We Are Inherently Evil and Introspection Makes It Worse

"Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face — there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart."

-The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), the national modernist poet of Portugal, is famous for creating numerous authorial personae, which he called ‘heteronyms.’ These heteronyms wrote poetry, poetic prose, philosophical essays, literary theory and criticism, and crossword puzzles. Pessoa relentlessly switched from one creative persona to another and even had his impersonations write letters to each other. While indulging in the creative betweenness of his life, Pessoa sometimes felt he had reached the bottom of depression. He believed that his ‘tendency toward depersonalization and simulation’ was caused by ‘a deep-seated form of hysteria,’ but that his ‘insanity was made sane by dilution in the abstract, like a poison converted into a medicine by mixture.’ Pessoa’s multiple personality order is defined as an interactive arrangement of multiple creative personalities generated spontaneously in the chaotic domain of the psyche, in response to the limitations of his self-imposed monadic existence.