Selfish Authenticity
Contained versus Uncontained
Does the needs of one, outweigh the needs of the many? Do we have a responsibility to allow children to grow as they want to, or to shape them for the greater good? Where do we draw the lines on responsibility?
In the 1840s, Kierkegaard argued that the deepest human failure was living according to someone else's truth rather than one’s own. A couple of hundred years later, as we moved into the sixties, folks like Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow distilled that idea further, with an eye on improving the human condition and humanity’s future. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs put authentic self at the very top, whereas Rogers focused on the congruence of oneself as being essential to a healthy human. He developed the idea of unconditional positive regard — a form of unconditional acceptance of others.
Civilization has long been forced to be community-based, or risk going it alone in the wilderness. For tens of thousands of years, civilization ultimately meant a large portion of any population living as a slave. And by slavery, I’m not just referring to the modern posterchild of slavery — the African slaves transported to the Americas — but to the thousands of years of north African and European slavery prior to that, which affected everyone equally.
We’ve left behind most of the obvious slavery, but even to today, many people live in conditions that are essentially slavery with chains of a different kind. Agreeing to live in community comes at a price that is often missed.
When civilizations in the West moved beyond obvious examples of slavery, ideas of the individual and what “rights” that individual might have started to evolve. Not just the idea of an individual who had acquired a wealth of resources or who had done great deeds — but the idea that any individual could be important, by the simple virtue of being born.
The idea that a human has any right to be left to their own devices is relatively new. On paper, it’s a great idea, isn’t it? Everyone free, finally. No one telling you what to do. No chains. And after ten thousand years of slavery, it’s not really surprising that freedom and most importantly, complete autonomy would be the holy grail. Not only can we be free, but we can be free to be exactly who we are, without owing anything to anyone.
If folks like Carl Rogers and Maslow introduced the idea that we as modern unchained humans need to be our true authentic selves, it was folks like Oprah that took that idea and ran with it through the eighties and nineties, turning it into pop culture, and into an idea that could hardly be challenged today as anything other than ‘the norm’.
And now, these “rights” are so ingrained in our society, that these days you can’t hardly ask anyone to put themselves out a little for the sake of others. No, indeed, it’s their right to exactly what they want to do.
Philosophers have long argued about whether humans are purely selfish and ultimately self-serving, or if we are communal mammals who are biologically programmed to selflessly sacrifice for the good of the many. Game theory shows the selfish or punitive behaviours that we are all aware of, but few admit to.
None of us is perfect. I could guess that we’ve all, at some point in our lives, wished we were just accepted for who we really are, regardless of what that is. If we could sidestep all the criticism, since we were trying so hard to conform to the society’s needs and wants, life could be so much easier.
And we humans like easy.
And that was ideal, I’m sure, in the minds of those in the sixties promoting the “authentic self” idea — the idea that we should just be accepted for who we are, warts and all.
What’s wrong with that?
Well, the most obvious issue is that we don’t live alone on the planet. What we want to do, or say, does tend to affect other people around us. So then the issue becomes, just how much responsibility do we assume for the effects of our actions, if any?
The sixties was very big on freedoms for everyone, but not very big on taking responsibility for the consequences in the larger world. There was a philosophy of the unconstrained self. It was almost considered a sin to limit oneself, and certainly for anyone else to place a limit on someone else. Hippies were known for their ideals of communal living, but in reality, none of those communes lasted long. Big on ideal, short on practicality.
Even the Israeli kubutzes — often held up as examples of how communal living could work — originally vetted the people coming into them to remove those who seemed like they might not work hard or be community-focused. Unfortunately, once the new generations of children were born to those original founding members, and they grew into adults, these communities died off, due to conflict caused by creeping laziness or selfishness of the newly grown up children members — children who didn’t sign up for the original goal. Why work hard when others will do it for you? Why give up the chance to make it big? Not everyone wants that kind of life.
You can try to force them. You can control their education, their upbringing, and yet still, they will be what they will be. You can’t force people to believe in your ideology. Progressive Liberals have been trying to do that since the 1960s, with huge majorities in the educational system, and yet here we are three generations later, with an all-Republican government, and the Democrats splintering into factions.
You might be able to coerce a chunk of the population, but people will do what they think is right for them, regardless.
In short, humans are hard to control.
And that’s the problem with freedom, isn’t it? When left to our own devices, some of us will work hard for ourselves and the greater good, and sadly, some will just let other’s take the heavy load for them.
In any community, there are those who could easily work and do their share, but instead will shirk responsibility and freeload on others. There are those who convince themselves that they have done enough, even when they haven’t. There are those who will falsely claim sickness or injury, so that others will step into their place and work in their stead.
