So, the normally wonderful Open Culture blog has a somewhat troubling post called Conformity Isn't A Recipe for Excellence. It features video links of such luminaries as Stephen Fry, George Carlin, Steve Jobs and (...shudder...) Bono pontificating on what they've learned over the course of their lives. The themes are fairly clear: Carlin tells us to follow "who we really are", Fry says that the power of the internet to change our lives comes down to expressing "our personality", Bono tells us to "take risks", and Jobs gives us this little pearl:
These are the kinds of thoughts that can start to draw out the absurdity of allowing famous people to hold forth on practical wisdom. Famous people absolutely love to tell us to follow our true selves or to find our inner bliss, because to them it appears as though doing so was the cause of their own success. They almost uniformly ignore the underlying reality: they were in the right place at the right time, their particular ambition found the right outlet, and they became famous. They turn around, examine their lives, and think: good thing I was true to myself. Well, yes, but if Steve Jobs had been born just 5 years later, he would have arrived too late on the scene to become THE Steve Jobs. He might have found his talents realized as a middling programmer, he would have made a bit of money, maybe got married, had some kids, and when cancer came, the more humble Steve would probably have just gone for chemotherapy instead of allowing a hyper-inflated ego to divert him, terminally, into "alternative" medicine.
The lesson? Famous people are not good sources of practical wisdom. Their outlooks are almost universally distorted by an inability to percieve the real social context which allowed them to flourish, and as such they nearly always end up espousing some "become who you really are" mantra that is disastrous advice for people who aren't so lucky.
For example, oh, let's see, a completely random example: should the repressed, suicidal, underpaid Chinese workers who assemble the Apple machines "follow their bliss"? Can they "change" or "influence" their world, Steve? Can they "build their own things that other people can use"? Seems like they can't, Steve, because it seems like their governments imprison or kill them when they try to do things like that.
So, man from rich, free country believes he's a visionary, gets rich by constructing shiny toys built in horrible factories in poor, totalitarian countries, turns around and tells everyone that they, too, can get rich by following their dreams.
World-Historical Irony: without those poor, repressed people who could not follow their dreams, Famous Man would not have become successful at all.
Now, how about us? Ordinary Western persons looking for something to do with their lives? Should we be "true to ourselves"? Well, on some level, perhaps we should. But should we expect that doing so will bring us worldly success? Should we expect our lives to resemble in any way the lives of these profoundly confused luminaries? No. Authenticity, if it is to be a valuable way of life, must be its own reward. It must go hand in hand with the realistic acceptance that one's life may turn out to suck, and suck hard, no matter how nonconformist you are. And, to play on an old Socratic refrain, it's better to be a nobody in touch with reality than a profoundly deluded someone.
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.One way to start thinking about why this is so troubling is to simply look at the word "excellence". Conformity, we are told, is not a recipe for excellence. Well, this is very nearly what some philosophers have liked to call an analytic truth: true simply by virtue of the meanings of the words. In other words, it's vacuous, boring, uninteresting. "Excellence" is a comparative term: in a given populace, only a select few can count as excellent. Therefore, any activity in which you simply do as others do is one in which you cannot excel.
These are the kinds of thoughts that can start to draw out the absurdity of allowing famous people to hold forth on practical wisdom. Famous people absolutely love to tell us to follow our true selves or to find our inner bliss, because to them it appears as though doing so was the cause of their own success. They almost uniformly ignore the underlying reality: they were in the right place at the right time, their particular ambition found the right outlet, and they became famous. They turn around, examine their lives, and think: good thing I was true to myself. Well, yes, but if Steve Jobs had been born just 5 years later, he would have arrived too late on the scene to become THE Steve Jobs. He might have found his talents realized as a middling programmer, he would have made a bit of money, maybe got married, had some kids, and when cancer came, the more humble Steve would probably have just gone for chemotherapy instead of allowing a hyper-inflated ego to divert him, terminally, into "alternative" medicine.
The lesson? Famous people are not good sources of practical wisdom. Their outlooks are almost universally distorted by an inability to percieve the real social context which allowed them to flourish, and as such they nearly always end up espousing some "become who you really are" mantra that is disastrous advice for people who aren't so lucky.
For example, oh, let's see, a completely random example: should the repressed, suicidal, underpaid Chinese workers who assemble the Apple machines "follow their bliss"? Can they "change" or "influence" their world, Steve? Can they "build their own things that other people can use"? Seems like they can't, Steve, because it seems like their governments imprison or kill them when they try to do things like that.
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| Fig 1. Apple workers following their bliss. |
World-Historical Irony: without those poor, repressed people who could not follow their dreams, Famous Man would not have become successful at all.
Now, how about us? Ordinary Western persons looking for something to do with their lives? Should we be "true to ourselves"? Well, on some level, perhaps we should. But should we expect that doing so will bring us worldly success? Should we expect our lives to resemble in any way the lives of these profoundly confused luminaries? No. Authenticity, if it is to be a valuable way of life, must be its own reward. It must go hand in hand with the realistic acceptance that one's life may turn out to suck, and suck hard, no matter how nonconformist you are. And, to play on an old Socratic refrain, it's better to be a nobody in touch with reality than a profoundly deluded someone.
8 comments:
Have you read Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided? You should.
Anonymous, as interesting as the book may be, I religiously avoid books with phrases like "Has Undermined America" in their titles. Call it a prejudice, but it's served me pretty well.
Like being true to yourself has served you well?
Yup!
I like your primary argument all around; it's been argued before and I feel it's fairly accurate that authenticity stems primarily from (to use a word that makes me shudder, but is appropriate here) privilege. However, I find it interesting that at the end you seem to find some value in the idea of authenticity, which has always seemed something of a sham to me (and by "always" I mean since I read Charles Guignon's On Being Authentic). When we talk about being true to ourselves, we generally commit what social psychologists have described as the self-serving bias: our positive actions and traits we interpret as stemming from our innate selves, and our negative actions and traits are interpreted as situational, and not really part of the "authentic" self. I find it easier to say what I want and do not want in life without having to tie it to something essential about my being.
Hi Puppyclaws,
I agree with everything you're saying, but I think that it just shows us that authenticity, as an ethical ideal, is a much harsher mistress than these pop-culture advocates would have it. Roughly, I think that Nietzschean truthfulness about the self is essential: authenticity is something you have to earn by facing up to the ugliest and least authentic sources of your own situation. That means engaging with precisely the kinds of false beliefs that you mention.
I don't want to say that there is, for all persons, no such thing as an "essence" of sorts. I think this is a notion that can still apply, but the right to say that you are "true to" it is a right that has to be earned. Steve Jobs seems to me to be a person who has not earned this right.
It's not about being true to oneself, but challenging oneself. How else does one learn their strengths and weaknesses?
Find what you excel at, then try to make a living doing it.
Authenticity is hard won and must be wrenched from inauthentic modes of self-comportment. Moreover, it seems that in every case authenticity proceeds from inauthenticity. We must be thrown back upon ourselves in the right type of way to even notice it, and there is no sure fire formula one can suggest in order to do so. It is made problematic that while self-understanding is very hard indeed, we are rarely within the right grips of our own self-knowledge to demonstrate authentic resolve. Self-understanding is an ec-stasis, it occurs outside of us in-the-world, and we get lost in public or cliche platitudes that pass for real self-knowledge.
But authenticity is one of those words. One such word in German is "Eigenlichkeit" and it is rendered as "authenticity" but ownershipness, or being-responsible-for-one's-existence is my rendering of the concept. It is not just a demonstration or condition that an agent must meet. Instead, it is deeper, more revelatory concept operative in the very marrow of living life.
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