Think about dual identities for a minute. In the world of superheroes, dual identities are very common. Here’s a short, partial, but fairly representative list of the sorts of dual identities to be found in superhero stories:

The Hero Identity	The Normal Identity
Aquaman	Arthur Curry Orin
Batman	Bruce Wayne
Black Canary	Dinah Drake
Captain America	Steve Rogers
Captain Marvel	Billy Batson
Daredevil	Matt Murdock
Flash	Barry Allen
Green Arrow	Oliver Queen
Green Lantern	Hal Jordan
Hawkman	Carter Hall
The Hulk	Bruce Banner
Invisible Girl	Sue Storm
Iron Man	Anthony Stark
Mr. Fantastic	Reed Richards
Spider-Man	Peter Parker
Superman	Clark Kent
Wonder Woman	Diana Prince
Woody Allen	Allen Stewart Konigsberg

I threw that last one in just to make sure you’re paying attention.

As soon as anyone gets superpowers and takes on a mission of dramatic crime fighting or world-saving outside normal channels, he or she always seems to face an immediate and unexpected wardrobe challenge. “What am I going to wear?” And the answer almost inevitably involves some sort of a mask, or a surrounding hood of brightly colored spandex, often with just eye-holes and a mouth opening at least large enough to sip through a straw. Then the next question seems to be: “What am I going to call myself?” Although, after donning the new outfit, some heroes suddenly find themselves too busy to worry about that one, and just get named by innocent bystanders. With the striking costume and new name, a new identity comes into existence. And it’s not always about secrets.

Everyone knows who the Invisible Girl is. It’s Sue Storm. She doesn’t try to hide her real identity. In the same way, everyone knows that Reed Richards is Mr. Fantastic. They don’t attempt to use their flashy outfits or catchy new names to mask their true, original identities. For them, the spiffy superhero presentation is more like a team uniform or a mode of dress that says, “I’m on-the-job.” In this regard, think of scientists’ lab coats, doctors’ scrubs, a Marine’s fatigues, or that guy at the garage with “Bob” stitched on his grease-stained shirt. There’s no secret identity stuff going on here (unless Bob’s real name is actually “Frank” or “Charley”—in which case you’d better scrutinize your repair bill a little more carefully). But there is something a little bit like a dual identity captured in each of these cases. Butch Bassham the Marine lieutenant may be a tough, aggressive, and even frightening guy in his full battle regalia, and while performing his duties, he may even get called “Wild Dog” by his compatriots. But he might also be the nicest dad a kid could have, and act as a kind, loving husband at home. When he puts on the uniform, he makes a transition into an alternative role, and to some extent, an alternate identity. This doesn’t mean that Butch is a schizophrenic, or a person with multiple personality disorder, or that he has any other sort of psychological pathology. We play different roles in the world, and when one of those roles is very difficult, we often go into a different mode of self-identity and self-presentation in order to perform it well.

Philosophy professors often don tweed sport coats, and carry ratty brief-cases, redolent with hidden wisdom. Your white-coated physician will stand over you adorned with all those official accessories like a stethoscope, hospital name badge, and a bunch of tongue depressors sticking out of her pocket. Many of us have lucky ties, power suits, or some outfit that we put on for special, high-pressure situations. More people than we realize dress to impress, and there are many ways to do so. The amount of life that involves bluffing by appearance can sometimes be a bit scary to contemplate, and quite interesting. And it’s relevant to the superheroes.

Batman has always been very honest about his costume. It was designed to strike fear into the hearts of criminals, who, as he often reflected, are “a superstitious and cowardly lot.” It was a piece of theater for a purpose. His outfit was meant to effect something in the minds and emotions of his adversaries, something supportive of his mission, giving him perhaps a split-second advantage that might make all the difference to the outcome of an otherwise well-matched fight. For most of the superheroes, the outfit, and the identity that goes with it, is a means to an end. It’s a calling card and a tool—a threat to the bad guys that gets them off their game, and a reassurance to the good folks that help has arrived.

