Seeing Myself as Others See Me. My Enjoyable Entry on 'Rational Wiki'

Did Robert Burns really mean it when he wrote ���O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!���. I doubt it.  Most of us don���t much like it when we find out how we really appear to others. There is a fine scene in C.S.Lewis���s ���Voyage of the Dawn Treader��� when one of the characters discovers to her considerable surprise what this means in practice.

 

But it is one of the gifts of minor celebrity (another being a need to behave better in public, lest you are observed, monitored and reported to social media). And you are given it whether you wanted it or not, and whether you expected it or not.

 

I suppose it is possible for a human being to be so self-contained, incurious and self-assured that he never watches himself or herself on YouTube, and never searches for himself or herself on Google. I am not such a person.

 

And, after an initial mixture of amazement, mild rage and gratification, I have learned to enjoy it in a way, having long ago been disabused of many false notions of what I look and sound like.

I thought I had seen it all when last week I was alerted to two entries on the internet, abouyt me, which I had previously nevr seen.

 

One was this (not wholly accurate, but who can really complain?) list of alleged quotations by me:

 

 

I link to it here for your delight. I���m not going to spend any time correcting the mistakes.

 

And the other was this from the self-proclaimed ���Rational Wiki���. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Peter_Hitchens

Unlike my actual Wikipedia entry, the ���Rational Wiki��� version is enjoyably, openly hostile to me and my arguments. I find if very useful to see exactly how those who loathe me have managed to misconstrue and misrepresent my arguments while never wholly departing from a factual basis. When my show trial comes, it will be something like this, with the Foucquier-Tinville, Freisler or Vishinsky of the day asking in sarcastic tones ���Citizen Hitchens, did you not write these words ���?���

 

Anyone with any sense can see that it is the work of a wildly-distorted, hopelessly-biased and hostile mind, and so can enjoy it, and work out what I really think without much difficulty.

 

This makes it preferable, in my mind, to the ���official��� Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hitchens

which was once far more extensive but has now been ruthlessly pruned ( see the talk page here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Peter_Hitchens )

to remove almost anything which is sourced from Associated Newspapers (apart, oddly from a hideous 2006 picture of me with a concrete background which makes me look as if I have grown gills, which is beyond doubt an official Mail on Sunday picture taken by an MoS photographer and without doubt  the copyright of Associated Newspapers, and so should not, as I understand Wikipedia rules, be there at all. I assume this has been included to annoy me because I once removed it) .This shying away from Mail on Sunday or Mailonline content is ludicrous in an entry about someone who has worked for Associated Newspapers for 19 years, and most of whose output is published there.   

 

 

It even includes a picture of my late brother, again a bizarre addition, presumably inserted by someone who thinks that I exists only as an adjunct to my sibling.

 

But, having been banned for life from Wikipedia , for sarcasm towards another user, and insubordination to others, self-appointed senior ���editors���, who took his side and, after a wholly one-sided trial in which I was not even allowed to defend myself, I can do nothing about this.

 

As I said at the time, it was, though fundamentally harmless, a hint of what it might be like to live in an actual tyranny. Oddly enough, apart from the immediate powerlessness which was imposed on me once I was accused, and the presumption of guilt, it was the humourless, literal-mindedness of it that was most disturbing. I do hope I shall never be that bad.