The Difficulty with Being ‘True to Yourself’ [Firebrand Big Read]
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There is perhaps no guidance more common today than the charge to “be true to yourself.” This modern proverb is conveyed in a variety of ways and the examples are legion.
Encouragements to “live your truth,” “do you,” “be authentic,” or “forge your own way” are variations of a theme that reflect an inward turn in our pursuit to discover meaning, purpose, and transcendence. Philosopher Charles Taylor describes this as a shift from a “culture of authority” to a “culture of authenticity.” Being authentic is not looking up or out; it is looking in.
But while the aphorism “be true to yourself”—or its corollary “be authentic”—is frequently used and ubiquitously advertised, the advice is problematic.
Individuality and the Authentic Self
Our autonomous self and our relational self are often presented in zero sum terms. To have more of one is to have less of the other. Yet this need not be the case. To inhabit our relational nature does not minimize our individuality or sense of self. Quite the opposite. Responding to this perceived tension, the French Renaissance philosopher Montaigne refers to us as having “a room at the back of the shop.” In other words, even in the orderliness of our social selves we present to the world, we still have personalities, tastes, eccentricities, and other individuated characteristics.
It is one thing to appreciate our individuality–unique characteristics that make us, us. It is another thing to consult and exalt the self as authoritative to navigate life’s complexities, settle moral dilemmas, forge identity, inspire self-worth, and live our best life.
“To thine own self be true” is an oft-cited Shakespearian adage that, while written centuries ago, seems comfortably fitted to our modern sensibilities. And yet, many fail to recognize that the expression was counsel from Hamlet’s Polonius—a pride-filled hypocrite who is myopic to his own deficiencies. The better takeaway for our present moment is to view Polonius’s advice as cautionary, not instructive.
This is not to minimize the goodness of human individuality. We each have characteristics unique to us. We have personalities. Our desires and emotions are an important part of who we are. We exercise agency. We possess the capacity to be reflective and introspective. Universal human rights are grounded in the essence of persons. We have “a room at the back of the shop.” All of this is good.
But unqualified commitment to our authentic self is misguided, if not harmful, counsel. Below are five reasons why authenticity and “being true to yourself” is, at best, difficult advice to follow.
FIRST: To which “self” should you stay true?
Being authentic seems to suggest a coherent interior life. However, our internal states are neither monolithic nor fixed. Describing the character of Jonah in the Old Testament, John Wesley refers to him as “a motley mix of all sorts of contrarieties.” The same can be said of us all.
In his book Your God is Too Safe, author Mark Buchanan describes a pre-marital counseling session with a couple who self-authored their vows. Concerned by one of the expressions—“I promise to be true to myself”—Buchanan responded, “There’s part of me, I’m glad to say, that is joy-filled, generous, trusting, trustworthy. But there’s another part of me—maybe the larger part—that’s slothful, lustful, greedy, miserly, apathetic. I could go on. Which part should I be true to?”
There is a mix of attributes that constitute our self-identity—some good; some ugly. Some are defined; some are in process. Some are admirable; some are repugnant. Some are mature; some are maturing. To be true, therefore, becomes a selective exercise when we appraise a broad range of human “contrarieties” associated with our process of maturation.
Closely related, some philosophers question whether authenticity is even possible given the dynamic nature of humans. We are always changing, always becoming something. The encouragement to stay true begs the question: true to what? Which dimension of myself at a given time deserves my fidelity?
SECOND: What does it mean to be authentic?
Even if our “self” were stable and static, how should we understand the commitment to be authentic? Is being authentic an expression of value, an aspiration to what is good, right, and true? Or is being authentic an expression of preference, prioritizing personal tastes, desires, urges, or feelings?
The question is helpfully raised by observing a famous thought experiment from Plato’s Republic. The character Glaucon tells the story of a shepherd who stumbles upon a mysterious ring that, when turned on the finger, makes its wearer invisible. If a person were granted such power, how would he or she yield it? Glaucon argues such anonymity would lead to theft, the satisfaction of lust, and even murder. Why? The invisibility affords no retaliation or public judgment, giving license to express the true intentions and desires of the ring’s bearer. “Give a man a mask,” Oscar Wilde famously said, “and he will show you his true face.”
If a magical ring afforded anonymity, and the ring bearer went on to satisfy decadent desires or violent impulses because there is no threat of public judgment, consequence, or retaliation—is he or she being authentic? If authenticity relates to realizing a virtuous disposition, the answer is unequivocally no. If authenticity is a matter of expressing inner desires, the answer is yes.
This raises a question that has a significant philosophical history. Is the essence of our identity bound up in our capacity for rational reflection and the consideration of values? Or is it reflected in our appetites, suppressed urges, and inner desires? Because judgments about authenticity are contested, the abstract advice to “be true to yourself” does little to guide us in concrete situations. Larger questions must first be answered before authenticity becomes tenable or, in some cases, appropriate.
