How we all became a brand
Summary
Sean Illing interviews Tara Isabella Burton, author of ‘Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to Kardashian.’ Burton traces a cultural history of self-creation, arguing that a fundamental shift began in the 17th century with a turn away from collective identities toward a more individualistic mindset. She connects this historical trajectory to our current digital age, where social media has democratized and accelerated the impulse to craft and commodify our identities.
Burton explores key figures like Da Vinci, Oscar Wilde, and Frederick Douglass to illustrate different strands of the self-making narrative—from the ‘aristocracy of the spirit’ to more liberatory, bootstraps narratives. She discusses how the Enlightenment’s ‘disenchantment of the world’ didn’t eliminate the sacred but relocated enchantment into the self, leading to modern concepts where personal energy, will, and branding take on quasi-magical properties.
The conversation delves into the modern obsession with authenticity, which Burton views with deep skepticism. She argues that in a gig economy and attention-driven culture, self-performance and personal branding have become economic necessities, blurring the line between persona and true self. The internet and social media, particularly platforms like Instagram and TikTok, have supercharged this dynamic, creating a landscape where experiences are often valued primarily for their self-branding potential.
Ultimately, Burton suggests that the current culture of self-making can be alienating and depressing, cutting us off from genuine community and receptivity. While sympathetic to the Enlightenment’s liberation from arbitrary constraints, she worries about the loss of binding myths and the difficulty of finding meaning and commitment in a world where desire is often seen as the ultimate authority. She proposes that the antidote lies in genuine self-love, real-world relationships, and recognizing the competing goods of individual freedom and communal bonds.
Recommendations
Books
- Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians — Tara Isabella Burton’s book, which is the central subject of the episode. It’s a cultural history of self-creation tracing from the Renaissance to the digital age.
- Strange Rites — Burton’s previous nonfiction book, mentioned as being shaped by her time at Vox, exploring remixed religious landscapes like witchcraft, yoga, and new spiritual movements.
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky — Referenced multiple times. Burton cites Dostoevsky as a favorite novelist because his work explores how everyone’s personal stories crash against each other. The Grand Inquisitor’s argument about humanity’s fear of true freedom is discussed.
- Essays by Michel de Montaigne — Discussed as a pivotal figure in the Enlightenment. Burton notes Montaigne’s rhetorical use of ‘nakedness’ as representing an authentic, pre-social state of human beings.
Concepts
- New Thought — A 19th-century American movement described as a ‘proto-The Secret,’ promoting the idea that positive thinking and focusing on desires (like wealth or health) could manifest them in reality. It’s linked to the modern concept of ‘manifesting.’
- Sprezzatura — A Renaissance concept, mentioned in the context of courtier manuals, referring to the cultivated appearance of effortlessness in one’s behavior and self-presentation.
People
- Oscar Wilde — Cited as a key figure in the dandyist, ‘aristocracy of the spirit’ strand of self-making. Burton references his idea of creating one’s life as a work of art and his quote, ‘Give a man a mask and he’ll show you the truth.’
- Frederick Douglass — Presented as representing the more liberatory, American strand of self-making—the idea that anyone, regardless of birth (including being born into slavery), could become a ‘gentleman’ through hard work and virtue.
- David Bowie / Ziggy Stardust — Discussed as an example of artistic self-expression where adopting a persona (Ziggy Stardust) can be a truer form of authenticity than a supposed ‘natural’ state. Bowie is noted as a reader of Nietzsche.
- Norman Vincent Peale — Mentioned as a mid-20th century Christian pastor who popularized ‘New Thought’ ideas and was the personal pastor to the Trump family, influencing Donald Trump’s worldview where ‘truth was whatever you made it.’
- Charles Taylor — The philosopher whose work on authenticity Burton cites as a major influence on her skeptical view of the concept.
Topic Timeline
- 00:01:51 — Introduction of guest Tara Isabella Burton and her book ‘Self-Made’ — Sean Illing introduces Tara Isabella Burton, author of ‘Self-Made,’ which explores the cultural history of self-creation from the Renaissance to the digital era. Burton’s background combines cultural criticism and theology, and the book argues a fundamental shift began in the 17th century toward individualism. The conversation is framed around understanding how social media has supercharged our need for authenticity.
