Hey everyone,
Anyway, before I extend my argument one final time, a quick quote and answer session.
Fuse.
Okay, I read through your reply a couple of times and to be honest, it seems like you kinda just said, "Tab you're not right" a lot.
You gave two examples: the curious child - though curiousity is a genetically inbuilt characteristic, and therefore not 'chosen' in any true sense of the word, and traffic rules, which are fairly mechanistic, and might be considered as pertaining to the whole 'having a car' set of existence, rather than of being a true expression of individuality. You wouldn't base your persona around how you specifically used your mobile phone or the toast machine would you..?
Then this:
fuse wrote:It is perfectly compatible with my position that one can be authentic without having a clear idea about they are. For instance, one can live authentically without really realizing it or reflecting on it.
Which seemed to me like an oxymoron to be honest. So, you 've said one can struggle to be authentic, albeit without much hope or possibility, owing to all the influences that constantly undermine our individuality, and now you're still saying it's possible to be a specific 'something' - ie. yourself (and no other) -
without actually knowing what that 'something' is..???Okay, let's try:
Fuse - do an impression. Go on, right now.
...
...
...
No, that was the wrong one.
You see..? I was thinking of Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry. "Make my day". It's impossible to accurately portray something, when you've no clear idea of what it is you are trying to be.
Sure. But evolution does does not determine with certainty our particular choices or actions. We are not slaves to these common purposes; we can exercise, if we know how, the freedom to act against common purpose if we so choose.
Yes, but it
does give us some pre-dispositional nudges. Natural racism in infants and toddlers for example, and possibly homosexuality - though the vote's not totally in on that one, depression, agression, attention span, alcoholism, smoking, all kinds of things. The Mathew effect will most times do the rest to send us down a pre-ordained path.
...you seem to be using "authenticity" differently. You're basically saying either a Van-Gogh work is really a Van- Gogh work or it is not. I agree. Yet this is not the sense in which we have been discussing authenticity and it is not the sense in which authenticity applies to human beings.
Then, why..? How..? Who..? Where..? Don't leave me in the dark here. <-E-x-p-a-n-d->.
Authenticity is not rooted in difference but in truthfulness. Debaitor is onto something and I'm starting to get it. Hermann Hesse, as an introductory remark to his novel Demian, wrote I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult? Authenticity has everything to do with being yourself and it has everything to do with what's "real."
Again - if you've already agreed with me that 'knowing thyself' is impossible (though apparently to you this doesn't matter), then how would you distinguish the voice of this mysterious 'true self' from the clamour of the 'false selves' projected into you from the outside world..?
"Hang on, I'm getting a message from my true self..!"
"E-A-T... A... B-I-G M-A-C™."
"Right, I'm now authentically going to MacDonalds. See you later. I'm being authentic."
As for the vid, sorry, but gosh-darn it, You tube is banned over here. Though I can't work out if that's good for my authenticity or not. I'm thinking maybe it is.
Debaitor.Is this person real or not??? I think that is the underlying question. And you posit that (reality) as an impossibility, since Authenticity is (near) impossible.
No, I'm not debating reality here. Iron is real. Carbon is real. Steel, though an alloy, is also real. Realness is not the question I'm examining. You are real, don't worry. I'm examining whether or not you can exist 'unalloyed' metaphorically, as you go through life.
people trust their parents, as infants. This trust, automatically implies authenticity. It implies that our parents/guardians are 'authentic' in their care.
We're not examining 'conviction' or 'trust' either. Okay, their care
is authentic - because demostratably it has produced a healthy infant. But again, what does that prove..? It does not answer the question of whether that 'caring' was an authentic part of those parents' individuality, or something thrust upon them by social expectations and/or genetic pre-dispositions, external to what they would suppose to be their essential selves. I hope you see the difference.
I'm sorry, but you've become so enwrapped in your associations with 'fatherhood' and 'authority' that you've straggled off the point.
Authenticity, to me, seems to become applied to 1. people, 2. facts/statements, and 3. scientific objects.
No. No no no. There's a huge difference between the existential version of authenticity and the meaning as applied to facts and science.
I mean okay, skeptically/Hume-wise, all facts are theories, and depend hugely on the recognized authority of those postulating and promoting them. I getcha. Unfortunately no-one's giving away degrees in Me. Nor professorships in Tabness, nor tenured positions in the faculty of Tab studies. There are
no experts,
no authorities to whom to appeal or trust for verification.
Except
me of course, and we've already established that I cannot know very much about myself anyway, being as I am, unable to distinguish what is 'me' from the crowd.
Damn, sorry dear readers, that wasn't actually all that quick, was it. Arrgh.
__________________________________________________Anyway. Last post, so now I'll summarize what's been before. This
will be quick, because it's a pic.

The above is a quick representation of the forces operating upon us both overtly and subliminally, as I mentioned in my first post, that undermine any individuality we may have.
In the second post I mentioned that it is hard to define yourself except in comparison to others, and that this shaky basis for self-knowledge would further render authenticity in life difficult, in the same way that doing an impression of someone you've never actually observed clearly, or simply learned about through hearsay, would be bordering on impossible.
So onto the finalé.
One question my esteemed counter-positioners have failed to raise is ironically the most simple: "Why, if we are not individuals, do we appear as such..?"
I mean, go outside, watch everyone. They all seem different - they talk differently, have different opinions, do different things, at different times, make different choices even though they are in the same sitiuations. To see all this and still say that people have no real individuality is either madness, or at the very least, unintuitive.
Sorry, but here I go back to the lowly bee. The same bee that I introduced in the very first post I made. Watch a hive. All the bees are buggering about in a seemingly random fashion, much as we do. Let's lower the temperature of the hive just a little bit. A degree or two. Brr.
Look, look there - Bee number 144,735 has begun to buzz its wing furiously. Damn him, he's trying to re-heat the hive back to its normal homeostatic temperature. Hah-ha - do not fuck with me bee, I will now lower the temperature a few degrees more. Hmm. Now
more Bees are all beginning to buzz their wings.
Arrgh - down with the resistance..!!! - I now lower the temperature even lower, to the point where it's bumping up against the lower limit of what bees can stand before dying.
Boom - the whole hive is buzzing furiously - a million teeny-tiny muscles pumping furiously - converting movement into heat.
A minute ago however, they were all doing their own things. Apparently individually. And now they're all acting in concert, effortlessly. Naturally.
Hmm.
Why..? Why didn't they all start buzzing like crazy all at once when I first lowered the temperature by a degree or two..? That would have restored the correct temperature quicker afterall...
...Actually, no it wouldn't have. It would have overshot it by a mile, then the poor bastards would have had to clear out until the hive cooled down, or at least remain torpid for a while. Then the hive would have cooled, and damn, gotten
too cool, then they'd all have started buzzing crazily again, and the whole overshoot-undershoot cycle would have begun again, never actually, to stop, and they'd never get anything done.
Giving each bee a different threshold of "Ooh, isn't it getting a bit chilly in here..?" makes evolutionary sense, because it ensures a
stepped response to temperature, ensuring that a homeostatic level is maintained - a reaction of near equal strength to a given provocation.
Now, let's transpose that thought onto human behaviour. Say there is a fire. It's no more than a burning cigarette-butt thrown from a car. It lands, still smoldering, in front of a group of people. What happens..? Do they:
(a) All shout "FIRE!!!!" and climb over themselves to either run away, or to stamp it out - probably squashing each other in the process..?
Or does:
(b) Whoever's closest grind it out and go "Tut-tut, people today eh..?".
ie. the most efficient level of response given the magnitude of the event.
However, now, if that cigarette lands on a bunch of trash, and the trash catches fire...
Then you get collective action - people trying to put it out - bucket chains for example, people phoning the fire department. People grabbing each other and saying "Oh look - there's a fire."
Same with agression and mob-behaviour. First, to produce a mob, you have to synchronize their mood. Do that with a good firey speech concerning a common grievance, then mirror-cells, collective body-language and facial expression will do the rest. Bingo, one synchronized, collectively angry mob. Now you take them on the warpath, and find someone to fight, or something to break.
Damn. Police line.
Now watch. Look - there's the first bee, oops, I mean person, throwing a rock. The police close in. Look again - a couple more people have been pushed over the "Goddamnit I'm so angry I could spit" threshold, and they are piling in. And boom - there goes the crowd. Everyone wailing in, fists, curses, and spittle flying.
It's all about thresholds. A coward isn't always a coward, it's just they have a very high tolerance for affront. Give that guy enough provocation though, and suddenly he's trying to bite through your leg along with the rest of them.
Acting individually doesn't mean you are an individual.
We can expand mob behaviour. Call it a "diffuse localized harmony of behaviour and perspective". ie, a wider society, with the mob's firey speech lessened into a general cultural background hum, specific to that area,
tailored to the specific needs of surviving happily in that location along with the accompanying accent.
And that's the trouble these days, a new technological advance that's screwing up even that localized group individuality (sorry - now it's my turn to be oxymoronic

), the globalized media. For example.
Black rap culture - (massively stereotyped sorry) - as smack your bitch, get into gangs, sell drugs, baby-mothers and all that unjazz, does kinda work (for the males anyway). As long as you stay in the ghetto. Inherrent, and to some extent subliminal, racism in American white culture - for example simply having a black-sounding name results in a statistically lower chance of getting a job, even without a picture, or any other context - means blacks are sidelined into unemployment and crime. With normal avenues of social advancement cut - ie. employment, promotion or higher education - it begins to make sense to explore criminal avenues, a risk taken being better than just sitting on your hands and rotting. And with a significant portion of suitable males in prison or dead, the black women are sexually disempowered, competing as they are among themselves, for a smaller pool of males - forcing them to accept chauvanistic and self-seeking behaviour on the part of those males, even to the point of bearing their children without the normal contracts and pledges... etc. etc. etc.
My point however is that without the net, and instant world-wide communication, this culture would have stayed pretty much within its borders for a lot longer and worked there to some kind of end-point, good, or more probably bad, whatever. But now - because that culture is a 'first order' culture - ie. sex, violence and money - and as such is vastly and instinctively attractive to the young and impulsive - ie. pretty much all male teenagers worldwide - it has exceeded its natural bounds and gone viral - igniting the youth of the world - white, black, and all colours in between.
Trouble is though, you've got nice white rich kids with educations trying to out pimp each other and hook their equally nice, educated and emancipated female colleagues on drugs so they can prostitute them out on Youtube.
In ending, I accept that obviously this is an extreme, and to some extent willfully exaggerated example, but it serves to illustrate my final point, that as the world becomes ever more interconnected, so, inversely, our chance of preserving an authentic identity at both an individual and a localized group level lessens, as our psyches become flooded not only with the influences of our native cultures, but also those of invading cultural memes, carried via the mediums of the TV and the net.
You still awake..?

I've finished.