If we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face, we will protect it with fabrications even at the cost of violating our own truth.

This seems to be the collective endeavor of society: the more busily we dedicate ourselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect mere fictitious identities – “selves”, that is to say, regarded as objects. Selves that can stand back and see themselves having fun (an illusion which reassures them they are real).

Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable