Does it really matter what others think?

Extracted from Mind Your Body

Gary Hayden

Hell is other people. Jean-Paul Sartre, from No Exit

Who cares what other people think? Most of us, it seems.

On 43 Things, a social networking website where members share their hopes and aspirations, thousands of people commit themselves to a self-declared goal, 'Stop caring what other people think of me.'

Obviously, these people do care very much about what others think. But they feel that caring too deeply will limit their lives and cause them unhappiness.

Jean-Paul Sartre: No Exit
During the Second World War, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) wrote a one-act play, No Exit, which offers some interesting insights into this issue.

The setting for No Exit is Hell. Not the Hell of mediaeval Christianity (or Haw Par Villa) with demonic torturers brandishing pincers and red-hot irons. In Sartre's Hell the torments are psychological and are inflicted by the damned upon one another.

The central characters, Garcin, Inez and Estelle, share a room. Garcin is a pacifist writer who was shot for cowardice after trying to flee his country to avoid fighting in a war. Inez is a cruel-hearted lesbian who seduced her cousin's wife and drove her to suicide. Estelle is a self-obsessed seductress who murdered her own baby by throwing it out of a window.

Their shared room in Hell has little furniture, no windows and no privacy. The occupants can never escape one another's scrutiny. There are no mirrors. So Garcin, Inez and Estelle are doomed to see themselves only through the others' eyes.

Estelle is obsessed with her appearance, but with no mirrors she must rely on Inez to be her looking-glass. Inez is able to torment her simply by telling her (untruthfully) that she has a 'nasty red spot' at the bottom of her cheek.
Sartre sets up an exquisitely dysfunctional relationship among the three characters. Each needs what the others cannot or will not give. Inez wants to captivate and dominate Estelle; Estelle craves the adoration of Garcin; and Garcin desperately needs someone to acquit him of cowardice.

Garcin's predicament is especially poignant. He constantly agonises over the motives of his own past actions.

Was he a hero who paid the ultimate price for refusing to surrender his pacifist principles? Or were his 'principles' really just a cover for deep-seated cowardice?

At one point he exclaims: 'If there's someone, just one person, to say quite positively I did not run away... that I'm brave and decent and the rest of it... well, that one person's faith would save me.'

But neither Estelle nor Inez will give him that. Inez exults in the power she has to torment him: 'You're a coward, Garcin, because I wish it! I wish it - do you hear? I wish it!'

Everybody cares
Sartre's point is simple yet profound. Our self-concept is intimately bound up with how others see us.

In his 1946 lecture Existential is a Humanism, he puts it very succinctly: '[A MAN] cannot be anything (in the sense in which one says one is spiritual, or that one is wicked or jealous) unless others recognise him as such. I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another.'

We all rely on others' perceptions in order to make judgments about ourselves. How else can I know that I am witty, attractive or intelligent? Or that I am selfish, irritable or cowardly? And since I care very deeply about these things, how can I not care about how others see me?

Of course, there are people who claim not to care at all what others think. I am sceptical of such claims. If they really care so little, why are they so anxious to convince me?

A friend's daughter recently told me that she is not at all influenced by her peers. To prove it she rattled off a list of ways in which she'd opposed their wishes. She seemed unaware that by determining to act contrary to their wishes, she had allowed them to define her just as surely as if she had acted in accordance with them.

I think that with very few exceptions, we all do care what others think and this seems perfectly right and proper. We are, after all, creatures who need to fit into a social world.

Of course, there will always be those who try to capitalise on this by making us feel bad about ourselves. Everyone knows someone who is adept at delivering hurtful criticisms and cruel put-downs; someone who tries to bolster their own self-image by damaging the self-image of others.

The appropriate response is not to pretend that it doesn't matter what people think, but to remind ourselves that it really doesn't matter what those people think.