- 00:03:01 — Burton’s inspiration: from dandyism to the metaphysics of the internet — Burton explains her doctoral research on dandyism and creating life as art in 19th century Paris, a time of cultural anxieties similar to today’s. Her previous book, ‘Strange Rites,’ examined remixed religious landscapes. For ‘Self-Made,’ she wanted to explore the ‘weird metaphysics of the internet’—how online self-presentation reflects and shapes a cultural metaphysics in a largely non-religious age, connecting historical self-making myths to contemporary personal branding and the attention economy.
- 00:08:40 — The pivotal moment of the Enlightenment and Montaigne — Illing highlights the section on the Enlightenment and Montaigne, noting the realization that much assumed to be natural or divine was historical accident. He asks if this was the beginning of the world’s disenchantment. Burton agrees it was pivotal but frames it as a shift in the location of enchantment—from external divinity to internal human energy and will. She discusses how 19th-century ideas of proto-science, magic, and ‘New Thought’ wove together concepts of individuals harnessing universal energies.
- 00:13:25 — Case studies: Da Vinci, Oscar Wilde, and Frederick Douglass — Illing asks about three key figures in the book. Burton explains that Renaissance geniuses like Da Vinci were seen as ‘God’s bastards’—innately special due to a direct line to God or nature, creating a tension between being chosen versus being a hard worker. She outlines two strands: a reactionary ‘aristocracy of the spirit’ seen in dandies like Wilde, and a more liberatory American strand exemplified by Frederick Douglass, which promised social mobility through hard work but later morphed into the Gilded Age’s ‘self-made’ capitalist ideal.
- 00:20:29 — Defining self-making and its connection to branding — Illing asks how to define the abstract term ‘self-making.’ Burton describes it as the cultivation of one’s personality for artistic or economic profit, where the interior self exists to be cultivated for how others see us. She traces this from Renaissance manuals on ‘sprezzatura’ to 19th-century dandy guides. Illing suggests it sounds like branding, and Burton agrees: ‘It is branding… personal branding with a spiritual component.’
- 00:22:39 — Skepticism towards the modern cult of authenticity — The discussion turns to the pervasive modern pursuit of authenticity. Burton states she is extremely wary and doesn’t think it exists as commonly understood. She argues authenticity often refers to an emotionally felt sense of truth that may not align with reality. While she values self-expression through culture (like David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust), she finds it depressing and alienating that economic and social pressures now force us to perform ‘a true version of ourselves’ through modulated self-presentation.
- 00:26:11 — The psychological impact of the iPhone and social media — Illing calls the iPhone and social media one of the most consequential mass psychology experiments, democratizing self-invention. Burton shares her desire to not have a smartphone, criticizing how form-mediated existence turns experiences into creative opportunities for self-creation. She laments events designed for Instagram photos and audiences watching performances through phone screens, noting a loss of ‘pure receptivity’ and an increase in the neurotic need to be the main character in a personal drama for followers.
- 00:37:39 — The internet as accelerant and figures like Kardashian and Trump — Illing notes the internet accelerated the drift into commodification. Burton discusses Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump as prominent modern self-creators. She connects Trump to the ‘New Thought’ tradition via Norman Vincent Peale, where reality is downstream of desire and perception. Kardashian represents the idea that reality is fungible and written upon the body. For the millions imitating this without profit, Burton suggests it’s often an economic necessity in a gig economy, where self-performance is like clocking into work.
- 00:44:14 — Seeking a balance between liberation and unhealthy self-projection — Illing asks for a happy medium between oppressive pre-modern constraints and today’s neurotic status obsession. Burton’s answer is straightforward: ‘Everyone should touch more grass and get to know their neighbors.’ She says the best antidote is genuine self-love and relationships with people who see through our facades, made easier with greater economic security to reduce gig-economy desperation.
