I couldn't count how many times I've heard people say 'I'm a good judge of character' or similar lines; people inherently believe they 'get' human nature. Yet we all fail to do so, some more than others of course.

I take a pluralistic approach to the question really. I don't think 'I' am a single mind. The phone call me is strikingly different to the alone in the bath me and the sitting next to a hot girl on the bus me, and the hanging out at a house party I don't want to be at me.

They all refer back, in hindsight, to a state of me that is perhaps an accumulation of all these different me's, but like the common man in Nazi Germany - those till workers and construction men, bakers and performers - who were led to casually scalp the hair off dead jews and nonchalantly kick the body into a giant pit, our 'self' is capable of far more than we can possibly imagine until the day we're exposed to ourselves actually doing it.