see this kind of stuff is misleading although we do get a feel for what he’s trying to say. where he goes wrong is to propose that there are always individuals who are sacrificing anything about themselves when they become immersed in the ‘theyness’ of public life. as if everyone had that special depth of person that would be compromised by doing so. i deny that they do… and even go so far as to say some people are so unbelievably shallow that they would not exist without being part of the ‘they’. such people lack any possible depth because they have neither the intelligence nor the experience to be able to grasp the superficiality of their being. that being the case, they are literally unable to experience that existential crisis at the lose of their individuality.
sartre also shared this concept of inauthenticity… once using a waitress as an example. her composure, movements, gestures and speech, were all too scripted to be authentic. she was ‘acting’ in every sense of the word. though he called this an example of ‘bad faith’ and worked out an argument to say she was avoiding her freedom by playing the role of the waitress. two things here; first, there’s no freewill, so she’s not avoiding anything. second, if anything peculiar at all is happening here, it’s not necessrily that she’s playing the role of the generic waitress (that’s her job), but that she doesn’t recognize or feel something fake about her character when doing so. this waitress can be used as an example of what’s happening on a much larger scale with ‘public discourse’ in general… how we mimic the behaviors we subliminally incorporate into our selfhood through the bombardment of all manner of indoctrinating forces. commercials, especially, that show us how we are supposed to be, what we are supposed to need and want, how we are supposed to talk, etc. so much so that to say these people are individuals who are missing something unique about themselves that is lost through the public discourse, would be an overstatement. there is nothing about themselves that is unique so that one could say ‘i’d like to recover myself from this public theyness.’ recover what? that’s what you are; a copy of a copy of a copy.
and it’s so bad that even the idea of ‘finding oneself’ is scripted and contrived. if you want to find yourself, you’re supposed to do what people do when they want to find theselves… and you follow a formula.
what we are submerged in today is like a single autopoietic organism that consists of selfless individual cogs programmed to play some role or another that happened to find them. like it’s so bad, you can’t even be fake without being fake. that shit is scripted, too.
anyway what your boy martin was feeling when he said that was just that everybody around him was dumber than he was. he then mystified (like everything else he touched) something unique he thought he had, and then proclaimed himself the exemplary of the true existential individual against the ‘herd’. but there was nothing different about martin, save perhaps his extraordinary philosophical vocabulary. this fellow hadn’t even begun to grasp the true uniqueness of the individual. that’s something only stirner could hold without burning himself.