Once it's validated, or not restrained, it poisons public faith and trust, and one's integrity.
Social roles of church, school, parenting, work can all easily hide the inner irrationalities that reject rational systems; science, for example. That's the John Calvin church part about the permanent inner condition of depravity.
The modern psychology part:
Social roles are trained in, and because social roles don't require real intimacy, very little can be learned about what another really thinks, feels, believes, except when big environmental stresses hit everyone equally, and roles don't work under stresses.
People often believe about themselves, that because they've been trained into "good roles," that they themselves are good people. (Good church/home training, etc., etc.) Because society validates "good roles" -- as in a life/work script -- they believe their own personal goodness is validated by society.
And so they believe that they themselves can't possibly do anything to directly hurt or harm others -- at least the ones they most closely resemble, those with "good roles." They can't possibly be wrong about personal or social labeling of others, or organizing inclusion and exclusion, personal or group pre-judging, or discriminatory policy. They believe that any difference is a deficit, not simply a difference.
Often, once people are seen outside their roles, we who are in roles, too, often tell ourselves that we are seeing the "real" person, and that their role(s) masks their realness (or we think they're fake). They often can and will say the same of us.
If under rapid or constant external stresses, roles break down because they can't be practiced or performed. Humans, without their roles, often don't even know themselves any other way, and so they are just as surprised, pleasantly or not, to learn about themselves and others, outside of roles they've played together. Without roles, different degrees of depravity and/or morality come out as rational or irrational talk, feelings, behaviors, and more or less so, because no one is all one or the other; everyone is some combination of both.
Grieving for a loss of role isn't grieving for lost self. It's grieving for a trained or habitual self. It's grieving for loss of what one believed as true. It's grief for the comfort of familiar ways of life, grieving for losing the comforting belief that what/roles they were used to wouldn't have to change.
Even in a bigger sense, having to say goodbye to structures that provide roles, doesn't mean that only bad can happen, or only ugliness.
It means that we have a chance to develop better, more humane and civilized roles, not just transactional ones, or hierarchal ones beset by rules, power, and ego (in social, political, economic, spiritual leadership).
We can have roles formed more authentically by morality and true equality, and leave the comfortable old ones -- appearance of it for purposes of "law and order" or "might makes right" and even "race status" -- leave those behind.
After grieving, a better world is possible.
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