I think it’s a general rule in our society that women are even more conscious of clothing choices and their effects on those around them than men are. In part, that’s because women are simply more conscious of everything than men are. And it’s natural to assume that the same holds true in the world of superheroes. In that case, it won’t just be guys like Batman who use costuming as a tool. I’ve always hoped that the most scantily and provocatively clad female superheroes chose their striking costumes for similar reasons and not because they were just outrageous exhibitionists. They knew they could rely on the “gawk factor” to give them an extra split second, or in the case of some bad guys, all the time they could want, to get the edge and win the day. While the bad guy was momentarily frozen, sizing her up, the beautiful and well-displayed female superhero would already be busy taking him down. Now, it could be that this is too generous an assumption, and that it’s the comic-book illustrators and their readers who have always been doing the main gawking. But it’s preferable to assume the best about both real and fictional characters, whenever possible.

Many athletes use clothing as a tool. You can sometimes see runners on cold days dressed in something like bright red long johns, white gym shorts, and a vibrantly colored jacket trudging down the side of the road. By putting on those special clothes, reserved only for their runs, many of those runners get themselves “up” emotionally for the experience, focusing their minds, and making themselves emotionally ready to take on the elements for miles and miles.⁹¹ The bright colors also help keep them from getting hit by a car. So there is often a dual purpose for such outfits, and it works.

But for most of the superheroes, getting into an outfit isn’t just a matter of psychological self-preparation or of public perception. And it isn’t just a matter of dual identities—one hat at work and another at home. There is much more at stake than this. For most of the superheroes, a dual identity is primarily about masking. The costume and the superhero persona (from the Latin for “mask,” or presentation) keep a secret. The people who see Spider-Man in action are not to know that he’s Peter Parker. And the people who see Peter each day are not to know that he’s Spider-Man. Attorney Matt Murdock doesn’t want people to know he’s Daredevil. And Daredevil is just as eager to prevent people from realizing he’s the blind lawyer of Hell’s Kitchen, Matt Murdock.

Keeping Secrets

This is a small point, but one worth making and highlighting. Secret identities go both ways. When Spider-Man is busy web-slinging and crime-fighting, he doesn’t want people to know that he’s really the young Peter Parker. And when Peter is at school, he can’t allow his mates to know that he’s the crime-fighting superhero, Spider-Man. He often wishes they knew, so that he’d get a little more respect. But he realizes that the knowledge of his alternate, crime-fighting identity could put them and him in jeopardy. Secrets are hard for people to keep, especially interesting and even exciting secrets. If any of his friends knew that Peter was a superhero, and let that information slip in the hearing of the wrong person or at the wrong time, great danger could result. Villains who can’t defeat a superhero in direct battle are always eager to get to their loved ones and friends in order to gain a unique form of leverage. And this could be disastrous for everyone involved. So the secrets seem justified.

However, an ethical problem involving secret identities has crossed the minds of many comic-book readers over the years. Secrecy involves deception, and deception, like outright lying, is considered by most good people to be a bad thing. Superheroes stand for the good, the true, and the just. How then can they justify the deceptions and even blatant lies necessary to create and preserve their secret identities? Honorable conduct seems to be definitive for all the classic superheroes. Therefore, secret identities appear to pose a problem.

First of all, as philosophers we should be careful here. Deception isn’t always wrong. We all admire a good quarterback fake in football, or a masterful head fake in basketball that allows the guard to blow by his opponent and get an open shot to the basket. There is a special place for skillful deception in sports. But even that is carefully regulated and very limited. It’s one thing for the punter to fake a kick when he really intends to pass the ball, but it’s another thing altogether for a lineman to try to hide the fact that he’s illegally holding an opponent, or punching him in the face. Not all deception is allowed in sporting contexts. Lying to the referee or umpire might be expected of many players these days, but almost no one off the field, in their more reflective moments, will think it’s morally commendable, or even acceptable.⁹²

An author can mislead us in the course of his suspense yarn, and we may applaud the deception that surprises us. But if he plagiarizes from another writer and tries to cover it up, that’s different. A painter can deceive us with a clever perspective and bring us delight. But if he dupes us when we purchase his work, we won’t be amused at all. In sport and in art, skillful deception within the rules is acceptable, but not outside the context legitimately created by the rules of the activity itself. The question we need to ask is whether there is anywhere in real life, apart from such artificial, special contexts as sport and art, where it’s also ethically permissible.

Although we don’t talk about it much, the answer is yes. While all developed and sensitive moral traditions condemn lies and deceptions generally, most of them also allow for important, though rare real-life exceptions. In one philosophical way of making the distinction, although a lie may always be in itself a bad thing, judged as to its own nature, it can sometimes, in extreme circumstances, be morally right, or even obligatory. If a lie or a deception is reasonably judged to be necessary for the avoidance of great harm to an innocent person, or is the only thing that will prevent an unnecessary act of killing from taking place, then the lie or deception is typically considered morally permissible and morally justified. We may even sensibly go so far as to offer moral praise to a soldier in wartime, or to a cop on the beat, who is able to disarm a dangerously murderous adversary by deception instead of using extreme force to severely injure or kill him.