That’s just the reality of human nature. No amount of social norms, or laws, or upbringing, seem to make any difference. It’s game theory in action. There’s always going to be those who don’t care if they are making life harder for others.
And what a great excuse for bad behaviour! But wait! It’s not bad, it’s “authentic”! It’s just “who they are”. They aren’t bad, and therefore they argue they should not be judged, because it’s simply how life “shaped them”. They are innocent victims of life itself. Of society. Of you, essentially.
It’s a great bit of gaslighting, isn’t it? They behave badly, but you are the problem.
Just human nature. There’s always going to be a percentage of people who find it acceptable to play the victim and position you as the oppressor. It’s a great tactical move. You can justify almost any attack as merely protecting oneself from the “oppression” you imagine or claim is happening. And of course, any retaliation to their attack, allows for yet more “protection”. In their minds, not only are they only being “authentic”, but you created the environment that forced them to act that way. It’s all your fault. Always your fault. No need to take any responsibility themselves.
There’s a lot of people that were formed through the sixties that have that attitude, it seems.
But is it reasonable? Is it okay for someone to “be themselves” when doing so puts others in distress? Or danger?
Should we all just “put up with” such self-centered people and honour their authenticity? Should we simply ask them to suck it up, buttercup?
Or, as part of a community, are we duty-bound to behave in ways that enhance that community? Or at the very minimum, leave it no worse off?
As much as Carl Rogers pushed for the honouring of the authentic self, and the unconditional acceptance of others as they are, I think he also understood that we, as willing members of a community, owe a debt to our community, to the people who have put effort into building it. That while we accept others as much as we can, that’s not an excuse to abuse that effort.
I can have positive regard for others, but I’m not sure it can be truly unconditional in reality. Indeed, I would challenge anyone to maintain unconditional positive regard to someone who in the moment is physically causing you great pain, for example.
It’s not just the lazy or selfish that cause problems. In our society today, we have an odd class of people — the middle management, or the administrator class. These are people who don’t simply produce anything. They are disconnected from the work being done. They merely manage the product produced by others. To them, they have access to resources that come at no cost to them, and they can distribute those resources at will.
That role is unfortunately predisposed to error. There’s a misperception of the reality of the situation inherent in the role. To them, there seems to be unlimited resources. They expend nothing, or little, but yet gain everything. These people are at the opposite end of the selfish group. Rather than being prone to taking advantage of others only for their own selfish wants in a narcissistic fashion, they instead freely distribute the rewards of hard work to others who have not worked. And they line their own nest in the process.
On the surface, it looks like altruism. Sharing the benefits with everyone seems like a good idea, and they can make the case easily that it is the right way to be. At least from their and their beneficiaries perspectives. From the view of the workers, not so much. For them, the rewards of their labour are very much in limited supply. A little kindness now and then it likely acceptable to the workers, but beyond that returns them again to a form of slavery.
No, the administrator role invariably becomes a form of resource foolishness, of misunderstanding what the position requires, of misunderstanding the limitations, of effort naivety. They are as children, left in charge of the sweet shop, eating freely and giving out the inventory to their friends.
Given that a not-insignificant portion of humans will gladly take advantage of our good natures — either selfishly, or foolishly — it is abundantly clear that we mere working mortals need boundaries. Unbounded unconditional positive regard is for the angels, folks.
While the sixties produced a large number of people who really think the planet and the workers exist for them alone to pillage and benefit from, there is also a streak of the selfish in the newer generations also. These younger folk aren’t getting the entitled streak from having everything handed to them, as the Boomers did, but rather from having things taking away from them.
These younger folk are abusing the workers in a different way. A variation on the victim gaslighting approach, they are taking advantage of a welfare system that has evolved to take care of them, again, at the expense of those who are still willing to work. They are not just pretending to be victims either as previous generations have done. They genuinely have less options than their parents did.
Faced with the prospect of a lifetime of meaningless work, usually for a fraction of what was previously paid out — or no work at all due to AI — it isn’t surprising they choose to opt out of the rat race and into the welfare/healthcare system. The rat race at least used to be profitable, but is now closer once again to slavery under the guise of freedom. without the rewards of yesteryear, bucking the system just makes sense these days.
Whereas Boomers could be described as narcissists in the overflowing bounty of the garden of Eden, the new generations are just zombies surviving a in post-apocalyptic concrete world run by computers. The game keeps changing on them.
Technology is advancing so fast, and society can’t keep up, so they have no foundation on which to build anything. They aren’t thinking about building a life, a family, a career. They are just existing in a numbed state, waiting for a moment where tomorrow looks enough like today to start to feel safe.
