It's hard to take a step back from your own thoughts and trifles in a social setting and just observe. (A prescription: TRY IT!) When I accomplish this, I get this weird vibe that everyone is just acting. Acting for themselves? Acting in accordance with what they deem themselves to be, i.e. their identity? Probably. But, as the observer, it comes out weird and twisted, like they're all acting for me.
For instance, when I'm in the library, working on a paper or just passing time on the internet, I drift from the task at hand and catch myself observing how everyone is like a little busy ant doing their own thing. But if you watch them, and I don't mean with a creepy, sketch-ball-kind-of-stare, (although that's fun, too) but watch them from a standpoint of humble curiosity, (like the standpoint that Jane Goodall's observations of chimpanzees must have come from,) there comes a point to where they know someone is watching and their eyes meet yours for the shortest moment.
This moment of meeting and fleeting eyes is almost of a transcendent quality. If the stare holds, it is of a transcendent quality. Nearly every time I experience it I feel as though I am akin to Jim Carrey's character in The Truman Show. This retrospective analysis of my experience of meeting and fleeting eyes seems somewhat of a jump from what is merely being observed, but I can't help but have this schizophrenic-like paranoia that everyone and everything around me is fake and not real.
This is a different kind of take on external world skepticism, and it's very similar to being just plain old crazy. But the truth is, the nature of the skeptical doubts that turn the wheels of any skepticism are the same kind of skeptical doubts that would promote this narcissistic skepticism that I am describing. For instance, if to have knowledge of the external world requires me to prove that I, in fact, am not dreaming, then I really can't have knowledge of the external world, if knowledge is to be understood as that which is indubitable. For if I cannot prove that I am not dreaming, then all that I am experiencing could be a dream. Any test that I conjure could itself be a part of this dream. (Ahh, this skepticism is dense and smells like burnt hair.) That is the Dream Argument originally proposed by Descartes.
Now, I am going to propose another version of this skepticism, which claims that I cannot prove whether or not this social construct, along with all of you mofos out there, is a sham, a fake, an act....
"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages."
-Shakespeare
Now, what I am invoking this quote to emphasize is probably not what Shakespeare had in mind when writing it. (But, maybe it is what he had in mind.) That is besides the point.
The point is that I cannot prove whether or not the world is just a stage. Everyone could be really good actors, and my life could be an experiment, and I have no way of proving otherwise. If B.F. Skinner were God, then narcissistic skepticism would not be too farfetched of an idea.
It's like I'm waiting for Morpheus to present me with the choice of a red or blue pill.
Red pill: you keep living your life as you know it; A mundane, fake existence. (Well, really, what is a real existence? I don't think there is a definition.)
Blue pill: prepare to watch your reality get torn to shreds, wherein a new reality will replace it. Ideally, the new reality will be one that you construct, so you don't have to keep taking these blue pills.
Eh, I don't like taking pills anyway.
In the end, I think this narcissistic skepticism is kind of fun. If the world is a stage, a stage for acting, a stage that has been set up, then use it to its fullest capacity. The self-awareness that is evoked from this view of the world is of the upmost existential kind. It reminds me that I create the way in which I see the world.
