Walker Percy begs many questions from the reader in Lost in the Cosmos. From whether or not you understand sexuality to why our species gets bored, the philosopher and novelist gets you thinking in on way or another. In the first section of the ‘self help book’ Percy gives us a laundry list of selves to analyze. The reader is prompted to “test [your] knowledge of the peculiar status of the self, yourself, and other selves”. Percy earnestly wants society to see where they fall short, whether it be arrogance, technology, or fashion (Check One).
One particularly relatable self presented in this section is the Fearful Self. This fear, is not that of Halloween, rather a fear of one-on-one time with each other. It’s a sort of insecurity one might say, in which the self cannot truly express itself for fear that others will discover it is lost as well. It’s hard to fathom why should humans are terrified to be surrounded by our own kind, after all, “A wolf howling alone in a wolf pack doesn’t get stage fright” (29).
Diversion to hide the self is one way to compensate for this “stage fright”. When the Cosmos was being written in the 1980’s the diversion could have been the walkman or the crazy neon clothing. In today’s world technology is not merely a diversion society turns to, but also a mask to hide behind. A controversial example of this are the online Role Playing Games or RPGs. These games take the user to an alternate reality and let them build their own avatar, or “mask”, to communicate with other players. In an article on the Karger Medical and Scientific Publishers webpage, players of RPGs ‘self concept’ was highly impaired and identification with the avatars was heightened among those addicted to RPGs. With this connection being made, here are some directed points of discussion:
- Which self can you identify with the most? Or rather, which self provoked the most thought for you?
- Are RPGs and similar games representative of the notion we are lost selves, and even fearful selves?
utopos et eutopos 