Layers

Going about your average day, it's easy to see why we often fall for the misconception that people are one-sided or simplistic. You go to work and see all the commuters as mindless sheep. Or you get to know someone to the point at which you claim that there is no good in them at all. Or you know someone who is so kind to you that you can't think of them doing any wrong.
Here is the big shocker. People are complicated. Each and every one of us has a deep and complex mind with multiple layers to our personality. No matter how one-sided someone may appear, they will always have different layers to them. And no matter how mindless the multitudes appear, each one of them is deep and complex.
I have known this for a while, but I still find myself declaring that a person has no good in them, or that a person cannot do any wrong, or that a person is too simple/stupid to have any depth to them. But this is never true. No matter how sure you are, you will always be wrong.
But what are layers? One one level, they are personalities for specific circumstances. I put on one layer of awkward introverted shyness for one social event, then change it to loud foolishness for another.  And everyone really has two general layers for this: one public and one private.
On another level, they are different personalities all together. One side of me wants to stay introverted and shy, but another part of me want social contact. As a result, I end up following both. One of my more intelligent friends has an entire congress of personalities that he controls, and it's plain to see that in his behavior.
On a third level, they are good and evil. Oftentimes the question is asked: Are people inherently good or bad? Well, the answer is that everyone is inherently both. Sometimes someone can appear to be a good person, but they have a bad side to them. And conversely, someone who you find to be despicable is actually a decent person on some level. There are a few of us who are farther out on the spectrum in either direction, but most of us lie in the middle, where we all have positive motives and all indulge in negative behavior. And our actions are used to judge us unfairly, as an act of compassion raises a reputation while an act of violence ruins it.
But something that is interesting about all of this is that, as we are all human, we all have similar amounts of depth to us. Some of us will waste this depth, others will fulfill its potential. In many ways, this is a better gauge for intelligence than just knowledge. If one could open the psyche of my friend with the congress of personalities and then open the mind of one unintelligent stoner that I know and map out their minds, they would be about the same size. The more intelligent person would be the one who puts these layers to good use.
But the point of this entire essay is just this: Don't just use a short blurb to describe someone.  No one word, sentence, or paragraph can be used to define a person, for nobody can be described in less than a novel. So the next time that you look at the world as a bunch of simplistic people with one dimension to their lives, just remember that our psyches, though varied, are all about the same size, and that the "mindless" commuter you see passing by is about as deep as you.