Spare Us the Authenticity

Everyone but me believes in authenticity. With very few exceptions most people have jumped on the authenticity bandwagon. It’s a culture thing, and we all want to belong to the culture.

In some ways it makes sense. We want to be real, not fake. We want to be open and honest about our feelings, not closed off and repressed.

We have been sold on authenticity because we have been led to believe that anything else is a lie.

Authenticity feels like a good idea, until you start reflecting that civility-- a term that has recently received much lip service-- is the polar opposite of authenticity.

As often happens, we have not given enough thought to the concept. Being true to what you have inside tends to push you toward being anti-social.

It’s bad enough that authenticity has infected everyday relationships. Now, if Deborah Gruenfeld and Lauren Zander are correct, we even want our leaders to be authentic, like Jack Welch. Link here.

With one possible exception, none of you is Jack Welch. If you imitate the Jack Welch leadership style, you will, by definition, be inauthentic. Adopting a Jack Welch persona will make look like a fake... unless you really are Jack Welch.

But nothing would prevent you from living your life according to the Jack Welch formula for authenticity: give it to them straight from the gut. If you want a copy, click on this link: Jack: Straight from the Gut

Whatever the philosophers mean by authenticity, the Welch formula captures its meaning with perfect clarity. It is totally high concept.

The trouble is: when something really comes straight from the gut, that means, literally speaking, that you are regurgitating.

You might feel like it’s a necessary purge of negativity, but most people, when they see it coming at them, will be trying to get out of the way.

No one embraces someone who is giving it to them straight from the gut.

I am not advising anyone to ignore whatever rumblings they feel in their digestive tract. After all, those queasy feelings may be telling you that you are in danger or in love.

But you ought to filter your gut’s impulse through your brain. You should weigh it with your best judgment, formulate it in human language, and communicate it persuasively and tactfully to another human being.

Regardless of how many business leaders have taken Jack Welch’s advice to heart, it is bad advice. It did not create the authenticity vogue, which originated with existential philosophy decades ago, but it has helped create a business culture where, as Gruenfeld and Zander point out, authenticity has come to be a justification for bad behavior.

Gruenfeld and Zander believe that you should not try to be authentic, because your true self might be a jerk or boor.What if your true feelings will be repulsive to another human being? I would go so far as to say that some of the emotions that pass through your gut, and other parts of your anatomy, during a business day will get you in serious trouble if you express them openly and authentically.

If you insist that your behavior be authentic, you will tend to be rude, tactless, and inconsiderate. Authenticity will absolve you of the effort required to show consideration for everyone else‘s feelings.

And how can you lead or even connect with another human being if you are so self-involved that you are hard at work on purging the contents of your gut.

Being inconsiderate toward your staff is not the way to motivate them. It is also not a good way to make friends or to influence people.

In truth, it is more natural, more normal, and certainly more adult to gear your expressions to your listeners.

People who want to make authenticity their policy will probably make it a point to display their more obnoxious characteristics in public. But why do we all think that your worst is your true self, while your best is a sham persona?

Leadership does not involve putting on a mask that will make you look like a leader. Effective leadership is seen in how well your staff is working, in how the company functions, not in how you present yourself.

Paradoxically, this does not mean that you should be someone other than yourself.

Authenticity is a misleading ideal because it defines you merely as an autonomous bundle of unexpressed emotions. It completely ignores your social being.

And, since all human beings live in society, the picture of the autonomous, authentic individual is a mere philosopher’s fiction.

True enough, sometimes you act like a jerk: you might be hypercritical and judgmental, querulous or irascible, pusillanimous or foolhardy, modest or flamboyant.

But, these are personality traits; they are more theatrical than real; they are not who you really are.

But then, what does it mean to say that you should be who you really are?

Happily enough, who you are as a social being is anything but mysterious. It involves the most obvious facts that others know about you.

This is going to feel somewhat self-evident. Yet, many of the primary characteristics that make you who you really are have recently run afoul of political correctness.

Simply put, I am thinking about the traits that define you as a human being in society. The people who are peddling authenticity have been trying to persuade us that they are trivial, irrelevant, prejudicial, and of less import than the deep feelings rising from your intestinal tract.

For example, you are a man or a woman. Despite the fact that most people have been bullied into removing gender references from their vocabulary, the basic fact of gender remains. You cannot be both a man and a woman and you cannot be neither.

If you are a man, you should not be pretending to get in touch with your feminine side. Most women will understand that you are faking it. You would do best not to work with those who don’t.

If a man gets in touch with his feminine side, other men will deride his pretension.

No man can lead effectively if he is adopting a feminine persona. Not because a woman cannot exercise leadership, but because no one is going to follow the lead of someone who does not know who he is.

Outside of the therapy world, most male leaders do not try to act like women. Yet, women are often advised that they must be more manly if they are to function effectively as leaders.

Here the same principle applies. A woman cannot command respect for being something that she is not. If she pretends to be another Jack Welch, she is not going to fool anyone. By seeming to be uncomfortable in her skin she will be undermining her own authority and credibility.

When it comes to everyday life, a man should not pretend to know what it feels like to be a woman or to have experiences that are specific to women. It is invasive and intrusive, a failure to respect a woman’s privacy.

Obviously, the same rule applies to women who might be tempted to get in touch with their more virile side, or to pretend that they know what it feels like to be a man.

Those who make a fetish out of empathy seem to believe that we can all feel each other‘s pain. In fact, we cannot, and it is insulting to pretend otherwise.