THIRD: Authenticity can be a euphemism for selfishness or harmfulness.
Related, in the absence of answering larger questions about what authenticity even means (i.e., sounds appealing until it is specified or contextualized)—the murky nature of the expression is at risk of being wielded as a euphemism to justify any manner of selfish and/or harmful activity.
For example, marital affairs, decommitting from relational obligations, indulging unhealthy appetites, shirking the wisdom of others, or being brash and offensive—all find justification under the broad shadow of being true to ourselves, self-care, authentic expression, self-discovery, or “me first” non-conformity. These are favorable mantras in an age of subjective individuality, but their social approval belies their potential weaponization against communal responsibilities and relational obligations.
In this sense, being true to ourselves is a means to justify our idiosyncratic preferences, choices, or behaviors. This could be described as another form of “emotivism”—what philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre referred to as “the doctrine that all evaluative judgments are nothing but expressions of preference…of attitude or feeling.” If there is no moral reality outside the self, says MacIntyre, then all that is left is the self. In this reality, I am the standard for who I am, my identity, and for normative action, what I should do. For this reason, sociologist Eva Illouz observes that feelings have become the moral basis for our actions.
During World War II, the famed economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote: “To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian.” To be clear, the statement was offered in the context of supporting civilization and democracy. But if people truly believe their deepest beliefs, values, and convictions are only relatively valid, and yet, are willing to stand for them unflinchingly, that does not make them “civilized.” It makes them fools.
Most of us would not want political tyrants, habitual liars, sexual deviants, or callous corporate CEOs to be true to themselves or to stand for those attributes “unflinchingly.” Why? Because it harms others. But a commitment to our feelings and inclinations may equally be harmful to ourselves. As a pastor and close friend of mine recently put it, “I have seen many people ‘follow their heart’ all the way to their deepest regret.”
FOURTH: Authentic self-discovery is still culturally contingent.
So, there is complexity in defining what our self is, and moreover, there is complexity in defining authenticity and how that is appropriately wielded. But those are not the only challenges in realizing the adage “be true to yourself.”
Commitment to an authentic life suggests exploring our interior and drawing out our identity. In his book Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah refers to this as “expressive individualism,” or the belief that “each person has a unique core of feeling and intuition that should unfold or be expressed if individuality is to be realized.” Here, self-understanding and identity is an inward-to-outward movement. That is, I look inside to express who I am to an outside world.
However, the characterization of self-identity is still culturally contingent. In other words, the individuality we choose to express is still heavily moderated by cultural norms specific to our environment. While we may think we are looking inside to discover our identity, we certainly seem concerned with what outsiders think.
Tim Keller has made the point that if an Anglo-Saxon warrior in the Dark Ages examined his heart and saw aggression—the desire to smash and kill people who got in his way, he might say, “This is me. This is who I am.” Yet today, if the median American examined his or her heart and saw aggression—the desire to smash and kill people who got in the way, he or she would say, “This is not me” (and, maybe, “I need help”).
Here is the point. Self-identity is still tied to what is culturally understood as appropriate, normative, and favorable. “You have a morally charged, value-laden grid that is being laid on your heart that you are using to choose what you identify with and what you don’t,” says Keller. “Someone is going to tell you how to sift what is on the inside.”
David Kinnaman describes this paradox in his book Faith for Exiles. In talking about our search for identity, he writes the following:
Another digital Babylon distinctive is that being different and unique—reflected in the oft-repeated mantra ‘You do you’—is among the highest priorities in the quest for identity. Our society deifies the individual’s search for self-expression. Ironically, however, most of us end up looking like the crowd we want to be a part of; the apparent value placed on self-expression is actually driven by someone else’s preferences. Even when we think we’re marching to our own beat, we’ve got an unseen drummer in our heads, keeping time and making claims on our identity.
The philosopher Rene Girard observes the ironic conformity of those seeking non-conformity: “[The] effort to leave the beaten path forces everyone inevitably into the same ditch.” Our commitment to inner authenticity is inevitably tied to outer norms and values. Put differently, “living our truth” is hardly a solitary exercise. This is captured in the opening of Edward Bernays early twentieth-century book Propaganda: “We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”
Who we are at a given time is a complex weave of countless experiences and inputs, making it difficult to distinguish what is uniquely ours. The common perception that we are self-defined individuals overlooks the fact that we are influenced by, and subject to, a variety of cultural forces and pressures that govern, guide, and mold the preferences and actions we claim as our own. Researchers call this “preference formation.”
“The angle of our pose might be different,” writes English Professor Barrett Swanson as he reflects upon a culture increasingly formed by social media, “but all of us bow unfailingly at the altar of the algorithm.”
FIFTH: What if self is the problem, not the solution?