The deceptions that superheroes have to engage in to create and preserve their secret identities are likewise typically morally justified, and perhaps can even be morally praiseworthy, rather than being merely acceptable-though-regrettable, in so far as they are reasonably judged necessary to protect innocent people from harm, including prominently those to whom the superheroes bear special obligations, like family members, good friends, civilian co-workers, and significant others. In some circumstances, maintaining a secret identity may be just the thing to do. It can be part of the behavioral repertoire of a good and honorable person involved in extreme situations.⁹³

Superman’s Interesting Motivation

Many comic-book fans and writers have claimed in recent years that Superman is different from the average superhero with respect to this secret identity issue. Their point is typically that, in other cases, the superhero identity is a secondary, artificially constructed identity, while the original, ordinary civilian identity is the real one, but that for Superman, it’s the other way around. Superman is really a super-powered alien. He was not born as Clark Kent but as Kal-El on the distant planet Krypton. He then later took on the ordinary civilian identity of Clark Kent. The Clark Kent persona is then the disguise, and the bright blue tights with their splashy color-coordinated emblem really present us with the actual identity. The mild-mannered awkward reporter guise is just that, a sustained ruse to keep people from knowing where Superman normally works and relaxes when he’s not in costume and on duty.

Spider-Man was Peter Parker before being bitten by the spider and gaining his superpowers, with their related second identity. Batman was little Bruce Wayne long before he took on the goals, knowledge, power, skills and couture that created his alternate identity as Batman. Daredevil was the excellent student and nice guy Matt Murdock first, and that particular young man took on his second identity for a purpose. In case after case, we see regular people gaining superpowers and donning a second identity for various reasons that are crucial for the mission they have chosen to assume. The real identity is the civilian one. But Superman is different.

One thing that is interesting about the case of Superman is that, of course, he didn’t originally and intentionally devise the cloaking identity of Clark Kent for any specific purpose at all. The Kansas farm couple Jonathan and Martha Kent found him as a small baby abandoned in a space-ship out in their corn field and did what any good Midwesterners would do under similar circumstances—no, they didn’t call the National Enquirer or set up a roadside attraction, they took him in and gave him their family name. We all know the background story. On the planet Krypton, the scientist Jor-El discovered that his entire world was about to be destroyed. He put his new baby Kal-El into a custom designed space-ship, presumably with an ample supply of toys, sippy-cups, and whatever else was needed, and blasted him into space, hoping that he could survive. The infant made it through the interplanetary journey, somehow crash-landed safely outside the town of Smallville, and was raised by the Kents as their son Clark. With the passing years, when he began to realize that he had superpowers, he knew he should hide this fact from everyone except his parents, and most likely for the reason that if other people knew, they’d all probably likely freak out and do something stupid that would be bad for everyone involved.

So as a young man, and then later as an adult, Clark didn’t want people to know he was really Superman. And that can sound precisely like the cases of Matt Murdock and Peter Parker, and so many of the rest—once they realized they had superpowers, they didn’t want other people to know. But they already had a core personal identity of a normal sort before gaining those extra powers. With Clark, the powers preceded the developed civilian identity. And his real identity was not that of a human at all. Uniquely, it seems, his superhero identity is his real, core identity.

When Clark moved away from home and went to Metropolis to experience life in the big city and find his destiny, he faced a choice that any of us confront when we go off to college or move to a new part of the country. Who will we be? How will we present ourselves? What image will we cultivate? Of course, our small-town alien farm-boy continued to use the name ‘Clark Kent’ but also began assiduously to cultivate a special persona involving a meek and mild manner, a social awkwardness, and a skittish sensibility that would remove him as far as possible from any image remotely considered heroic. Otherwise, his phony thick-framed black glasses alone would never likely succeed in keeping people from recognizing him as the Man of Steel, given his identical height, weight, and coloring, along with the awkward fact that he was often seen in the proximity of events involving Superman, yet somehow seemed to disappear during all the excitement, only to be found later by his friends with slightly mussed hair and a question about “What happened while I was gone?” Fortunately for Clark, people in Metropolis are apparently a little slow at connecting the dots.