Of course, there’s more to who you really are than your gender. There’s also your age. You are your age and you should always act it.

As we know, this is easier said than done.

Some businesses value a young, vibrant look, and our culture seems to worship at the altar of youthful inexperience.

Granted, it is probably easier to find love and romance if you can highlight your more youthful qualities.

Yet, if you are going to exercise leadership, you do yourself no favor by pretending to be much younger than you are. We associate age with experience, and we all look up to leaders who have more experience and who look like they have earned their way to the top, a leader who affects an appearance of youthfulness is not going to command respect. Looking and acting your age means that you are comfortable with your leadership position.

Sorry to have to say it, but one way to look your age is to forgo cosmetic surgery procedures. These do not just erase your wrinkles; they freeze your face to the point where it no longer expresses anything resembling a human feeling.

As for the larger issues, if you are an older person leading a group of younger people, you should not pretend to be just like them. In your demeanor and your attitude you should express the grace that comes from experience and the generosity that shows your confidence in their ability.

If you are older, you should know that leadership involves being the kind of person that someone would want to emulate.

If we are thinking seriously about the topic of leadership, gender and age are just the beginning. How you function as a leader will involve where you came from: which country, which region, which community.

You will also be known by the schools you attended and by the degrees and accreditations you possess.

You will also be seen differently depending on whether you are elevated from inside or outside of the company, whether you got your start in sales, marketing, accounting, legal, or human resources.

If you got the job because your father owns the company, that will also affect your ability to lead.

These different aspects of who you really are weigh more heavily than whether or not you are a jerk or a drama queen.

If you acknowledge their importance and their permanence, you can effectively manage them. If you ignore them because you are obsessing about being your authentically nasty self, you will be mismanaging them

Last, but not least, many of the most important parts of who you are involve your character. Are you trustworthy, reliable, responsible, and loyal?

These are far more important for social interaction than your ability to give it to people straight from the gut.

Beyond Authenticity

In a New York Times column today Professor Adam Grant firmly rejects the current cult to authenticity. He rejects the commonly offered advice that you should “be yourself.”

Long time readers of this blog will find Grant’s thinking to be familiar. I have often expressed a similar opinion and thus I happily find myself in complete agreement with Grant. Links here.

For the higher purposes of this blog I would only add that the cult to authenticity has been promoted and promulgated by the therapy culture. Therapists who do not know any better often tout the transcendent virtue of being yourself.

We are inclined to forgive them. They have no idea what they are talking about.

Allow Grant to define his terms:

We are in the Age of Authenticity, where “be yourself” is the defining advice in life, love and career. Authenticity means erasing the gap between what you firmly believe inside and what you reveal to the outside world. 

Breaking down the barriers between inside and out, making what Freud called free association something you live out in your everyday life, exposing your thoughts and feelings and fantasies to whomever, not caring what others think of you or how they see you… these commonly-held values are very bad advice:

But for most people, “be yourself” is actually terrible advice.

If I can be authentic for a moment: Nobody wants to see your true self. We all have thoughts and feelings that we believe are fundamental to our lives, but that are better left unspoken.

Right on! As it happens, some people have put this idea to the test. They have wanted to find out what would happen if they blurted out what they really, really felt to whomever.

Grant describes the result:

A decade ago, the author A. J. Jacobs spent a few weeks trying to be totally authentic. He announced to an editor that he would try to sleep with her if he were single and informed his nanny that he would like to go on a date with her if his wife left him. He informed a friend’s 5-year-old daughter that the beetle in her hands was not napping but dead. He told his in-laws that their conversation was boring. You can imagine how his experiment worked out.

“Deceit makes our world go round,” he concluded. “Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered, governments would collapse.”

But, when a man decides not to tell his nanny that he is lusting after her body or does not announce to his in-laws that they are boring… is he really being deceitful? Why not say that he is being considerate and tactful? Why not praise him for showing concern for the feelings of others? This does not make him a deceptive liar. It makes him a man of good character.

I think it fair to say that when Jacobs says that it’s all lies and deceit, he is being ironic. I emphasize the point because not everyone is going to understand it that way.

Next, Grant points out that some people are more considerate and tactful. Others are inclined to expose their inner thoughts and feelings willy-nilly.

The former are considered to be inauthentic. The latter are considered to be authentic. I would note that the therapy profession often tells people that if they do not expose what they have inside they will become sick. These values did not come down to us from the moon.

And yet, Grant points out, people who are more tactful and considerate, who care more about how others see them are more respected, get along better with others and tend to be more successful.

Therapists will not like it, but ignoring what other people think of you puts you on the glide path to mediocrity.

People who are tactful and considerate adjust their verbal offerings and their behaviors to the cues that they receive from other people. When we engage in a face-to-face conversation we often modify what we are saying as we read the facial and postural signals the other person is sending.

People who are tactless and inconsiderate are more like stage actors. They blurt out what they have to say, as though under a strange compulsion, as though they are reading lines. And they do not modify what they are saying regardless of how much it hurts or bores the other person.

It is useful to note that the authentic individual so closely resembles an actor reading his lines, generally oblivious to the effect they are having on the audience.

For what it’s worth, Grant calls people who show consideration for other people: high self-monitors. Their counterparts, low self-monitors tend to blurt out their feelings, no matter the consequences. For the record, high self-monitors have a stronger sense of shame… thus of decorum and propriety.

