Oscar Wilde once said, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” This quote basically says that in normal conditions, not everyone says their special thoughts out loud; but if you hide their personal identities, they will tell you with no scare. So we can ask ourselves this simple question: Why?
Wilde’s words make me reflect on the emotional armor people wear every day. There is a sadness in realizing how much of our lives are spent hiding, not because we don’t have any thoughts, its because of the fear of rejection, judgment, or exclusion. Furthermore, as we can see in the recent days, anyone who says something against the government just gets flushed away. This might not be something against the government too but it has to be something that they would not like. For example, Engin Arık (the proffesor that would rise Turkeys nuclear and electrical power) died because of a plane “accident” that took her life on the way to an important confenerce. Because of this fear, humans does not favour confessing their thoughts. Thats where hiding their identitys comes into the action. Masking the identity becomes a strange form of freedom. Behind it, we might confess our fears, thoughts, ideas and dreams that we would never dare to speak out loud in crowded.
The necessity of hiding identity might seem as a bad solution, but there are so many examples about the topic. A famous example is Mark Felt, who is known as “Deep Throat”. Eventhought he was a very highly ranked person, he still hided his identity (like 99% of the 8 billion people) to share his imformation about the Watergate scandal. If he wouldn’t have hide his identity, he would have died in an early age.
Unfortunately, hiding identity is one of the best solutions to confess special thoughts. People either has to use this way or has to zip their mouths. This is because of the cruel world but if you want to confess your ideas, you either end up like Prof. Dr. Engin Arık or like Mark Felt.