Why did Superman consciously choose to disguise himself as the newspaper reporter, Clark Kent? First, it clearly served his purposes as a crime-fighter to be in a newsroom, keeping up on all breaking stories and having the opportunity to get out as a roving journalist, ostensibly to cover the news, but actually to make it. And it could be that, at least at first, keeping a secret about who he really was had been undertaken partly to protect his human family and all the good people of the Daily Planet from what would otherwise very likely have been various forms of unpleasantness, including the parade of paparazzi and celebrity interviewers who would inevitably camp out on the lawn, the various authorities, promoters, and hucksters who would be bringing requests and urgent demands to his family and friends in order to get some back-door access to him, and especially the very serious potential of kidnappings and deadly reprisals on the part of the frustrated villains he knew he would have to thwart and subdue on a fairly regular basis. But haven’t you always suspected that there was more to the story than just this?

Superman, of all the great superheroes, is best positioned to defend or rescue anyone in his inner circle who might be threatened with harm of any kind. With super-senses and super-speed to go with his super-strength, he can track what’s going on, get there, and deal with it like no one else. Perhaps part of the secrecy about his identity is meant just to cloak his background in mystery. After all, the less people know about him and his origin, the less access they can have to information that might be compromising to him, such as the fact that he’s vulnerable to Kryptonite. Any less-than-omnipotent being has to be on the defensive, and part of any good defense involves guarding information that might give an enemy an advantage. But I suspect there is even more going on than this.

Superman knows he is an alien. He feels like an alien. He is the ultimate outsider. But he has tasted enough of human life and the human condition to feel very attracted to it, and deeply drawn into it. Jonathan and Martha Kent were good and loving parents, and Clark grew up experiencing friendship, sadness, excitement, happiness, hope, and all the normal emotions and relationships of a genuinely human life. At some level, it seems that he wants desperately to be human, or at least to know what it means to be human in the deepest, most intimate possible way. And he understands enough about human reactions to realize that this will not be feasible if he’s perceived as being who he really is. He has to fit in. He can’t stand out in the way that he would if the whole truth were known about him.

Imagine if a person about your age and demeanor were to walk up to you in a crowded cafeteria, or in a packed fast-food restaurant, and ask if he or she can share an open space at your table. You barely look up, but agree, and the stranger sits down to eat. This intrusion will interrupt and alter your emotional state to some small extent. You’ll feel the presence of someone you don’t know, and it might make you the slightest bit uncomfortable. But it would be easy to greet the person and start up a conversation, and then after a while, you might feel like you’ve made a new friend. But let’s take this little thought experiment and make a slight change in it. When you glance up at the stranger, you’re utterly shocked to see that it’s your favorite movie star, or rock star, a person you’d never expect to see in the flesh in your entire life, but whose poster you have on your wall. The emotional reaction is likely to be vastly different. It will be extremely hard for you to act completely natural and feel anywhere near normal in the presence of this individual. That’s the difference the “other-ness” of celebrity can make. The seventeenth century philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) saw that this is all a function of our imaginations, and is not at all due to the other person existing on a different dimension of reality, or being of an alien race.⁹⁴

But now change the story again and let the stranger actually be recognizable as a unique alien being from another planet with superpowers that could save or destroy, heal or kill in an instant. It will be as hard as possible to have a normal, natural conversation with such an individual and to go away with anything other than a major case of the heebie-jeebies. The restaurant would probably empty out as if it were on fire, and the local SWAT team would be outside within minutes, surrounding the place until the federal authorities could arrive. You’d be very unlikely to end up sharing an order of fries and your life stories. If even Batman, a fully human being, in all his dark and menacing power stood over you in a dimly lit parking lot, the mere force of his presence would probably make your heart race and adrenaline pump through your body. Your skin might crawl, you could tremble with fear, and you might even hurl or pass out. In other words, anything remotely resembling a normal relationship would be, at best, quite difficult. Multiply even that a few times and you can get some sense of how hard it would be for a clearly super-powered alien to walk among us in all his other-ness and yet experience ordinary human relationships and, through them, the full emotional range of the human condition. If such a being craved this experience, he would have to appear among us so well disguised that he could blend in and be accepted as one of us. That’s exactly what I think Superman decided long ago to do. His true identity is indeed that of the Man of Steel, but I suspect that at least an important part of him wishes it were Clark Kent.

