On Authenticity
Authenticity is what I value the most (at least this season of my life) but also probably one of the most complex concepts to understand. Of course it is even more challenging to practice on a daily basis. This is my first attempt, with a cubism approach, to at least draw the contour of it from different angles, with the intention and hope for incremental clarity.
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in his famous essay “The Ethics of Authenticity” uses the negative space to elucidate “manner” vs “matter” of authenticity. More specifically, he worries about an extreme atomic individualism, or self-referentiality that is becoming more prominent since the 90s. Not only does it isolate oneself by ignoring “higher” social context, but also leads to a collective “culture of narcissism”, “loneliness pandemic”, and a highly fragmented American society. This idea that self does not exist outside the social context, is not new (see German philosopher Georg Hegel). Zen Buddhism too, in the name of “egolessness”, talked about not only the concept of self as amorphous, it diffuses itself into a larger “one-ness”, which is beyond societal.
At the core, I think only in the narrow sense, self realization will lead to self referential. The broad sense of self realization is always inclusive and is aware of the larger societal and spiritual context it operates in.
This naturally leads to another important topic, and it is the opposite end of self-referentiality, which is unconscious conformism. This, I argue, requires even more urgent attention.
Initiated by post war mass consumerism and exonerated by pop culture and social media, we now express more and more of ourselves through what we “like”. That zero waste Everlane pants, $20 Geisha espresso, Mykonos party, Taylor Swift, and Blackpink concert. Not in any way to trivialize the genuine benevolent intention and the longing for belonging. It is also so easy to slip into yet another self-referential game, in the extreme form of conformity (eerily contradiction here).
What is NOT easy, is the deep self work towards authenticity. Especially for people of less privilege and power. Audre Lorde, thinks self-expression is more a privileged term, so she instead talks about “self-preservation”. The enormous intensive energy required to fight for authenticity almost feels violent. Similarly, for queer community, as American Theorist David Halperin laid out in his class on queer and gender study at University of Michigan, we have to decode and then recode mainstream heteronormative cultures to create our own. One can also easily find similar points made again and again, by artists such as Bernice Bing, and Yayoi Kusama.
On the final hopeful note, I want to return, again, to the idea of collectivism. On this, three recent important works stand out.
Dr Pooja Lakshmin, psychiatrist and author of <Real self care>, talks about the toxicity of most self care books. These books failed to question the question, instead, they try to find answers within the already flawed and unequal system. They assign way more responsibilities and therefore place more blame on individuals rather than the system.
Dr Moira Weigel, author of <Labor of Love>, talks about how women compromise themselves, in large part due to fear, again, created by the power imbalance and patriarchal systematic biases.
Finally, Psychologist Thomas Curran, in his book <Is perfectionism ruining your life>, essentially alludes to the same idea of “self fashion” Taylors talks about. Perfectionism is not true authenticity, but a coping mechanism deeply rooted in shame and insecurity (again societal and systematic).
Defining and expressing self authenticity without larger context is clearly not the answer, but extreme conformity is also not the answer. Somewhere in between, through more nuanced understanding and constant daily effort to hold space for contradictories might give some hope. And all these require deep work by not just the lowercase “i”, but by the uppercase “WE”.
Note for future writing: is the concept of “agency”, in particular, one of the most inspirational and landmark Economics book <Development as Freedom> by Economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen.