He explains:

If you’re a high self-monitor, you’re constantly scanning your environment for social cues and adjusting accordingly. You hate social awkwardness and desperately want to avoid offending anyone.

But if you’re a low self-monitor, you’re guided more by your inner states, regardless of your circumstances. In one fascinating study, when a steak landed on their plates, high self-monitors tasted it before pouring salt, whereas low self-monitors salted it first. As the psychologist Brian Little explains, “It is as though low self-monitors know their salt personalities very well.”

Research studies show that the first group is largely more successful than the latter. One notes that women, in particular, have been conned into thinking that they must express all of their feelings, no matter the circumstances. This habit has worked to their disadvantage in the workplace:

High self-monitors advance faster and earn higher status, in part because they’re more concerned about their reputations. And while that would seem to reward self-promoting frauds, these high self-monitors spend more time finding out what others need and helping them. In a comprehensive analysis of 136 studies of more than 23,000 employees, high self-monitors received significantly higher evaluations and were more likely to be promoted into leadership positions.

And also:

Interestingly, women are more likely to be low self-monitors than men, perhaps because women face stronger cultural pressures to express their feelings. Sadly, that puts them at risk for being judged weak or unprofessional. When Cynthia Danaher was promoted to general manager of a group at Hewlett-Packard, she announced to her 5,300 employees that the job was “scary” and that “I need your help.” She was authentic, and her team lost confidence in her initially. Some researchers even suggest that low self-monitoring may have harmful effects on women’s progress.

We can now expose the fact that therapists have been giving women—and metrosexual men-- some very bad advice. If they share their inner feelings, their anxieties and vulnerabilities, they will look weak, unprofessional and ineffectual. They will compromise their leadership potential because others will lose confidence in them.

Grant then mentions another salient point. People who are tactful and considerate, who care more about “face” than about their inner soulful selves, can be damaged by believing in an inner self.

One does not want to get too far into the philosophical tall grass here, but David Hume and Ludwig Wittgenstein have shown us all the way out of that morass.

Psychologists have discovered that abandoning the notion of a fixed true self can contribute to psychological growth:

But even high self-monitors can suffer from the belief in authenticity because it presupposes that there is a true self, a bedrock to our personalities that’s a combination of our convictions and abilities. As the psychologist Carol Dweck has long shown, merely believing that there’s a fixed self can interfere with growth.

Here is one way it manifests itself. People who think that they are who they are, who believe they have an immutable self, do not believe that they can change. Thus, then tend to hunker down and refuse even to try to do things differently.

In Grant’s words:

Children who see abilities as fixed give up after failure; managers who believe talent is fixed fail to coach their employees. “As we strive to improve our game, a clear and firm sense of self is a compass that helps us navigate choices and progress toward our goals,” Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at the business school Insead, notes. “When we’re looking to change our game, a too rigid self-concept becomes an anchor that keeps us from sailing forth.”

Grant quotes Lionel Trilling on the difference between authenticity and sincerity, but the basic concept goes back at least to Confucius. The Chinese Sage recommended that you do the right thing, perform the correct social rituals even when you do not know why you are doing them and even when it does not feel like the real You.

If he is right, then the real You is merely an overly familiar bad habit. The Sage adds that you will arrive at sincerity when your good behavior becomes second nature.

Grant offers an explanation:

Instead of searching for our inner selves and then making a concerted effort to express them, Trilling urged us to start with our outer selves. Pay attention to how we present ourselves to others, and then strive to be the people we claim to be.

Rather than changing from the inside out, you bring the outside in.

And also:

When Dr. Ibarra studied consultants and investment bankers, she found that high self-monitors were more likely than their authentic peers to experiment with different leadership styles. They watched senior leaders in the organization, borrowed their language and action, and practiced them until these became second nature. They were not authentic, but they were sincere. It made them more effective.

Martin Heidegger: Everyone's Favorite Nazi

How did it happen that one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century was a Nazi? And how did it happen that seriously leftist  philosophers continue to pretend that it did not matter? Why, in the case of Martin Heidegger, did so many of his fellow philosophers willingly ignore his service to National Socialism and his lifelong failure to recant his views?

If it was not a will-to-power, perhaps it was a will-to-ignore… to ignore the fact that, in extolling Heidegger’s thought, they were teaching people how to think like Nazis.

It becomes that more complicated when we reflect that Heidegger’s work is borderline unreadable. Even before he joined the Nazi Party, Heidegger was writing some of the most impenetrable prose anyone had ever seen. For a language that gave us Kant and Hegel, that’s a considerable achievement in its own right.

So, very, very few people really understand what Heidegger was talking about. They do understand what Nazism was, but they cannot make the connection.

Considering how much time and effort it takes to figure out what Heidegger was about, they are not about to admit that they were duped by a Nazi. Academic thinkers like to think that they are impervious to demagoguery. When it comes to Heidegger they should think again. Surely, they do not agree with any of the tenets of Hitler’s thought, but they have become what medical science would call “carriers.” They transmit the disease without suffering its symptoms themselves.

Now, Adam Kirsch, in an exceptionally clear exposition of the Heidegger problem explains the internal contradictions that have beset those who continue to defend the great Nazi:

… no matter how much we find out about Heidegger’s Nazism, it still seems like a contradiction in terms. After all, we think we know what Nazis are like and what philosophers are like, and the two identities simply don’t match. Thinkers are supposed to be idealistic, moral defenders of the highest values of civilization; fascists are brutal, barbaric, appealing to humanity’s lowest instincts. Nazis burn books; philosophers write them. But Heidegger did both. In 1927, he published one of the most influential books in the history of philosophy, Being and Time; six years later, as rector of Freiburg University, he presided over a public bonfire of “un-German” books, proclaiming, “Flame, announce to us, light up for us, show us the path from which there is no turning back.” Like the famous optical illusion in which the same figure is both a duck and a rabbit, then, we keep twisting and turning our image of Heidegger, trying to see in him both the Nazi and the philosopher at the same time.

Could it be that those who have devoted their lives to disseminating the Heidegger’s thought have misunderstood it?

When I asked a young college graduate about this contradiction one day many years ago, he offered up what he had been taught in a college philosophy course. He suggested that, perhaps, Heidegger did not understand his own philosophy. To which I replied: And you do?

But, why should anyone care?

For one, as I explained in my book The Last Psychoanalyst, Heidegger’s thinking seems to have been perfectly consonant with Freudian theory.

For another, Heidegger was the progenitor of what is now called the practice of deconstruction. College students often thrill to this new method. They love deconstructing texts to expose the way Western, that is Judeo-Christian civilization contaminates our minds and destroys our authentic individuality.

And yet, precious few of those who practice deconstruction understand that it is just a fancy philosophical terms for “pogrom.” Deconstruction does to texts what the SS and the Gestapo did to the cities, towns and villages that were conquered by the Wehrmacht. If you do not understand that these are fundamentally the same thing, you do not understand deconstruction.

And, how smart do you have to be to understand that the assault on Judeo-Christian culture would naturally lead to the destruction (or deconstruction) of Jewish culture, Jewish customs, Jewish learning and Jewish people?

To repeat a point that I made in my book, Heidegger’s thought was designed to create a form of human being that was perfectly amoral, and thus, that was exempt from responsibility for personal behavior or even political actions.

Kirsch explains it in terms that place Heidegger firmly within Nietzsche’s orbit:

That is largely because Heidegger is not very interested in the central problem of ethics (and of politics), which is how to live with other people. For him, the key experiences and challenges of existence are individual: Alone we suffer, alone we die, and alone we must make meaning out of our fate. The highest value, then, is not goodness but authenticity; above all, authenticity in the face of death. To accept one’s actual condition of mortality and thrownness, not to flee from these difficult facts into consoling illusions and abstractions, is for Heidegger the ultimate moral achievement.

Could it be that philosophers who drunk too deeply of this philosophy found that their moral judgment was numbed to the point that they could not hold Heidegger accountable for his grotesque moral failings?

Kirsch continues:

What Heidegger does here is to pluck a kind of meaning from the midst of nihilism. It is precisely because life is meaningless, because it has no value or purpose imposed on it from above or outside, that the individual human being must endow it with meaning by deciding on an authentic existence. But authenticity and decision are fundamentally anti-ethical concepts, because they deny the existence of any established values, such as justice, equality, or sympathy. Why be a “good” person rather than a “bad” person, if terms like good and bad are mere conventions? If life has the meaning we decide to give it, what’s to stop us from finding that meaning in arbitrary violence, domination, or irrationality? What if we choose to find meaning in serving a Volk or a Führer?

Don’t these ideas have a ring of familiarity? We are not born as we are, but we can make ourselves over, recreate ourselves in order to have an authentically anti-social existence. Wasn’t Heidegger merely doubling down on anomie?

If we follow this program we will overcome all established values and will transvalue, as Nietzsche put it, values like good and bad, which to Heideggereans are, as Kirsch says, mere conventions, or better, social constructs.

And what could be a better sign of our ability to transcend custom and convention than to take actions that any civilized human would consider to be evil and then declaring them to be good. It is any wonder that Heidegger thrilled to the pogroms carried out by the SA and that he was not especially moved by the Holocaust.

In the hermetic world of Heidegger’s thought, our lives are meaningful because we give them meaning. They do not gain meaning by our values, our actions, or our membership in groups. Trying to get along with other people is a waste of time. Trying to be a good person is to fall prey to an illusion.

In Kirsch’s words:

This hope is expressed again and again in the “Black Notebooks” for 1933, the year Hitler took power and Heidegger became rector of his university. “A marvelously awakening communal will is penetrating the great darkness of the world,” Heidegger writes. Nazism, with its rhetoric of destiny and rebirth, was going to define new coordinates for human life, simply by the authenticity and confidence of its self-assertion. These coordinates might be upside-down, from the perspective of conventional morality; Nazism might call murder, conquest, racism and dictatorship good, where the old Judeo-Christian morality thought them bad. But because values are determined by conviction, not vice versa, the Nazis could succeed in bringing into being a new world in which evil actually was good. “The mission—if precisely this were the mission: the full imposing and first proposing of the new essence of truth?” Heidegger asks, thrilled at the prospect that truth itself can be transformed.

Of course, Heidegger’s minions have been fighting to remove the taint of anti-Semitism from their guru’s reputation. And yet, Kirsch explains, the recent publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks shows that they are fighting in a losing cause:

In his published work, Heidegger traces it all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, suggesting that it was the fate of Western civilization to turn against itself in this way. But in the “Black Notebooks,” he finds a much simpler and more familiar scapegoat: the Jews. “World Jewry,” Weltjudentum, with its overtones of hostile conspiracy, was a common Nazi phrase that the philosopher had no qualms about embracing, using it several times in the privacy of the notebooks. Thus in 1941 Heidegger writes: “World Jewry, spurred on by the emigrant that Germany let out, remains elusive everywhere. Despite its increased display of power, it never has to take part in the practice of war, whereas we are reduced to sacrificing the best blood of the best of our own people.” This is a breathtaking example of how Nazi anti-Semitism precisely inverted reality: At just the moment when the Holocaust was killing millions of helpless Jews, Heidegger suggests that it was “elusive” World Jewry that was killing Germans.

Following Heidegger, Jacques Derrida also traced the beginning of Western civilization to the time of Socrates and Plato. Derrida, who seems have believed that the civilization was founded on the repression of the activity of writing—Socrates did not write—did not see that putting his theories into practice would produce a multitude of anonymous internet trolls.

And Derrida did not seem to know that Alfred Rosenberg, a great Nazi ideologue and member of the Nazi Party high command—high enough to be tried at Nuremberg and summarily executed for his crimes—had once said that Plato and Socrates had ruined it all because they had suffered the influence of Judaic thought. Jewish ideas—ideas like free will—had contaminated the Being that had been extolled by pre-Socratic philosophers.

It is true that very few people really have anything like an understanding of Heidegger’s project. Conservative thinkers tend not to be familiar with it at all. And yet, great ideas trickle down through the academy and the media. Before you know it, students are acting like Brown Shirts, asserting their authentic being and working to destroy anyone who does not accept their own self-creation.

Even on a more mundane level, a current debate over the value of small talk seems to reflect Heidegger’s critique of what he called idle chatter. When a behavioral economist like Dan Ariely declares that small talk is a waste of time because it does not produce authentic connections and because it does not engage meaningful topics of conversation, he is communicating, without knowing it, a basic tenet of Heidegger’s philosophy.

Don't Find Your Self

It should not come as news, but today’s college students are being seriously misled. Beyond the obvious fact that too many universities have become indoctrination mills—in the humanities and the social sciences—and that the fight for social justice seems more important than learning anything, it appears that students are being told that the purpose of a liberal arts education is to find themselves.

Having been nurtured with a steady diet of unearned praise, they all seem to know what that means. In truth, it suggests that the college experience should be therapeutic, not educational, that it should promote a specious notion of mental health and not the skills needed to succeed in the real world. No wonder, as Camille Paglia says, their minds are like Jello.

Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh tell us that we can find the antidote if we go East and look to Chinese thinking for an alternative. They have written a synopsis in the Wall Street Journal.

Of course, Tiger Mom Amy Chua has already suggested as much in her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and yours truly has said as much in his book: Saving Face: America and the Politics of Shame.

But, what does it mean to find yourself? The authors explain:

When students arrive at college these days, they hear a familiar mantra about the purpose of higher education: Find yourself. Use these four years to discover who you are. Learn flamenco dancing or ceramics, start a composting project, write for the student newspaper or delve into 19th-century English poetry. Self-discovery, they are told, is the road to adulthood.

So why is it that so many students feel such anxiety? On campus, we hear the same complaint again and again: “I’ve done lots of extracurriculars. I’ve taken a variety of courses. Why can’t I figure out who I am and what I want to do?”

One would love to see these students read more Chinese philosophy, but, truth be told, these children have been turned into professional dilettantes. They have done so many different things that they cannot have put enough focus and concentration into one activity.

Having also been burdened with the notion that they must actualize all of their potential, they seem not to have learned that in order to excel you must concentrate. If you spend your time studying a multitude of subjects and spreading yourself thin in a multitude of activities, you will never excel at any of them. These children should be learning that you cannot have it all, and that if you work hard at one thing you will have to give up other things. You cannot be in the library and at the party at the same time.

Life is about trade-offs. Perhaps you can learn it in Confucius. But the idea is not alien to Western civilization.

What do the authors find in Confucius? Glad you asked:

According to Confucius and other Chinese philosophers, we shouldn’t be looking for our essential self, let alone seeking to embrace it, because there is no true, unified self to begin with. As Confucius understood, human beings are messy, multidimensional creatures, a jumble of conflicting emotions and capabilities living in a messy, ever-changing world. We are who we are by constantly reacting to one another. Looking within is dangerous.

So, they have discovered that introspection is bad for you. Since a goodly amount of therapy is based on the notion of introspection, of finding yourself, of getting in touch with your feelings, of learning what you really, really want… the authors have correctly identified a basic flaw in the therapy culture.

And yet, one would be remiss if one did not note that British philosophy has long known all about this. Ever since the time when David Hume, in the mid eighteenth century decided to search for his Self introspectively, only to find nothing but bundles of sensations, thinkers in the Anglo world have known better than to try to find something that does not exist. Many continental philosophers and certainly many in the psycho world have continued the fruitless search, but the ideas are readily available in Anglo philosophy.

For those of you who have a fairly sophisticated knowledge of philosophy, Saul Kripke tells this story in his book: Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.

The authors also argue against authenticity, which means, generally speaking, that you ought to be expressing what you have deep inside, with passion, with gusto, with vigor… even if it is offensive and obnoxious. Express your feelings, your instincts, your impulses, your heart, the stirrings of your loins… it is a good thing because the value of what you say resides in the feeling that gave rise to it.

Obviously, other people have a slightly different conception of authenticity, but time and space do not allow me to elaborate here. In place of authenticity the authors offer a plastic view of Self:

Instead of struggling to be authentic, Confucius proposed another approach: “as if” rituals, that is, rituals meant to break us out of our own reality for a moment. These rituals are the very opposite of authenticity—and that’s what makes them work. We break from who we are when we note the unproductive patterns we’ve fallen into and actively work to shift them—“as if” we were different people in that moment.

When you hear your girlfriend at the door and make yourself go to greet her instead of sitting there absorbed in your iPhone, you are creating a break. When you make a point of ignoring your mother’s harping and solicit her guidance, you are recognizing that both of you are constantly shifting and changing and capable of bringing out other parts of each other. Instead of being stuck in the roles of nagging mother and put-upon child, you have behaved “as if” you were someone else. It turns out that being insincere, being untrue to ourselves, helps us to grow.

There is good and bad in this notion. If you do the right thing even though you do not feel like doing the right thing, you will acting ethically. Your ethical being might feel slightly alien, but it is the real You. Somehow or other the authors do not seem to bring in the ethical dimension. Unless I miss my guess it was central for Confucius.

Chinese thinking is not about introspection because it is about FACE. It is about how you look to other people, not how you feel about yourself. Perhaps the authors mention this in their book, but the important point is how one learns how to become an ethical individual. And one does so, Confucius said, by performing the correct rituals regardless of whether we understand them or not. And he introduced the notion of sincerity, whereby he meant that if you act correctly over and over again, even if it felt false when you started it will feel true in time.

It is misleading to suggest that you are becoming a whole series of different people, as though you were putting on one mask or another, to see which one fits and to see which one pleases other people.

The notion that we are constantly changing, that we are Protean was explored by Robert Jay Lifton, someone who has done work with Chinese philosophy.

And yet, having face, saving face cannot really be encompassed by the notion of ever shifting personae. One sees how this works when the authors address a college student’s question: what career path should he follow?

“But if there’s no true self and I’m always changing,” more than one student has asked, “how can I decide on the career that’s right for me?” Today’s students want a plan for their future, which makes sense. Their high-school activities—AP classes, varsity soccer, the service trip to Haiti—were aimed at the goal of college admission, and they believe that a clear road map will help them to take the next step toward a fulfilling and profitable career.

From here they take us on an extended excursion through the experience of a student who finds his love for medicine after getting sick and being treated in a hospital. He had at first thought he wanted to be a diplomat, but fortune or fate or God tapped him on the shoulder, got him very sick and told him to become a physician.

OK, the authors do not say it was divine intervention, but it does sound as though this student found his calling by getting sick. Yet, getting sick and being hospitalized is a random event. What would have happened if he had gone to Spain and had gotten fascinated by bull fights? Might he have then chosen to become a butcher? Besides, isn’t this argument roughly equivalent to the dilettantism promoted by those who want you to go out and to find yourself?

In both cases you undertake a series of different experiences in order to find which one fits you best.

Truth be told, if the young man who discovers medicine in his sick bed has no real talent for science, what good has his discovery really done him? How does anyone know what psychological factors led him to discard his plans to be a diplomat, field in which he might excel, and become a physician, field which seems to be his passion but in which he might be no more than a mediocre practitioner.

Here the authors indulge in some less than coherent thinking. It is one thing to critique the pathlessness and purposelessness of today’s college students. It is quite another to say that they are too focused on a path and purpose in which they are known to have superior natural talent.

The authors write:

Consider how many of today’s students were raised: Their talents were identified early. They were “athletic,” “good at math,” “a natural at the violin.” Soon enough, they were winnowed into a stream that would allow those talents to flourish. They learned to stick with what they were good at. Over the years, it became instinctive to sideline the interests for which they didn’t show a natural aptitude.

Obviously, to me at least, working hard to become a great violinist will not allow you to participate in the variety of activities that would lead you to find yourself. Once your talent is identified the question is: how well you develop it, how hard you work at it, how focused you are in learning it?What matters in choosing a career path is discovering where your talent lies. As Peter Drucker once said, it is better to work to excel at something you are good at than to work to become good at something you have little talent for. 

In order to excel at a task or at an occupation or in a career is perseverance, industry, hard work, integrity and other aspects of good character.

And it does require some coherent thought. The authors of this new work might think that they are fighting the good fight against self-esteem and authenticity and dilettantism, but they are effectively arguing for it. Without having read their book I suspect that their grasp of Chinese thinking, to say nothing of the Anglo thinkers who have covered the same ground, is somewhat skewed.

The Art of the Schmooze

More often disparaged than praised, small talk counts as an important social skill.

Serious thinkers often demean those who know how to exchange a few words of little consequence with new or even old acquaintances.

In the business world everyone knows that the ability to “schmooze,” thus, to engage in small talk, is invaluable.

How much business will get done if colleagues or customers or clients bare their souls or try to turn every conversation into a discussion of profound philosophical matters?

When people schmooze they connect. When thy bare their souls they think they are connecting.

In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson derided small talk as a worthless exercise. On the other side of the debate, his contemporary, the sometime ethicist Lord Chesterfield advised his son to master the art of small talk, the better to advance his social and career prospects.

In her essay on small talk Dora Zhang revives Samuel Johnson’s description of two people talking about the weather:

Of course, the perfect obviousness of the weather is why it’s also the ultimate sign of banality. Samuel Johnson famously observed in 1758 that “when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.” 