- 00:47:15 — Burton’s Christian humanist worldview and systematic theology of modernity — Illing probes the worldview shaping Burton’s critiques. Burton identifies as a Christian humanist Episcopalian, believing in good, evil, and the sacred dignity of each human person. She aims to apply a ‘systematic theology hat’ to figure out the ‘implicit religion of modernity.’ She is fascinated by how unexamined commitments about the world, good, evil, and relationships are interconnected in secular culture, just as theological commitments are in her own worldview.
Episode Info
- Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing
- Author: Vox
- Category: Society & Culture Philosophy News Politics News Commentary
- Published: 2023-07-31T09:00:00Z
- Duration: 00:52:40
References
- URL PocketCasts: https://pocketcasts.com/podcast/the-gray-area-with-sean-illing/1d3ce9a0-ae3d-0133-2e33-6dc413d6d41d/how-we-all-became-a-brand/3f32714f-29d7-4410-b479-d09cbf8fc99e
- Episode UUID: 3f32714f-29d7-4410-b479-d09cbf8fc99e
Podcast Info
- Name: The Gray Area with Sean Illing
- Type: episodic
- Site: https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast
- UUID: 1d3ce9a0-ae3d-0133-2e33-6dc413d6d41d
Transcript
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[00:00:57] The subtle changes are especially interesting to me
[00:01:02] because they have more to do with our inner lives
[00:01:04] and how they’ve been distorted by the internet and social media in particular.
[00:01:11] We’ve done a few episodes on related topics like the self and authenticity,
[00:01:17] and those conversations were mostly about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
[00:01:23] But we haven’t really had a conversation about the history of society.
[00:01:27] And that history is essential to know
[00:01:30] if we want to make sense of the impact digital technology is having on us today.
[00:01:37] I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
[00:01:51] Today’s guest is Tara Isabella Burton.
[00:01:54] She’s the author of a new book called
[00:01:56] Self-Making.
[00:01:57] Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to Kardashian.
[00:02:01] And incidentally, she’s a former colleague of mine at Vox.
[00:02:05] Tara is someone with deep and wide-ranging interests.
[00:02:09] She’s a cultural critic and an Oxford-educated theologian
[00:02:13] who brings that sensibility to every topic she touches.
[00:02:17] And this book is a wonderful example of that.
[00:02:21] It’s a cultural history of self-creation
[00:02:24] from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment,
[00:02:27] all the way up to the digital era.
[00:02:30] And it makes a compelling case that something fundamental shifted in the 17th century.
[00:02:36] It was, in her view, the beginning of a turn away from collective identities
[00:02:41] towards a more individualistic mindset.
[00:02:44] It is a fascinating story,
[00:02:46] and it helped me better understand how social media
[00:02:49] has supercharged our need for authenticity.
[00:02:54] We started by discussing
[00:02:55] why she wanted to be a social media star.
[00:02:57] And why did she decide to write the book in the first place?
[00:03:01] My doctoral research was in dandyism and theology,
[00:03:04] and the idea of creating one’s life as a work of art,
[00:03:07] and to a lesser extent, artistic creation,
[00:03:10] as particularly loaded in late 19th century Paris,
[00:03:14] which was this time and place where people were wrestling
[00:03:17] with cultural anxieties very similar to our own.
[00:03:20] Industrialization, the power of technology,
[00:03:23] the sense that everything around them was being reproduced,
[00:03:27] mechanically, that there’s department stores everywhere
[00:03:30] and advertisements everywhere.
[00:03:32] And at the same time,
[00:03:33] sort of on a more theological or religious side,
[00:03:37] faith or the cultural relationship between faith and doubt was changing,
[00:03:41] the sense that the world might be less of an enchanted place,
[00:03:45] and that perhaps it was up to human beings to fill in that gap of magic,
[00:03:49] rise of interest in the occult even.
[00:03:51] All of these were so much a part of this era that I loved.
[00:03:55] And I wrote my doctoral thesis,
[00:03:57] I put it away.
