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When I was very young, I used to go into chatrooms and pretend to be one year older than I actually was. I justified it to myself by noting that my birthday was only, say, ten months away. That's about the most dastardly misrepresentation of myself I have ever adopted.
In real life, several opportunities for misrepresentation have arisen. I've been mistaken for:
-a high school band director (when I was 17!)
-a security guard at a "theatre" in London (at 19)
-a hospital administrator (also at 17)
-a discount shoe store employee (at 20)
I've never really played along, though. If I got confused for someone with actual power, I'd probably play the game a bit differently, but I didn't see the point in helping a guy find a new pair of sneakers.
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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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