On Authenticity

The extent to which the things that you think and do are based upon the expectations of others is directly proportional to the degree that you are your true self or not. This is called authenticity.

If the reason that you are acting benefits someone else, then ultimately your life lacks genuine meaning. That is not to say that people cannot salvage some sort of satisfaction from living like this. They can. And if they find others of a similar mind they can quite readily convince themselves that their reason for existing as a group is quite authentic. But in reality there is nothing life giving at all about living under the expectations of either other individuals or mass society as a whole.

And let us not imagine for a moment that living for others in this manner has anything to do with love. There is never any relationship between love and the donning of social expectations. In fact it is categorically impossible to love if you do not have a self to give. Pleasing and posturing are not love. Genuine love can happen because someone has a self that they are in control of giving. On the other hand, an alienated person has been taken over by someone/something else and has no chance of loving because they have nothing of any psychological substance to surrender. Call living like this what you will, but do not call it love.

When it comes to religious faith one of the signs of inauthenticity manifests itself in language that uses the terms right and wrong, or whether something is approved by the institution or not, or if something is in keeping with what superiors and supervisors prescribe or teach or expect. That is not to imply that genuine relationships do not share common values and/or goals. They do. But a real, life-giving relationship with another person happens precisely on the level of one person with another person without being mitigated by someone else’s expectations of what that relationship should entail. And certainly at least in the Christian tradition the person of Christ gives himself to us simply as a person and invites a genuine response of our true self (unmasked) as we concretely exist here and now in time and space.

In short, you cannot genuinely respond to anyone else either if you do not know that you have a self in the first place, or if you do not care what precisely constitutes your own self in the second.