Creating Your New Self

Among today’s young intellectuals Tara Isabella Burton stands out. Having missed out on an American education, the kind that will most likely ruin your mind, she earned a doctorate in theology from Oxford.

Thus, her commentaries are always thoughtful and always worth reading. Her book, Strange Rites, argues persuasively that our culture has taken a decided turn toward pagan idolatry. The book is worth a read.

Now, Burton has just published a new book, called Self-Made wherein she analyzes a Western cultural deformity, the belief that one can remake or recreate oneself, that one can be whatever one wants to be.

We see it in transmania, the notion that you can change sexes at will, depending on your belief. Behind the theory lies the notion that society, with its rules and regulations, creates a false and sociable Self, one that alienates us forever from our true selves. The theory suggests that we can be what we want to be, but that society or the culture or civilization represses our inner truth because it wants to make us cogs in the machine.

Consider this a variation on a theme by Freud, but it is certainly not limited to him. Any ideology that promises liberation from society’s expectations, and from the roles we were born into, shares this illusory thought.

Anyway, in an essay from Persuasion, Burton presents her argument:

To many, self-making is a gospel of liberation. You can become whoever you want to be. No matter who or how you were born, your race or class or gender or family, you can wipe the slate clean, determine your own destiny, become self-made. It’s the narrative at the heart of the myth of The American—the promise, as Frederick Douglass ringingly put it, that anyone could “make the road on which they had travelled.” It is the narrative with which so many of us have been inculcated from birth: that our “true” or “authentic” selves are derived from our internally-felt sensations or our creative powers, and that our lives ought to be a process of expressing and “manifesting” that reality, overcoming the social and communal obstacles that stand in our way. Life, in other words, is the process of becoming our best selves, while throwing off the shackles of social expectation.

Nicely put. You are potentially a work of art, a block of marble that you craft into your true self. It means that there is a special virtue in breaking the rules, in defying expectations, in transforming yourself, for example, into a member of the opposite sex. 

Burton continues:

At its best, the quintessentially modern narrative of self-making—one that has become more widespread and more robust in the Internet Age—can indeed be an avenue for freedom from both oppression and repression. But the narrative also has a darker side. As often as not, as it has played out since the advent of modernity, the gospel of self-making has been less about freeing individuals to choose their own destinies as about identifying a new aristocracy, just as exclusive as the old one. The sole difference in the new way of being is that it may be money, “style,” or “spirit”—as opposed to purely lineage—that creates the right to transcend society’s rules. 

Nowadays, Burton continues, everyone has a smart phone and everyone has an online presence through social media. We can take on various characters, avatars, and present those as our truth. And we become indignant when anyone rejects that true self.

In our own era, the gospel of self-making has become nearly universal. Anyone with a smartphone—85 percent of America’s population—can create a digital avatar, a filtered selfie, a personal brand, in order to capitalize on the dizzying potential of the attention economy, which often rewards aesthetic curation with economic success. Self-help doctrines like “manifesting” promise that anyone can connect to the energy of the universe and that that energy can be harnessed to help us achieve our goals in this life. 

Burton believes that this new religious dogma has turned us all into commodities:

The demand to create our own selves for cultural and financial success alike has transformed us all into commodities: as we desperately attempt to prove that we—and we alone—are worthy originals, demigods with the right to determine our own lives.

And she remarks that the new religion, a form of pagan idolatry, allows us to consider ourselves to be gods, to be superhuman beings, in the Nietzschean sense of the term. It is a powerful illusion, far more powerful than the call to rebel against society’s rules and laws. It’s a more modern form of liberation theology, but one that has been embraced by many people who should know better.

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