang out together, and the things we are concerned with have remained more or less the same.
And then there is Marsh. Oh, should we have seen it coming. Marsh is a very intelligent guy, reserved, socially inept though warm-hearted and usually well-meaning; ever since we were teenager, he was the one person all the rest of us liked to tease because of his self-absorption. He never really did anything about it, but murmur some unintelligible set of curse words. Admittedly, he did not talk a lot, but when he did, he always had something good to say, as if an astronomical amount of mental activity had been going on before every utterance. Because of his introverted nature, however, we never really knew much about his doings.
This one time, being as taciturn as he was, we were astonished to find him talking with himself out loud. And it was not a simple muttering; it looked as if there was an actual war going on inside Marsh’s head. I grabbed his shoulder and asked him if he was alright, but he pushed my hand away and told me to leave him alone. I went to the other room, only to see him coming out after five minutes, swearing and smacking his own head around. We should have known then that a change had just taken place, but since Marsh did not mention it the day after, we decided to let it go.
A few weeks later, Marsh gave it to us straight: he despised us. He said we were a bunch of insensitive, imbecile, good-for-nothings, and that he had always loathed us. We were dumbstruck. From what we recollected, he was cross because we had forgotten his birthday, and on top of that, we had teased him on that very day. Evidently, that had prompted his uglier self to come out, the one that had revealed only its tail in Marsh’s mumblings. He had been able to subdue it before it could become his hegemonic self, until he chose to embrace it instead.
It has been a few years since then, and we hear Marsh is still that way. We felt guilty for some time, but as you know, my friends (and I) are dimwits (we seem to be really good at subduing our compassionate, mature selves). So now we joke about it, trying to predict who will be the next one to have a “Marsh-attack”. It is really not that funny if you consider what happened, but I suppose it is our way of showing our awareness, our understanding of people. Maybe, from now on we will be more careful not to push the wrong button in people: none of us wants to unleash another beast.