In the Bhagavad-Gita, the great Hindu holy text, the god-like Ultimate Being Krishna takes on the appearance of an ordinary chariot driver in order to help guide the prominent leader Arjuna at an important juncture in his life. In this identity, Krishna is able to have a casual conversation with Arjuna, and the leader listens to his wisdom. In the Bible, we are told that God the Son, a literally divine being, took on the form of a man, and the fullness of our condition, in order to experience what we experience, suffer what we suffer, and save us from the deepest consequences of our heedlessly selfish ways by transforming us, as one of us, and as more. But the New Testament is full of what theologians call “the messianic secret”—the reluctance of Christ to reveal the fullness of what and who he really is until the people around him are ready to understand and accept it. These themes are reflected in various ways in many of the best Superman narratives over the decades. The greatest guardian, defender, and savior must be one of us, while also being more than us.

Superman doesn’t aim to serve the world exactly as the alien Martian Man-Hunter might, or even as Alan Moore’s Dr. Manhattan, in all his aloof other-ness, would. He doesn’t want to be a nearly Aristotelian God, an unmoved mover of the world, isolated in his own autonomous independence. He craves an existential connection to us. He wants to serve us as really one of us. His secret identity as Clark Kent isn’t just a normal superhero ploy, one more tool or weapon in the super-arsenal. It’s a crucial part of a real quest to live the human adventure and guard humanity from within. And I can’t help but believe that this desire is the result of the love he was given by his human parents, and even by some of his childhood friends. The transformative power of their total acceptance of him and commitment to him has elicited within him a desire to share mutual acceptance and commitment with more of the people of this world.

Switching Identities

Can Superman really become Clark Kent in more than a disguise? I want to say, “Tune in next week to find out,” but I can’t. We have to settle this here. As almost every superhero says at some point in his career, “This ends now.” I’m joking, of course, but only partly. To get a better fix on whether Superman could ever possibly change fundamental identities and in any sense become primarily Clark Kent, let’s look for a moment at his iconic counterpart, Batman.

Superman and Batman are the Plato and Aristotle of the comic-book world. Plato is the theoretical philosopher of the Ideal, the other-worldly spiritual thinker who directs our gaze away from the details of this world and focuses us on the heavenly pattern of The Good. Superman is from the heavens, embodies our ideals, and is always committed to The Good, to such an extent that he’s often referred to as the superhero Boy Scout. Aristotle, by contrast, is the earthly, this-worldly thinker, interested in the natural sciences and immersed in the practical and the real. He is also thought of as the inventor of logic, but is perhaps best described as one of its primary discoverers and its first masterful expositor. Likewise, Batman is the down-and-dirty, pragmatic, this-worldly superhero who uses whatever is available, but is at the same time a master of applicable science and technology, along with being the supreme detective, an unsurpassable practitioner of logic in all that he does. Superman is the most super-powered superhero. Batman is the most human superhero, having no superpowers at all. Yet Batman is perhaps the only member of the Justice League of America who could take down all the others, including Superman, if they ceased to serve the world properly and went out of control as the destructive forces they are capable of being. Thus, in an odd way, Superman and Batman are counterparts.

We began our discussion of secret identities with the claim of many commentators that Superman is different from all the other dual-identity superheroes in having as his core identity not his civilian persona, but his superhero persona. But he might in the end have one companion sharing that category with him—Batman. Batman did start life as Bruce Wayne, and only later became the Dark Knight. However, this second identity arose not from some sort of tragic accident that mysteriously brought with it superpowers, as in the case of so many superheroes, but rather from years of intentional effort and painful transformation. Bruce Wayne worked at a superheroic level in cultivating his human qualities to their maximal extent. As a result, he has become the perfect specimen, mentally and physically, for one purpose: to keep the promise he made to his dead parents and do all within his power to fight the crime around him. This mission consumes him to the extent that it makes other normal human activities and experiences more difficult, and some almost impossible.⁹⁵

As you track Bruce Wayne over the years, you can see his transition from a wealthy industrialist who seems to dabble in fighting crime on the side to a totally focused and committed crime-fighter who merely uses his persona as the wealthy Bruce Wayne—industrialist, socialite, and playboy—to keep his real life going as a nearly full-time vigilante and self-created superhero. At the start of his dual identity, his core identity was clearly that of Bruce Wayne, and his alternate, secondary identity, taken on for a purpose, was that of Batman. But as it stands now, years down the road, it seems to me that there has been a gradual, surprising transformation such that the core identity may have become that of Batman, and the secondary, alternative identity for special purposes is that of Bruce Wayne. The image of Bruce may have become the real mask at this point. And if this transformation has actually occurred, then Superman isn’t the only superhero whose primary identity is that of the powerful costumed crime-fighter. Batman now shares the category.