In the hands of a skilled wordsmith like Dr. Johnson, the stuff of everyday human conversation is rendered ridiculous.

Thanks to Dr. Johnson, among others, serious people make an effort to avoid small talk. They prefer to remain tongue-tied.

Better to be silent than ridiculous. When you keep silent people will assume that you are cultivating deep thoughts. When you engage in small talk they will think that you are empty-headed and inauthentic.

Picturing two mindless beings exchanging information about the weather or the baseball scores or the market closing will provoke gales of laughter in the illiterati, but if we give the matter a little thought, it is not as absurd as it seems.

When two people who have never met discuss the weather, they are connecting. They are trying to find a place where they can connect; they are looking for common ground.

They know, as John Maynard Keynes was supposed to have said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

People connect over what they hold in common.

Even when it comes to those who are near and dear to us, we spend a great deal of time communicating information, that is, objective facts. This affirms our connections and allows us to remain connected.

Why is that such a bad thing?

If the same two strangers meet in a bar or at a party or even in an elevator and launch into a discussion of their feelings, it will be more difficult for them to find common ground.

You are the ultimate authority on what you feel. No other individual can have the same relationship to your feelings.

If you share an intimate detail with someone you have never met, you are imposing an unreasonable demand. Conversation involves reciprocity, so your interlocutor will feel obliged to expose something of himself in order to complete the exchange.

But, when he does, he will feel that he has just exposed himself to a stranger. Normally, he will never want to see the other person again, the better to forget what happened.

You may call it authentic; I call it rude. You do not make a human connection by imposing yourself on another person.

If you are exposing an opinion, a stranger can choose between disagreeing and agreeing. If he does not want to be disagreeable, he will assent. Thus, the two of you have become of one mind.

But being of one mind does not mean that you have found common ground in an objective reality that any other individual would see. It means that you have established something like a folie à deux.

True enough, you have connected, but your connection has separated you from the mass of humanity. You are not in the world; you are in your own world.

Be this as it may, philosophers and psychologists tend to be contemptuous of small talk.

Zhang explains the point:

Although a sometime topic of instruction, small talk, as is clear by its very name, possesses no great stature among the arts of conversation. No one, after all, aspires to banality. So we wield our scorn for vacuous chatter like a strand of garlic, warding off the contaminating musk of inauthenticity. The allegiance to high-mindedness and substance that most of us have carefully displayed at one time or another was summed up in a recent New Yorker cartoon depicting a dinner table in ancient Greece, where a father admonishes his son: “If you don’t have anything profound to say, don’t say anything at all.” It’s no coincidence that this cartoon is set in antiquity, at the birth of Western philosophy. As a group, philosophers have been the most vocal critics of empty chatter. It wouldn’t be hard, in particular, to imagine that dinner table scene taking place chez Martin Heidegger. His 1927 Being and Time offers an analysis of Gerede, translated as “idle talk,” which forms probably the best-known philosophical critique of this phenomenon.

In the age of authenticity more people aspire to authenticity than know what it is. But, we have it on the authority of no less a philosopher than Martin Heidegger, the godfather of authenticity, that small talk or idle chatter is bad.

Heidegger’s extended the category of idle chatter to any use of language that is formulaic, that repeats commonly accepted wisdom and that expresses what everyone thinks, rather than what I think.

Authentic speech, in Heidegger’s philosophy, wells up from the depths of your soul. It is original and personal and unique to you. It might involve your latest research into Western metaphysics; it might express your sentiments about the state of German politics in 1933.

It is authentic because it is purely personal, even poetic. It is not a hodgepodge of impersonal statements that involve, not just the weather, but the conversational filler that we use to grease the wheels of human connection.

Whatever you think Heidegger meant by it all, we cannot ignore the fact that he believed that he had seen his theories come alive in the German Nazi Party.

In 1988, philosopher Thomas Sheehan wrote in The New York Review of Books, that with the new revelations about Heidegger’s Nazism, his philosophy should be read through the filter of his political activities and political beliefs.

Apparently, Heidegger became disillusioned with the Nazi Party because it was not fulfilling its potential. Still, he never renounced his membership or recanted his Nazi views. In his opinion, the inner truth and greatness of Nazism had been betrayed by Hitler’s cohorts.

Apparently Heidegger preferred the Nazism of Ernst Rohm’s Storm Troopers ( the SA) to that of the more technocratic Heinrich Himmler.

When Heidegger became rector of the University of Fribourg he set about to Nazify it. He resigned his rectorship in 1934 immediately after Hitler and Himmler liquidated Rohm and his SA in what is called the Night of the Long Knives.

Clearly, the brown shirts of the SA were not interested in connecting with people. When a member of the SA saw a Jew on the street, he was not looking to schmooze.

Rohm’s SA was in the business of threatening and intimidating prospective opponents of the Nazi regime. Its mode was street theatre and its weapons were clubs. Obviously, a man as aesthetically refined as Martin Heidegger would naturally have been drawn to the SA.

Wikipedia describes it:

Its traditional function of party leader escort had been given to the SS, but it continued its street battles with "Reds" and its attacks on Jews. The SA also attacked or intimidated anyone deemed hostile to the Nazi agenda, including uncooperative editors, professors, politicians, other local officials and businessmen.

The Storm Troopers took their socialism seriously. Wikipedia continues:

They largely rejected capitalism (which they associated with Jews) and pushed for nationalization of major industrial firms, expansion of worker control, confiscation and redistribution of the estates of the old aristocracy, and social equality. 

