"...the intellect unfolds its principle powers in dissimulation....This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man.Deception, flattering,lying,deluding,talking behind the back, putting up a false front,living in borrowed splendor,wearing a mask,hiding behind convention,playing a role for others and for oneself-in short, a continous fluttering among the solitary flame of vanity-is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them."

 

Friedrich Nietzsche-"On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense"

 

 

 

It seems to me that as soon as we immerse into life, or better to say as soon as we gain awareness of the existence of a metaphysical,intangible world, we learn there is no "happily ever after" and I wonder is it our endless vanity or the genuine discontent with the world we belong to ?

Perhaps neither of them ,as nothing seems to be good enough for us , enough fulfilling , satisfying once we build incommensurably high ideals ahead of us.

Should it be as iwasfixin2 said,the drive for the pure truth , for the orthe doxes has arisen on one hand as a means of defense against the threatening lies and boycotts , whilst on the other by seeking to fight back using the very same weapons : the art of dissimulation ( in the picture symbolised by the mask)-which is partly due to out great impossibility to communicate exhaustively-and its most important consequence, the act of manipulating ,the desperate try of extending our influence upon the others, nearly insanely brainwashing them (the apple).

 

You may not need either awareness or intellect for all that ,though,because this is precisely what defines us best, a matter of existence, a principle of self-conservation.