SurrealPolitiks S01E023 – Authenticity

With some merit, it has become something of a cliche to say that “change is hard”. Of course, one could as easily say the opposite. For things to remain stable actually requires a great deal of effort. Chaos is the default setting, and in chaos, things change uncontrollably, often at an overwhelming pace. In the hysterical debates over “climate change” it is often said that the only thing constant about the climate is change. This being but one of the reasons people need to stop freaking out about the weather. But, to be fair to the cliche, it is more often applied to people trying to change themselves. It is often said that “people don’t change” or “once a so and so always a so and so”. I suspect there exists scant data to support this, but it may be and has been said that “the best predictor of future behavior is prior behavior” and this is about as close as we can get to an accurate axiom on the subject. People tend to do what they have done before. Our capacity to survive and to succeed is in no small part dependent on our ability to make reasonable predictions about the future, and so we have a certain inertia to repeat behaviors, since we know what the results are most likely to be. Then again, a still more notorious cliche is that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results”. I checked the dictionary. This is fake. Moreover, it would indicate that the whole world had gone insane, and plausible though that theory may be to you, this is not how we tend to define insanity. What everyone does is by default considered sane, whatever the merits. Insane people are different from the rest of us, otherwise we would not pathologize their behavior. But perhaps the best explanation for the difficulty of changing oneself is their own perception that they are being inauthentic. No less frequently, the fear that they will be perceived as inauthentic by others. One can be forgiven a near infinite number of sins by both God and Man so long as they are honest. But a deceiver is not trusted. His repentance is unbelieved. Better perhaps an authentic sinner than to be perceived inauthentic with all the trappings of righteousness. If you have always dressed a certain way, and all of a sudden you adopt a certain new style, are you wearing a costume? There are those who would say yes. And as surely as one is what they eat, they are no less certainly what they do. So, if you change your behavior, are you someone else? Or more to the point, are you pretending to be someone else? As one who has changed his behavior, and his clothes, a few times, I understand this thought process quite well. Let us begin with something uncontroversial. I once earned a name for myself as a drunk. Many times, actually. I had so fully embodied the lifestyle of a drunkard that I used to peruse the pages of a rather amusing publication known as Modern Drunkard Magazine. Who wants to be stuck in the past, after all? Especially when it is so hard to recall. And, during these years, if somebody said “Chris Cantwell is a drunk” – which was known to happen from time to time – I could only disagree if I had forgotten my name that day, and this was by no means the most frequent of occurrences. And so I considered this a rather plain statement of fact. Chris Cantwell is a drunk. That is part of his identity. A rather central feature, in fact. To try and stop drinking would be inauthentic, and of