by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Mancunian crooner Morrissey once noted that one's self is unknowingly dictated by the footwear one happens to be sporting. Put a skinhead in slippers and he's instantly transformed into a nerd, get a goth into loafers and the tragic scowl disappears.

Here's why I hasten to babble about this: many sunsets before our age of Beatle Boots and Nikes, a sandal-wearer approached the Temple of the Sun God at the oracle at Delphi and chiselled the words "Gnothi se auton." The oracle was a pre-telephone Miss Cleo pack of lies for country bumpkins, but the inscription caught on and legions of Greek philosophers made a solid living repeating "know thyself" and stretching it into one-liners like "the unexamined life isn't worth living." Those phrases still get repeated by today's intellectual giants - CÉGEP teachers, I mean, of course.

But like Morrissey, I reckon that our notions of who we are can be as steady as12-inch platform fuck-me boots. Allow me to buttress this with science.

1. Men and women rated their own attractiveness to Jennifer Siciliani of the U of Missouri. They were all way off. Others considered them, as a rule, far more attractive than they considered themselves. 2. An Ipsos-Reid study of the wealthiest 20 per cent of Canadians revealed that almost all - 95 per cent - don't consider themselves "wealthy." 3. A Dr. David Dunning got dumb kids to take a test then asked them how they thought they did. Almost all of them said they did really well. They didn't. 4. Dr. Shergill of University College in London instructed subjects to touch each other with the same force repeatedly. After eight rounds they were pressing each other 14 times harder than they did at the start.

I could continue with evidence of the fact that we don't have a clue as to who we are. Strange, considering you're the only person you're with 24-7, whose teeth you brush, whose dreams you dream and whose shoes you lace. The sucking vacuum of our self-awareness, I would assert, is at the root of all our problems and peccadilloes. It explains why celebrities dangle babies and billions hungrily suck cancer air into their lungs and why most of the planet lives in semi-anarchic conditions of dirt poverty under political systems characterized by blatant thievery and malice. When it comes to self-knowing, we're still mutated apes transfixed by flashing lights. Hey, I'm comfortable with that. But until we all get super intelligent brain implants to get us over that hump, we'll suffer no shortage of idiot moments.

And if we're constantly wrong about ourselves - why wouldn't we be wrong about other things? Take our city, for example. We're almost all snobbish about our smoked meat and bagel utopia, but in fact, residents have been moving away in droves for 30 years, and now many suburbanites would give their first born to demerge from our city.

A big obstacle to our self-knowledge and quest for truth is our devotion to styles. Our intellectual fashion prejudices lead us to quickly dismiss too many potentially exciting ideas. Here's a resolution for this year: let's try different shoes. Like the Stoics, let's not just mutter about bad sandals, but also embrace them and walk in them.

So as practice, here's a pair you might not usually lace up. Tom Adams, a Toronto-based energy expert, suggests that a large increase in our home electricity bills would make us wealthier. "Ontario is prepared to pay good dollars for your electricity. We have a power crisis here but Quebec doesn't have any surplus to sell because it's all being soaked up by homeowners who get it below market," he says. "Quebec is the most electricity-profligate society in the world. More than half its electricity is wasted. People think, 'It's cheap, who cares?'"

Adams argues that raising rates is the only thing that reduces consumption. Reduced consumption would leave extra for our government to sell and make a mint on. Raise prices and we get rich.

How's the fit?

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca