it feels like self-help books are going through a bit of a boom at the moment and I have read a surprising amount of them like anyone I go through difficult periods and at one point I thought that these books might contain the answers that I sought some of them were genuinely helpful and although I don't revisit them that often now a few hold a special place in my heart however one particular idea just kept cropping up many of these books would reference a nebulous idea of living authentically they seems to treat the human being as
composed of two parts there is the outer shell a superficial layer that keeps us all unhappy but underneath that there is a golden core and if we could just discover this core then we would finally find peace and also somehow achieve extreme worldly success I've seen this concept become even more influential over the last few years and it does often crop up on social media where various influencers will teach you how to become your true self often for a handy fee this whole idea struck me as quite suspect and so this video is something of
a pmic I want to drag what I think is a crude and potentially destructive concept out into the sun in order to examine how it has become so unhelpful and how we might be able to rescue it also I want to give a huge shout out to the book authenticity as an ethical ideal by Simi varaga as it was immensely helpful when writing this video and has fundamentally shaped my own ideas about authenticity in countless ways I won't be able to go too far into the specifics of his ideas here but I do highly encourage
you to give him a read for yourself but what do these self-help authors tend to mean when they say authentic and how does this differ from how the concept has been used elsewhere my name is Joe Folly and this is unsolicited advice but if you want to avoid fakery on your news feed then I recommend you check out today's very kind sponsor ground news ground news is a website and app that gathers related articles from thousands of sources around the world in one place so you can compare how different Outlets cover the same story every
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certainly not to examine every article I read for bias and misinformation so ground news is fantastic for giving me an idea of the differences in reporting on different stories so that I can get a variety of views rather than remaining stuck in my echo chamber ground news is giving my viewers 40% off their unlimited access Vantage plan I think ground news is doing very important work and I sincerely hope you'll check them out but anyway back to the video One authenticity initial conceptions historically being auth authentic has meant a variety of different things many Christian
thinkers like St Augustine or kard considered authenticity to be very closely linked to a relationship with God and that it was found partly within but also with this connection to a higher power someone like diogenes the cynic thought that authentic Behavior was closely aligned with what he considered natural for humans to do as well as abiding by a certain set of ethical and aesthetic principles in his book Vara notes that most modern ideas about authenticity fall into roughly two camps the inner sense camp and the productionist camp we'll definitely be visiting the productionist later in
the video but most forms of authenticity in self-help literature and in popular discourse fall into this inner sense cap very broadly inner sense authenticity defines being authentic as being aligned with some deep inner you that you can commune with purely by reflecting on yourself or or looking inward hence in a sense varer traces this idea back at least as far as rouso and it is very much in line with how many people use the term today in will store's book selfie he says the following about the ideal put forward by authenticity focused self-help culture the
ideal self enjoys thinking it's in some way unique that it's trying to make the world a better place and one of the traits it'll value highly is that of personal authenticity or being real it'll preach that in order to find happiness and success you must be true to yourself and follow your dreams he later expands upon this with ideas from various influential Originators of the modern self-help movement principally authenticity is intended to borrow through to each other's perfect core leading to breakthrough and transformation the idea here is pretty simple a real self is posited that
represents the true us this is what all of our Quests for authenticity are aiming at crucially this is not about crafting a self or developing a particular character out of choice it is about Discovery we find this discovery based language all through popular culture it has even become cliche that a young person embarking on a traveling adventure will say that they are going to find themselves on this picture the authentic self is meant to already be inside you just waiting for you to uncover it as we will see this is pretty different to the way
many philosophers like haiger or satra tended to talk about authenticity but I'm getting ahead of myself here it's also worth noting that this image of authenticity is often not explicitly argue for but is instead working in the background to a greater or lesser extent it's more of an underlying assumption than a definite conclusion or a thesis another important component to our popular conception of authenticity is that it's an ethical goal to strive for we are told that being authentic is better than being inauthentic both in the sense that we will be happier and healthier but
also that it is more honest to call someone fake or inauthentic is not just telling them that their way of life will not make them fulfilled in the long term it is to say that they are in some sense bad this does not always stretch as far as calling them evil or anything like that but it does seow some suspicion on their character this is again very different to how inauthenticity has been portrayed elsewhere in Leo tolstoy's classic Nolla The Death of Ivan ilich the anonomous lead wastes his entire life just following societal expectations until
he realizes that he will die having never asked what he wanted but Tolstoy doesn't say that Ivan ilich is a bad person he is a tragic figure we mourn for him we don't condemn him our modern concept of inauthenticity has advanced from being an unfortunate personal blind spot to a downright moral failing this is pretty noteworthy and we'll be revisiting it later in the video when we examine the pressures to be authentic in the modern world as Vara points out the true self is also often associated with being uncorrupted by interaction with others or with
society as a whole it is sometimes identified with an infant or a child a singular individual who has not yet taken up any role in constructing or maintaining a social web or a network of relationships there is this implicit assumption that what is within is the true you and that this personal truth can be defined separate to any participation in a social system the true self is broadly seen as unchanging and is thought to reflect a permanent core around which the more ephemeral parts of you are wrapped and of course being aligned with this inner
self is supposed to Grant you great peace it is sometimes pitched as a sort of psychological Panacea getting in touch with the real you is the thing that will finally solve all your problems by contrast being out of line with the true self is sure to bring you misery and suffering I also want to point out that this veneration of authenticity is not based on nothing it has been repeatedly shown that when people behave authentically they report higher levels of happiness or well-being however things get complicated because the definitions of authenticity used in many empirical
studies is often much more subtle than this inner sense View and tends to instead refer to the consistency of values with behavior or something like that this is very different to the idea that we have a true self that we must discover within us also generally having looked through a lot of Empirical research papers for this video there is some disagreement between the definitions used in each study which can make it difficult to see exactly what is being studied and to draw conclusions between different studies sometimes the congruence of authenticity is between inner feelings and
outer Behavior sometimes it's more values based and sometimes a wider idea of self-enhancement is used this makes it difficult to confidently put forward a single unified definition for authenticity in empirical psychology but in almost all cases the definition is far more complex than just coherence with a true inner self working behind the scenes for example Corey Gunther links authenticity to a sense of self-development that is self-perceived authenticness is not just a matter of reflecting something within but improving oneself as well overall it is the simplistic inner sense idea of authenticity that I want to criticize
in short this is the theory that there's a permanent underlying self behind all of our actions and that if we align ourselves with this self it will necessarily have a large part in solving our psychological problems moreover this true self is formed in isolation is broadly unchanging and is set apart from social fabrics and being true to it is a moral imperative and an ethical goal so I'm going to start by critiquing the actual tenability of this picture of the human mind and then move on to disputing its ethical value and this will involve stepping
outside merely Western philosophy and looking at one of the most influential thinkers to have ever lived two the myth of the true self of all the beliefs of early Buddhism there is one that stands out for its philosophical Innovation and precise analytic structure the idea that there is no permanent self and that it is at best a pragmatic falsehood and at worst a dangerous illusion in various different sutas or sutras the Buddha goes through the different aspects of what we call ourselves and demonstrates how none of them are permanent and so cannot be identified with
this single unchanging eye or ego take our feelings for example they are in constant flux and so they can't be the true permanent us the same goes for our body since it to develops and changes our perceptions can't be us nor can our desires be since they too morph and fade and reemerge lastly even our base level awareness or Consciousness can't be us since things flit in and out of that awareness all the time even if we say that there is some permanent thing that is experiencing the awareness this is such a minimal notion of
the self that we can't really hang anything on it the Buddha thus argues that searching for a permanent inner self is a lost cause something like this simply does not exist our perceptions desires feelings and thoughts are no more this permanent inner core than the trees outside or the clouds above over 2,000 years later the empiricist philosopher David Hume would come up with quite a similar idea called bundle Theory this is the notion that what we call us is not one enduring thing but an everchanging Mass or bundle of experiences memories and perceptions varer himself
also critiques inner sense views of authenticity but from a slightly different angle he does not want to claim that an inner self is incoherent but he points out that the components of our minds can either be identified with or not identified with based on someone's personal values and that this seems like an extremely relevant Factor if we're going to Define an authentic self an extreme example of this is the phenomenon of intrusive thoughts when someone has an intrusive thought it is often rather disturbing and it's one that they don't explicitly identify with like the urge
to Hur yourself off a ledge or to do someone extreme harm to use another example when I'm angry I might get the urge to hit someone but I deliberately seize control of that desire and quell it rejecting it from whatever I call I there is clearly something that separates what we consider authentically us from the rest of our mental architecture and it seems like establishing this distinction will involve the endorsement or rejection of certain inner properties based on the agent's values put a pin in this idea of values as we will definitely be coming back
to it later even by itself this already complicates the inner sense view that we discussed in the previous section because whether or not you indorse a particular aspect of your inner world seems to at least partly be a matter of choice in the case of me wanting to hit someone I can either choose to identify that urge with me and either say I will hit this person or I really ought to hit this person or I can re the desire in there is at least part of my self that I don't discover but create this
is a very different view of authenticity that varaga calls the productionist account in its most extreme form a productionist claims that we don't find ourselves at all but we create our eles in practice there aren't many total productionist but some thinkers at least along productionist lines are Fric nich and Jean Paul satra much of n's philosophical project involves crafting your life until it is a work of art and creating your own values in a vital active way he did not think that you discovered who you were but became who you were by acting and creating
in the world he encouraged outright experimentation with the self and the gradual alignment of the different aspects of our Wills until they are all pointed broadly in a single Direction sra's existential authenticity is perhaps even more explicit it involves recognizing the radical freedom in your choices that in any situation you are not technically Bound by your social roles or your past or anything else really you could choose to act however you want and it is in the choices that you make that you craft the project of your life again here authenticity is not finding a
self within but making a self by acting and deciding for satra how you choose to act in full consciousness of your extreme Freedom just is authentically you he was very skeptical at using an inner sense to detect some kind of true self separate from this since he thought that the human capacity for self-deception was just incred large to quote him directly feelings are developed from the actions we take I shouldn't seek Within Myself some authentic state that will compel me to act when most existential philosophers speak of authenticity they often mean something much closer to
this than the popular idea of authenticity that we discussed earlier in fact satra would condemn that version of authenticity as acting in bad faith to say that you behave in a certain way because that's just who I am or to say that you have an Inner Essence that you are bound to is effectively denying freedom and responsibility and playing a predefined part it just so happens that the part you are playing is some strange perception you have of yourself and that makes it a bit harder to spot however I do think there is a danger
in a purely productionist model of authenticity as well for example as SRA points out it seems like we can be deeply wrong about who we are if the past hundred or so years of psychotherapy and psychology have taught us anything it's that we can form images of ourselves that simply don't reflect how our minds actually function I might fool myself into thinking that I'm courageous when I'm actually rather cowardly or I might think that I'm considerate of others where I am actually quite selfish I cannot count the number of self-professed people Pleasers that I've met
who seem anything but as I said satra also recognized this since he devotes an awful lot of his existentialist project to parts of ourselves that are defined through our relationship with other people in his play No Exit he explores the torment that is caused by our need for our self-perception to be agreed upon by our peers it's very difficult to see yourself as Brave or attractive or lovable if these are not affirmed by the people around you that you respect this suggests that the self cannot purely be produced by us in the same way that
I produced this script it is not just the product of our decisions but also the social fabric that we are in meshed in and thus it is not just defined by us but by those around us as well it's worth noting that this same critique also attacks the pure inner sense idea from the previous section far from there being this semi innate true self that is corrupted by our interactions with other people and with Society some parts of us do seem to be inexorably linked with our cultural and social backdrop at some level we are
likely already aware of this while most people don't want to say an explicit social role like their job is their authentic self we do tend to admit that even at our deepest levels we are still somewhat shaped by our environment and that includes our social and cultural context but where you hold the extreme view that there just is no real inner self or some variant of the productionist framework or just accept the influence of our social environment this all throws significant doubt onto the standard picture of authenticity that we use in popular discourse where there
is a neat division between an unchanging inner core and one's outer Behavior or social interactions with any discrepancy between the two immediately being labeled as harmful in authenticity but beyond these questions about the coherence of our popular view of authenticity we can also evaluate it from an ethical and a practical perspective because when it's pushed to its extreme it can encourage a borderline narcissistic view of reality where the whole world must bow down to your true inner self no matter the cost if you want to help me make more videos like this then please consider
becoming one of my wonderful patrons for access to occasional exclusive content including most recently my full interview with Alex okon three the idolized self along with the idea that the self is something purely internal comes this further moral division between our true selves and the outside world the world and Society more generally are seen as inherently oppositional forces to who we are making the true self inside us good and anything that threatens s it bad again there is a nugget of truth to this idea it is true that in a lot of social environments many
of us have to stifle our internal feelings thoughts and values to fit in with a wider group the term emotional labor was coined by Arley Hawk child to describe how service workers have to hide how they are truly feeling and put on a smile in order to please their customers and how this can be exhausting and alienating over time there is something about having to consciously hide a mental state that is genuinely unpleasant likewise modern psychological theories of cognitive dissonance point out that it is painful to have your behavior feelings and values caught up in
webs of contradictions nonetheless the simplified picture of authenticity that has come to dominate public discourse on the topic can have downright dangerous consequences here it is clear that being internally out of sync can be be uncomfortable but a dogged pursuit of this crude sense of authenticity can be just as destructive firstly the behavioral consequences of acting authentically are going to vary wildly depending on which part of the psyche is most closely identified with this true self as already discussed a lot of empirical work in this area is about someone acting in accordance with their values
which is a fundamentally ethical concept and also doesn't seem to be inherently conflicting with any kind of social role or social Duty someone's Behavior not matching their ethics can happen through a lack of personal self-control or through Temptation rather than simply due to social pressures if I act outside my values and hurt someone that will make me feel bad and that unpleasant feeling is not necessarily undesirable but this is very different to someone identifying their momentto moment feelings or momentto moment desires with their true self or as necessarily stemming from a true self and this
distinction is often sidelined in much of popular discourse feelings are incredibly changeable and acting on every single one of them is borderline impossible moreover we can have impulses that are self-destructive or fool ourselves into thinking that we desire something that we actually do not our immediate desires are not necessarily in our long-term best interests and may even be mimicking what the people around us desire this is not always always a bad thing but it does muddy the waters when we talk about our true desire or our heart's desire as these are inseparable from our cultural
context and the notion of self-destructive desires cast out on the idea that being authentically true to our desires is always going to lead to this psychological Panacea or sense of inner fulfillment it's also worth noting that feelings and desires are also pretty amoral some of the time as we've already said you can desire to hit someone or hurt someone or cheat on your partner infidelity is actually a pretty good example here you can feel attracted to someone else and yet we would say that expressing or acting on that attraction is a violation of your duties
towards your partner and over time will prevent you from having long-term fulfilling relationships but observations like this become incredibly significant if we're going to treat this vague inner sense authenticity as a straightfor W moral goal if we adopt as an axiom that to live authentically is simply better than to live inauthentically and then begin to identify the true self with our feelings and our desires then this can very quickly lead to a rather self-centered ethical system if everything is a means to the end of this inner true self then we essentially have a soft form
of egoism you may care about other people but this is only ever because that reflects the the desires of your true self and since desires can change those people can be dropped as soon as they lose this utility they have to your personal Journey or your experience of the world just take a moment to think what a society governed by this kind of ethical system might look like it would be a sort of allout War where everyone is attempting to fulfill their own desires bolstered by the idea that this is not just their preference but
actively makes them a better person this is in pretty stark contrast to most philosophical ethical systems which tend to at least take other people into a c and furthermore just empirically I don't think that a rugged individualist pursuit of your own goals to the exclusion of all others is a very good recipe for happiness even if it's wrapped up in this language of authenticity repeated studies and metaanalyses of psychological literature around happiness and well-being show that caring personal relationships are an enormous part of a fulfilling life and that acting in service to others often brings
Great Joy by contrast an over fixation on the self is often associated with unpleasant mental States and sometimes even depression and anxiety this is perhaps unsurprising almost every ancient spiritual or philosophical system emphasize the importance of service to other people from the Buddha's metas sua to Christ's position to love one another to Plato's emphasis on our Collective duties to Doo's later observation that hell is the inability to love we have always known that serving others is deeply important for our long-term happiness and to be fair very few of the self-help books that emphasize authenticity will
explicitly talk about breaking agreed upon uncontroversial moral rules in the pursuit of that authenticity and I'm sure that authors probably do think that the inner self is subject to ethical laws however these nuances often get lost when the concept seeps into popular discourse and it is still a straightforward natural consequence of making authenticity a primary ethical goal it is incredibly easy to just take the rule that being your authentic self justifies most behaviors and go no further than this also this is just anecdotal but I actually quite regularly see people use phrases like this is
just me or I am just being authentic as moral exonerator for rude or inconsiderate behavior and it's often only pushed back on when it defies moral Norms in a far more substantial way again I think this partly stems from the overly simplistic picture we have of authentic Behavior by treating the inner as necessarily truer or superior to the alter or the social we can slip into privileging our own feelings and desires far above other people there is nothing inherently wrong with looking out for yourself but like many other potentially helpful Concepts when it is stretched
to its extreme it can become destructive both for the agent and for those around them I do think there is this slightly disingenuous equivocation that sometimes goes on where people will point to the empirical literature around the benefits of authenticity which are often about acting in accordance with your moral values to AR you for this other kind of authenticity where the desires of our true selves are seen as inherently justifying it's a classic case of conflating two terms that actually have substantially different meanings this perception of the inner self as unchanging in nature also seriously
undermines our idea of personal responsibility for all that it forms the backdrop for a certain subsection of the self-help Community this idea of the unchanging inner self actually robs us of almost any power to shape who we are it turns us into this strange victim of circumstance but not because we are shaped by our social environment or are psychologically predisposed to certain behaviors but rather because who we truly are has already been defined at some vague moment in the past and may have even been defined since our birth our job is not to think about
who we want to be since the perfect us already exists deep inside of us we must rather rather blow off the dust and clear the dirt so that whatever Lies Beneath can shine through I don't think we often acknowledge just how fundamentally disempowering this is as a picture and beyond that it makes it very difficult to hold anyone as responsible for their actions provided that they were acting in accordance with this true self that they cannot change it is an extreme view of our Natures whereby who we are is essentially totally fixed and cannot be
altered either by us or by external factors this links quite closely with what we said in the last section about endorsement we don't tend to want who we are to be defined totally separately to what we would endorse or agree with any notion of authenticity that does not collapse into this kind of amoral egoism and robbing of responsibility must involve some idea of what we value not just what we happen to desire so considering all of these criticisms what can we do well constructing a whole new conception of authenticity from the ground up is obviously
beyond the scope of this video but I do want to perhaps provide a starting point for your own thinking on the topic four Prelude to an authenticity of the future so far we've said an awful lot about the harm authenticity can do but it would also be far too hasty to dismiss the concept out of hand clearly people do want to be aligned in some way and there are ideas of authenticity that do not fall prey to the kind of critiques that we've given thus far so let's explore how we might rescue and resuscitate authenticity
firstly we can note that whatever the authentic we is it will be partly down to us and partly down to our environment the productionist model of authenticity probably does go too far in granting us the radical unrestrained freedom to create who we are I cannot simply decide to Value certain things or to desire certain things the human mind is much more complex than just an agent picking out identities like clothes on a rail nonetheless The Other Extreme where we have no agency over who we are seems just as untenable it opens the possibility that our
true self just could fly in the face of everything we value and be incredibly destructive to the people around us if so this is unlike to be a very productive ethical goal so I would suggest a different approach I don't think we should think of authenticity as something purely given or purely created but rather as an aspiration within constraints that sounds a little bit abstract but I think the concept is actually quite intuitive at one level the authentic self is now more a reflection of our values than who we are at this very moment for
a Christian this might involve a kind of connection with God like we discussed at the beginning of the video for a stoic this might be imitating the figure of the sage and of stoic virtue for a Buddhist it might be the aspiration of the Bodhi SATA this is the aspirational component of authenticity at the same time we must also recognize our personal limitations be they physical or psychological and whether they are temporary or permanent for example I really value mathematical and Technical ability but I also recognize that I am no Terren towel and I also
just don't have the time to learn as much math as I would like my ideal is tempered by my awareness of my limits both in terms of natural ability and also just time constraint this is where the Nugget of Truth in the inner sense model is important we can look within to become aware of a what we value and B what our limitations are even if introspection is still fallible it would be far too quick to dismiss it as a data source this conception of authentic ticity keeps the underlying idea that we are being true