The SA was not in the business of doing business. It did not try to reach out to the opposition or to find common ground with it. The SA worked to impose the Fuhrer’s will, his ideas and his feelings on everyone else.

The next time a Pied Piper comes along to suggest that you give up schmoozing in the name of authenticity, think twice before going along.

The Big Baby Generation

The report reads like corporate boilerplate. It is chock full of the latest in vapid psychobabble, and declares that the new approach, involving care and nurturance, equity and inclusion, has made a company like the consulting firm Accenture into a new Mommy. 

Strikingly, the new Accenture feels more like a nursery than a competitive playing field. Management wants to show care for employees, to nurture them, to make them feel wanted and appreciated for their unique individuality. 

They tout the virtues of their new mommification, without remarking that the young hires who respond well to this treatment are basically a bunch of big babies. Everyone calls them Gen Z, but it might be more appropriate to call them the Big Baby Generation. 

Naturally, the great minds of Accenture have bought the tripe about bringing your authentic self to work. You need not conform to company norms; you need to be a unique total individual. 

The reductio ad absurdum of this silliness would lead each individual to speak their own personal and private languages. As was discovered in Babel, multiple languages ensures that nothing ever gets donw.

In truth, the notion of the authentic self is pure psychobabble. The only person who loves you for your uniquely authentic self is your mother. Once you join a corporate team or even a baseball team, you are expected to overcome your childish ways, to subsume your individuality and to embrace the corporate culture. 

However, that same research found that only 24% of US employees feel like they truly belong and bring their authentic selves to the workplace.

Notice the language. The new work environment should be nurturing, like a nursery. Has anyone ever suggested that you will become a better football player if you feel properly nurtured?

… an opportunity for company leaders to create more satisfying and nurturing work environments.

So, Accenture has broken down the wall between home and workplace, which is also the wall between church and state. It has allowed the workplace to feel more like a home, the better to welcome a group of young workers who have overdosed on therapy. Naturally the CEO touts his capacity for empathy, another quality that is especially well developed in young mothers. 

Jimmy Etheredge, CEO of Accenture North America … explains in the podcast, Can you be your authentic self at work?, leaders first have to walk the talk. “People should feel at home while at work. That starts with leaders being open, empathetic, and really tuning into meet people where they are. Authenticity can’t be faked, and when you’re really listening—and treating people as you would like to be treated—people pick up on that.”

It’s not about competing. It’s about showing how much you care:

“I think it boils down to something pretty simple…make caring your calling card,”

The company is no longer devoted to competing in the marketplace, to making its employees into teammates. It wants to be a safe haven, like a nursery where you are treated like a helpless child:

No longer just a place to punch a clock or climb a ladder, work today is expected to be a safe haven for the authentic selves of employees and an exciting way for them to contribute value for their companies, themselves, and the wider world around them.

It is not about being a good colleague or a good teammate. It’s about being a unique individual, a self-indulgent big baby:

The workplace is an arena where individuality has at times been snuffed out. Uniformity was prized over cultivating personal strengths, and appearing to have all the answers took precedence over lifelong learning. Today, more industry leaders are seeing the value in authenticity—an awareness of who you are and what you stand for and expressing yourself honestly and consistently to the world.

And if you cannot do the job, at least you can rationalize your salary by saying that you are bringing something unique to the operation:

Bozoma Saint John, a Hall of Fame-inducted marketing executive, author, and entrepreneur, “Why am I there if not to represent my specific and unique point of view? Culture. Language. Attitude…now, if I hide any of that or if I massage any of that tone…then we all lose. Because then I’m not able to actually affect the work the way that I could.

So, companies are adapting to the Big Baby Generation. It is sad. It is philosophically incoherent. It has made the workplace into a giant nursery.

Accenture insists that it is the latest and greatest in management. In truth, it is adapting itself to a generation of big babies who are unfit to compete in the world. It is going to be a cold day when they discover that the new nurturing workplace cannot sustain itself against international competition.

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Anger Management via the Treadmill

How are those anger management classes working out for you? And how are they working out for New York Congressman, Mad Anthony Weiner?

By now everyone has witnessed Mad Anthony's intemperate rant on the floor of the House of Representatives. When you were watching it, weren't you thinking that this man needs some anger management?

You don't have to answer that one, but it's a good way to introduce the latest scientific research on mood management. It turns out that physical exercise helps people to control their moods, up to and including anger. Link here.

Of course, this assumes that you feel that controlling your moods is a good thing. A lot of people don't. When Mad Anthony was offered the chance to apologize for his behavior, he refused, saying that he felt very strongly about... whatever.

If you want to have more temperate moods, then the treadmill will do you a lot more good than the couch. Strangely enough, if sweating on the treadmill tempers your moods, then spending too much time supine on the couch would, necessarily, make your emotions more volatile and your moods harder to control.

As the New York Times article reports, aerobic exercise combats clinical depression, makes you more confident and more focused, and helps you to manage your anger with more "aplomb."

Of course, if you have a problem with out of control emotion, adding a little coaching to the mix would probably be a good idea. But why deprive yourself of the benefits that the treadmill will provide to your mental and physical health... unless you have bought into the idea that the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling signals authenticity.

If you have bought into that notion of authenticity, I recommend that you sell it it immediately. Otherwise you risk morphing into Mad Anthony Weiner. Check out his performance again, and ask yourself whether you would be proud if that were you. Link here.