We are all artists, with our masterpiece being ourselves. Every gesture, every word, is a work of performance, crafted through habit, from the day we are born. We shape ourselves based on audience polling: It’s not quite an applause meter, but we’re a social species and we tend to fairly quickly get a sense for how other people react to the things we say and do. We calibrate, adjust, we become, without ever explicitly thinking about it.

This might sound dismissive. Perhaps it sounds like I am accusing all humanity of being terribly superficial – but these performances go deeper than the skin. Who we believe ourselves to be is, in large part, who we are – or very soon becomes so. That’s one of the ways that brainwashing works: If you can convince someone to perform compliance, it’s often only a matter of time before they become compliant.

Our…