to ourselves when we're being authentic but now it's not because we are simply mirroring some underlying us that is already there but rather because we are reflecting in the best way that we can the values we have come to hold dear those values are going to be influenced by the culture and Society we've been brought up in but we can also deliberate and challenge those influences they are thus partly inherited and partly created My Hope Is is that this does Justice to the strengths of both the inner sense View and the productionist model while hopefully
avoiding some of their pitfalls Vara goes into much more detail about being in meshed in a particular social system but I don't necessarily think we need to go that far for our purposes by acknowledging authenticity as involving personal values and then recognizing that those values are going to be partly inherited from cultural influence some kind of social aspect is incorporated into the background of our account with the details to be hashed out later I also want to clarify that when I say values here I mean what varaga would call strong evaluation that is the belief
that something is not just good for you but good in some higher sense whether that is cashed out meta ethically as objective or not is entirely up to you we can think about it behaviorally as treating it more like a prescriptive moral than a descriptive preference this values-based picture also more closely reflects the type of authenticity that has empirically demonstrated positive effects in the psychological literature on the topic since the definitions used in those papers often do involve heavy reference to values and since we are flawed human beings muddling our way imperfectly through our mortal
coil behaving in accordance with your values is always going to be partly aspirational if it's taken in its total sense this picture also dispenses with many of the critiques of the simplistic account of authenticity earlier in in the video for example that's just who I am can no longer be a moral exonerator since who we currently are is no longer the goal nor is it considered fixed and permanent instead the equivalent phrase would be I am acting in accordance with my value system to the absolute best of my ability and of course value systems can
be challenged and debated thus behaving authentically becomes a kind of moral defense but it's certainly not an impenetrable one and certainly does not alleviate the agent from responsibility for their actions since value systems are also much more likely to reference other people this is also not as prone to the more egoistic implications of the true self was inside us all along picture most people do not think that values are innate but learned and developed over time regardless of whether you think morality is objective subjective absolute or non-cognitive the causes of our particular moral beliefs are
not given to us from birth and do change with experience and exposure this reestablishes that someone's authentic self evolves as they interact with the world and with other people it moves authenticity from something purely within to something deeply connected with our actions in the world this also rescues the idea that we have a certain amount of agency over who we are since our authentic identities are no longer fixed but are partly the product of our actions you can Rec recognize this wherever you stand on Free Will and determinism if you think of agency as just
a causal chain that runs through our decision-making processes now you are no longer stuck with who you are but you become a developing project that nonetheless Works within certain recognized constraints it's like an artist stumbling across some charcoal and a canvas they can now create a wonderful charcoal drawing but no matter how hard they tried or how gifted they were they could not make an oil paint with the available tools we are not simply able to Value whatever we like or become whoever we want but nor is there some ready-made inner self that we are
powerless to change it is like an Ever evolving dialogue between what is already there and what we would like to be at The Sweet Spot of that dialogue where we are genuinely doing the best we can to honestly follow our values lies what we can now call authenticity this idea makes the authentic something we can strive after yet also something that will mostly be a little bit Out Of Reach I doubt that many of us will ever perfectly mirror our values but at the same time we can get closer to them and we can perform
them to the best of our abilities this somewhat resembles the Aristotelian idea of personal development where we work on becoming more virtuous over time rather than simply dividing the world into The unver Virtuous and The Virtuous and being done with it I also think that that this functions more readily as an ethical goal as Vara points out the modern concept of authenticity is often turned into an external performance a similar argument is made by buun chelh Han who describes the pressure that we feel to be totally authentic and totally transparent to forever be revealing our
deepest inner core to the world but under our new definition of authenticity this demands changes considerably rather than insisting that people be true to s inner self we would instead be imploring them to live by their own values this strikes me as a far less Insidious request and if we were to move to this concept of authenticity then the pressure would only be that people become more true to their moral systems and we probably want to do that anyway of course there is so much about a new concept of authenticity that I just don't have
the space to discuss here I could discuss the socio existential angles in varga's book or the the notion of a wholehearted commitment put forward by Harry Frankford but I hope this can serve as a modest starting point for your own thinking about authenticity and perhaps it can be a small antidote to the crude way we view being authentic today but if you would like more on Modern social issues viewed through a philosophical lens then check out my video on the aforementioned Buel Han's devastating critique of social media and the pressure to be transparent right here
thank you so much for watching and have a wonderful day
