Charles Saatchi: Knowing yourself well, would you choose you as a friend?

 
charles saatchi pg 32
Charles Saatchi26 April 2012

What do you like most about yourself? What’s the best part of being you? What specific character trait do you want to be known for?

These are some of the unappetising questions I put to myself in seeking an answer to this; the only comfort I could find was my feeling that those who look for friends without faults will have none.

I did receive a Friendship Card once, but I always feared the greetings message inside was meant ironically.

Some days are cold and dark, Some make us feel so alone, Some days are hard to understand, On those days God knew we’d need and extra hug or two, So he gave us friends,So that we would always have an angel close when we needed one.

I never heard from this friend again, and could never trace him, so I assume it was a deathbed note, or he emigrated to avoid me.

Before you can make a success of life, in work as well as spiritually and socially, do you believe it is imperative to stick to the maxim “Know thyself”?

Socrates’ familiar view — that the unexamined life is not worth living — was probably inspired by the inscription “Know thyself” at the shrine of the oracle of Delphi. He saw in his fellow citizens of Athens a society that craved only money, power and fame, and was doomed to forever try to enlighten them.

Sadly, despite Socrates and the other great philosophers who followed him, society today appears indistinguishable from that of the Socratic era, except with knobs on. So best not to do too much internalising, particularly if, like me, the view inside is not all that appealing. Do you ever look up old school colleagues or attend school reunions, seek out friends from your young days, looking for them on Facebook, or on sites like Friends Reunited?

My youth is definitely Friends Disunited, and I don’t know if that’s because I’m too stuck here in the present, or too nervous about what I may dig up about my past.

Equally, people who knew me when I was young have been studiously effective at not seeking me out, and they must have their reasons.

Which is worse — a fib that saves a friend’s feelings, or the truth that upsets them deeply? I always feel that telling the truth and making someone cry is just as bad as telling a lie and making them smile. But I’ve been called a “phoney” so many times over the years, I’ve decided it’s probably true.

As long as you accept that it’s okay to be partially phoney, part of the time, I think this flaw applies to most people. Or are you so hard-line in your position that even a hint of phoniness, which slithers out occasionally, is wholly unforgivable?

You would have enjoyed the work of one of my heroes, Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The thesis was an experiment to test the publication’s intellectual rigour and, specifically, to learn if such a journal would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”

The article, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct.

At that time, the journal did not practise academic peer review and did not submit the article for outside expert analysis by a physicist.

On its date of publication, Sokal revealed that the article was a hoax, identifying it as “a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose statements, and outright nonsense ... structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics”.

The resultant academic and public quarrels concerned the scholarly merit, or lack thereof, of humanistic commentary about the physical sciences; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text, and whether the journal had exercised the appropriate thoroughness before publishing the pseudoscientific article.

Alan Sokal is my kind of phoney, and something of a genius. And as they say, talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.

As for phoniness in general, Oscar Levant understood it well. “Strip away the phoney tinsel of Hollywood, and you’ll find the real tinsel underneath.”

People tell me that my opinionated views show a lack of empathy with others, and a disregard for acceptable sensibilities. But the truth is, although I believe almost everything I tell myself, I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.

Be The Worst You Can Be, by Charles Saatchi, is published by Booth-Clibborn Editions (£9.99).

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