[00:03:58] My first nonfiction book, Strange Rites,
[00:04:00] which was really shaped by my time at Vox,
[00:04:02] writing about not just more traditionally understood religious stories
[00:04:06] like evangelicals and Trump or the Catholic sex abuse scandal,
[00:04:08] but also about yoga and witchcraft
[00:04:11] and all of these kind of remixed religious landscape
[00:04:15] that was less organized or less formal or institutional.
[00:04:19] Which is all to say that when I came to think about
[00:04:21] what I wanted to do as a follow-up to Strange Rites,
[00:04:25] I was really interested in writing
[00:04:26] about something that I love to write about,
[00:04:28] which is the weird metaphysics of the internet.
[00:04:31] How our relationship with self-presentation in this network technology
[00:04:38] both reflects and shapes a kind of implicit cultural metaphysics
[00:04:42] in a culture that is not religious as traditionally understood
[00:04:46] for many, if not, I would argue, most people.
[00:04:49] And in thinking about this, my interest in this,
[00:04:53] some of these older dandy figures,
[00:04:54] not just the sort of obscure, weird,
[00:04:56] French ones like Marc-Pierre d’Orvilliers or Georges Carrisman,
[00:04:59] but people like Oscar Wilde,
[00:05:00] perhaps better known to the English-speaking world,
[00:05:04] I became interested in telling a wider story,
[00:05:07] a story that kind of married my academic interests
[00:05:10] with an exploration both of this kind of narrative of self-making
[00:05:16] that I see as an integral part of American culture,
[00:05:20] the myth of the self-made person,
[00:05:22] but also contemporary Instagram culture
[00:05:25] and the attention,
[00:05:26] and economy,
[00:05:27] the sense of our personal branding as an economic necessity
[00:05:32] where the line between economic self-making
[00:05:34] and celebrity self-making is getting thinner and thinner.
[00:05:36] And so, self-made.
[00:05:38] Some of that speaks to a,
[00:05:39] I guess you’d call it a contradiction at the core of selfhood
[00:05:43] that I do think you center a little bit throughout the book.
[00:05:46] And the contradiction is that the self
[00:05:49] is always already a social reality
[00:05:52] because the very idea of the individual
[00:05:54] is sort of unintelligible.
[00:05:56] And so, I think it’s important for us to think about
[00:05:59] how do we think about self-made and self-obsessed people
[00:06:02] without other people around to acknowledge us
[00:06:04] and distinguish ourselves from?
[00:06:06] And that’s not really a question,
[00:06:08] but I guess I’m asking if you think this drift
[00:06:11] into a more self-involved, self-obsessed world
[00:06:15] kind of cut us off from,
[00:06:17] I don’t know, maybe you would say God,
[00:06:18] but I guess I’m thinking more that it’s cut us off
[00:06:21] from each other in a way that blots out the reality
[00:06:23] of our interdependence.
[00:06:25] And I think that if I am critical of the idea
[00:06:30] that our desires are authoritative,
[00:06:32] it’s not because I think desire is bad or what have you,
[00:06:35] but I think that we often don’t have very good access
[00:06:39] to ourselves, to what we want,
[00:06:41] or that I think it’s a mistake to think of it as pure
[00:06:43] given so much of our self-understanding
[00:06:45] comes from stories, cultural stories,
[00:06:48] myths, legends, language itself,
[00:06:51] a shared cultural phenomenon.
[00:06:53] Now, I will say, I am aware of this,
[00:06:55] I think that there is a version of the story of self-making
[00:06:58] that is a very pessimistic, negative one,
[00:07:01] perhaps even one when I say conservative one,
[00:07:04] that goes something like in the good old days
[00:07:06] of the medieval era, everyone knew their place
[00:07:09] and kings were kings and peasants were peasants,
[00:07:11] and it’s all downhill from there.
[00:07:13] I do not think that, and I would be wary of thinking that.