In her remarkable book Strange Rites, author Tara Isabella Burton thoroughly and thoughtfully documents the shift from institutional to “intuitional” spirituality in American religiosity. That is, the overriding trend of Americans rejecting formal religious traditions like Christianity, Judaism, or Islam has not led to a nation of rational atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris or religious cynics such as Bill Maher or Ricky Gervais.
Rather, the American landscape is characterized by bespoke, “remixed” religiosity, says Burton. As examples, she references the mystical wellness culture of SoulCycle and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, social justice witches who gather to hex conservative politicians, libertine self-actualizing sexual communes, nihilistic gamers, techno-utopian transhumanism, the self-authorizing metanarratives of progressive liberals, and the materialist stoicism of right-wing atavists. Paul’s words at the Areopagus in Acts 17 are timeless: “I see you are a religious people.”
Perhaps the best summary of intuitional, remixed religion is that the source of meaning is found within us, not outside of us. “Among the most common sayings I heard among the people I interviewed was ‘I make my own religion.’” writes Burton (italics hers). In other words, transcendence is not discovered and practiced so much as it is constructed.
In this sense, we tend to view ourselves as possessing the solution to life’s big questions. But what if our self is the problem? This is one of the many differences between the Christian faith and the intuitional faith(s) described by Burton. Specifically, orthodox Christian doctrine characterizes the self as diseased with sinful inclinations and disordered desires. Philosopher Immanuel Kant refers to this as the “crooked timber view of humanity.” In Jeremiah 17, the author famously writes, “The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—Who can understand it?” In sum, we are not inherently morally good.
Martin Luther’s characterization of sin is particularly helpful here. We tend to think of sin as an evil action or willful transgression–“missing the mark.” But for Luther, sinful actions are a function of a sinful disposition— incurvatas in se—or humanity “curved in on itself.” In other words, classical Christianity recognized that “being true to our self” was the crux of our problem. “My sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in [God] but in myself and in his other creatures,” writes Augustine in his famous work Confessions, “and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.”
If the Christian vision is an accurate picture of our human anthropology, then fidelity to our self will fail to liberate us unto the human flourishing that self-expression and authenticity claim to deliver.
Unselfing—Being True to God and Others
The concept of “expressive individualism” has burrowed its way into our imaginative landscape and colored how we perceive and act within the world. Authenticity to our self is difficult advice to follow because it is based upon contested assumptions. Chief among these assumptions is the belief that we alone are responsible to define our lives.
As philosopher Elisabeth Camp points out, our sense of identity is predominantly understood as a thread of overlapping psychological states. A “psychologized” self is a function of internal faculties that originate from within me—a disembodied combination of mind, will, emotions, and desires.
This psychologized understanding of identity abstracts from all relationships, commitments, and attachments. Put differently, the narrative of the modern self is that we have no narrative. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas writes, “[T]he project of modernity has been to produce people who believe they should have no story other than the story they chose when they had no story.” Philosopher Michael Sandel has repeatedly referred to this as the “unencumbered self.” That is, the belief that I am an untrammeled creator of my self-identity from the raw material of the world around me, and that I possess the capacity to act independently of the persons, places, and things in my life.
But what if another story is true? What if we are created on purpose and therefore have a purpose? What if we do not choose our path to flourishing so much as we experience it when we participate in our intended design? What if we are not the author of our story so much as we are a character embedded in a story? What if identity is a function of persons and places in our lives—a nexus of dependencies, responsibilities, and obligations that inhere within our socially embedded self?
If this is a more accurate account of our humanity, then “being true to ourselves” is a misleading and potentially harmful appeal. Rather, participation in the life of God is our purpose for living. In the Christian faith tradition, this means a commitment to God, our Creator, and a commitment to others, our neighbors. In sum, in this story we must “un-self” to realize our true self.
And herein lies the great irony of the Christian faith: in emptying myself I become whole; in losing my life for the sake of Christ I find it; in binding love I realize freedom; and in my commitments, responsibilities, and obligations I discover meaning, significance, value, and identity. Because others are and because Christ is… I am. “Real freedom,” writes New Testament Scholar Richard Bauckham, “is liberation from enslavement to self-interest and freedom to give oneself for others.”
In the Christian story, we are not encouraged to be true to ourselves. Far from it. We are directed to love God and love others. If this is our purpose and design, then staying true to anything less will compromise and complicate human flourishing. “When we worship God, the individual is critiqued by the communal, the prophetic and pastoral meet, and the Trinity teaches us the joy of living our lives out of our control” writes Will Willimon. “In his resurrection, Christ forever defeated our fantasies that life is under our control.”
It’s a challenging statement. But if the Christian story is true, the counsel to live “out of our control” is worth following. Perhaps we should be true to that.
Kevin Brown is the 18th President of Asbury University.