And of course, our final twist is that if such a transformation has been possible in the case of Bruce Wayne and Batman, why not also in the opposite case of Superman and Clark Kent? That is to say, we might be led to ask: given the motivation and the effort, what’s to stop Superman from so altering himself existentially that, ultimately, he becomes at least, in some important sense, really Clark Kent as his core identity? It wouldn’t be the strangest thing ever to happen in superhero stories. But it would be among the most subtle and instructive things to occur there.

Actually, I think what we may be led to conclude in both these cases is that a duality has replaced a singularity, but with a new, fused unity. What I mean is that Bruce Wayne’s identity may have evolved to the extent that he is at least as much Bats as Bruce. Some of Batman’s superhero friends may have doubts about the healthiness of this transition, and so they insist on calling him “Bruce” when they are alone with him, away from the ears of the public, almost as if they are calling him back to remember the person he started out as, and the person it might be a little healthier to be, as his core.

Likewise, Mark Waid has persuaded me that it makes sense to see Superman as inwardly embracing his alien otherness as an important part of the path of authenticity and genuineness in his own life.⁹⁶ Because of this, if I am right in thinking that so much of him inwardly yearns for more of an identification with human-ness, to the extent that he often wishes he were just Clark Kent, it may be that what results eventually is not a transformation of core identity from Kryptonian to Kansan, but rather a similar blended duality enhancing what would otherwise have been a singular persona merely using a costume—in this case, of a newsman—for special purposes. And, when you think about it, don’t many of us see the same sort of transformation occurring in our own lives, when what starts out as a mask, or costume, or a specialized role, becomes more fused to who we really are, so that in the end our core identity grows into something more complex and interesting?

There is a fascinating thing that sometimes happens in the cross-breeding of plants that botanists refer to as “heterosis”—a phenomenon of superior strength that results in some cases of hybridization, where the blended individual that comes into existence can have all the strengths but not all the weaknesses of the two identities that gave it birth. Perhaps Superman and Batman can experience this in their own different ways, as they reap some of the deeper benefits of what we can think of as role integration, or as identity expansion. As the case of Batman shows, it can sometimes be dangerous in personal ways to integrate certain roles into our core identities. But with sufficient care, we can expand our identities in ways that strengthen and deepen us.

Regardless of where we come out on the surprising issue of whether Bruce Wayne could actually become at the deepest levels Batman, so that, like Superman traditionally, his civilian identity is the real mask, or whether Superman could actually become Clark Kent as his core existential identity, our main conclusion here can be at least that secret identities are no simple matter, and are even more interesting than they might initially have appeared. Likewise, personal identities of any kind are not as straightforward as we might have been tempted to suppose. Our core identities can grow, develop, and take on new elements that either strengthen us, or weaken us.

Costumes, masks, and alternative personae can be used for multiple reasons, they can be ethically employed, they can be very effective, and perhaps they can even be transformative. We all know about stories where undercover cops or secret government agents have lived too long in their alternative identities and have “turned” for the bad. Why can’t inner transformation also go the other way around? It could be that taking on the costume and launching out in committed, dutiful action as a masked superhero can really effect an inner change of some sort on at least most of those individuals whose crime-fighting and world-saving escapades have entertained and enlightened us for decades. It could also be that by trying long enough to live as Clark Kent, Superman will actually and deeply become a person that he would never otherwise have been.

A further conclusion would then seem to follow that we ourselves should exercise great care if we are ever tempted to put on bright tights and a mask and call ourselves by a different name. Every mask leaves an impression on the person who wears it. And any mask may eventually become more of a reality than we ever imagined. Who we are is always a matter of how we act. And what we become is the result of the activities we engage in day to day. The great philosopher Aristotle knew it, and so have many other insightful thinkers through the centuries, like Blaise Pascal, and William James (1842-1910).⁹⁷ If we could keep this truth in mind throughout all our endeavors, we would be able to exercise a good deal more care in what we become.

Dual Identities

Keeping Secrets

Superman’s Interesting Motivation

Switching Identities