And the advice from their parents? Well, they are telling them to “just be yourself”, “do what you want and you will make it”, “let your freak flag fly”. Old advice from the narcissistic golden age of opportunity and self-indulgence. They take their zombie children to their mental health counselor — as though talking endlessly about their emotions will somehow solve this new world of problems they face. Well, it pays the counselor’s bills.
The new generations are opting out, the same as the older hippies, but for a different reason. And, as we know, society can’t function when the new generations opt out of the original community’s commitments.
So, where does that take us? Older people? The Boomers? Well, they’ll die off eventually. And yes, no doubt causing everyone around them as much trouble as possible, because they are committed — above all else — to their own narcissistic “authentic self”, which definitely includes the most indulgent old age and death possible. Don’t expect any self-sacrificing on their part for anyone else’s sanity.
And, when they are finally gone? We get to clean up the mess they made, and learn from their copious mistakes. Like unbounded capitalism, greed, and legal powers to abuse the masses.
We can do better. A lot better.
Younger people are looking for stability, for a rest from the constant changes. They don’t know it, most likely, because they’ve never had it. To them, the capitalist world is constant innovation, bringing in new overwhelming challenges daily. Solution? Communism, socialism. People who will take charge and limit things, make things easier, put in a safety net, make life bearable again. Be the governmental parent.
But we know socialism and communism doesn’t work. We’ve seen multiple generations in multiple cultures try and fail. It just doesn’t work long term. It works for a while — long enough to get started, to seem like it’s going somewhere. Long enough to line the pockets of those who push for it. And then it crashes and burns, because, well… human nature.
We, as a species, keep forgetting we are human, and what that actually means. We are flawed, permanently. No amount of idealism will change that. No amount of leaning into it, over-indulgence will fix it. We’ll only continue to slam our heads against reality, over and over again. We need reality and we need reasonable limits.
We love to talk endlessly about the unfettered hope and inspiration of the human species, but we rarely talk about the necessity of shaping and guiding the results. We need containment. We are at our best when we know our limits and put others before ourselves.
Just because we can, definitely doesn’t mean we must. I’m looking at you, AI.
Our best chance at happiness? Small scale capitalism. Legal limitations on corporations beyond a certain size, beyond a market share. Yes, you can be a capitalist, and make the most of your talents and hard-won skills, but you can’t turn your company into something that dominates cities or countries. Or the people that live in them. It gives us, the little people, a chance.
If we view corporations as a living entity, we are managing the size of a creature. You don’t want animals the size of dinosaurs walking around, stomping on people. Why are we allowing businesses to do that?
Corporations are a good example of the extension of the narcissistic “authentic self”. No one seriously limits them, and they eliminate challengers who attempt to do so — meanwhile they take advantage of everything and everyone for their own benefit. They are the ultimate expression of the narcissistic people who created them and allowed them to grow unchecked. All the way down to the invention of the LLC — literally a way to avoid taking responsibility for ones actions.
Don’t get me wrong. I think capitalism is currently the only continually working model. It’s just not as good for the people as it might be. It needs refining. Unfortunately, that refinement would mean no more elites — and the current elites will not allow that without a fight.
So where are we? Humans are sometimes selfish. Corporations are always selfish. The future is bleak, the past is glorified. We are pawns, with no agency of our own. Is there a happy ending to this?
Well, as the saying goes, the future is our children. I think young people need to stop looking to their therapist as a way to express their emotions, and instead start to make real changes in their life. Stop being a “diagnosis” and start being active. We are overflowing in victim-y “authentic self”. We need less self-focus and more stoicism. Less “what can I get”, and more “what can I build”.
My advice to them? Your future looks bleak, unstable? Make it better. This world is yours, not ours. Learn from our mistakes, our parents’ mistakes, and make it better. No, it’s not easy. You can’t rely on your parents. They got you here, where your future is bleak. You want to go somewhere else then you need to work from your own gut.
Don’t like where corporate AI is taking your potential work career? Work to change it. Don’t sit in your parents basement playing video games and watching porn. No one is coming to save you. Those in power are looking for ways to use you for profit and more power. They aren’t going to stop. Use them. Understand them. Understand what works and what does and adapt to what is until it is what you want it to be. Chasing unlimited profit gets you here. Fix that. Put in reasonable limits. Make it work for everyone. Selfish gets you back to square one.
Yes, I’ve wandered amongst various topics here. I’m still mulling it over, still looking for answers. These ideas will be picked up, prodded, turned over, and put down again many times before they make good sense.
So far, the best I’ve got is simply to understand human nature, accept it, work with it, but most importantly, take control of it. Because if you don’t take control of yourself, someone else most certainly will.