[00:07:16] What I actually do think and hope to argue in self-made
[00:07:19] is that the weirdness that makes us human,
[00:07:22] that I think many of the self-makers,
[00:07:24] in my book, are actually,
[00:07:26] from in very different ways,
[00:07:28] Frederick Douglass to Oscar Wilde,
[00:07:30] are trying to work out is there is something,
[00:07:33] something special, something distinct,
[00:07:36] something maybe even sacred
[00:07:38] about the parts of ourselves
[00:07:40] that are not reducible to our biography
[00:07:44] or our story or the facts of our existence,
[00:07:48] and that part of our ability to choose
[00:07:51] and to create and indeed to tell
[00:07:53] stories is linked to that.
[00:07:56] And that is part of who we are.
[00:07:58] At the same time, it is only part of who we are.
[00:08:01] We are also social beings, we are relational beings,
[00:08:04] and we are mortal animals.
[00:08:06] Towards the end of my book, I quote that soliloquy in Hamlet,
[00:08:09] what a piece of work is a man.
[00:08:11] I mean, this is not a particularly new insight
[00:08:13] that it’s pretty weird that we’re both animals
[00:08:16] and also kind of gods.
[00:08:18] But I think culturally speaking,
[00:08:20] we’ve lost sight of the,
[00:08:23] the difficulty in reconciling
[00:08:26] all those parts of ourselves
[00:08:28] in favor of valorization
[00:08:30] of one part at the expense of the rest.
[00:08:33] There’s so much there.
[00:08:35] You know, I really love
[00:08:38] the section on the Enlightenment
[00:08:40] and the bit on Montaigne in particular,
[00:08:42] the French philosopher,
[00:08:44] because what you see in this historical moment
[00:08:46] and Montaigne like illustrates this as well as anyone
[00:08:48] is kind of what you were just talking about,
[00:08:50] this realization that so much of what we took to be
[00:08:52] natural law or divine truth
[00:08:54] was really just an accident of history.
[00:08:56] It could have been otherwise.
[00:08:58] And is that sort of for you,
[00:09:00] that moment in time,
[00:09:02] the beginning of the disenchantment of the world,
[00:09:04] which maybe on the one hand led to a lot of experimentation
[00:09:08] and personal liberation,
[00:09:10] but maybe also at the same time
[00:09:12] created a lot of social disruption?
[00:09:15] Roughly speaking, my answer to the question,
[00:09:18] is this a pivotal moment?
[00:09:20] Yes, absolutely.
[00:09:21] Montaigne, when he,
[00:09:23] in his introduction to his essays,
[00:09:25] when he jokes about painting himself naked,
[00:09:27] Montaigne’s really, really into being naked.
[00:09:29] It’s actually, when you think about it, pretty weird.
[00:09:31] Every other essay, he’ll just have an aside about like,
[00:09:34] wouldn’t it be cool if I were naked right now?
[00:09:37] And weirdness aside,
[00:09:39] I think the rhetorical device he’s using
[00:09:41] is this idea that there is a kind of
[00:09:43] authentic Montaigueness,
[00:09:45] that clothing, that putting something on,
[00:09:47] that social dictates
[00:09:49] is occluding a reality.
[00:09:51] Or obscuring.
[00:09:52] That a certain kind of
[00:09:54] antisocial naturalness
[00:09:57] is the truest state of human beings.
[00:10:00] However, I do want to push back.
[00:10:02] You described this change as a disenchantment of the world.
[00:10:05] And I think that actually,
[00:10:07] I can see why one might say that,
[00:10:09] and I don’t disagree entirely,
[00:10:11] but I think that I would frame it as a shift
[00:10:13] in the location of the enchantment of the world.
[00:10:16] Both in Strange Rites and in Self Made,
[00:10:18] one of my commitments is that
[00:10:20] we are not looking at a secular age now,
[00:10:23] so to speak,
[00:10:24] but rather a reimagining of where we see
[00:10:27] the sacred divinity
[00:10:29] on which the universe runs.
[00:10:31] And particularly, this becomes more and more
[00:10:34] apparent in the 19th century.
[00:10:36] In different ways, both in America and in Europe,
[00:10:38] and that is the scope of my book,
[00:10:40] to be clear, is the West,
[00:10:42] is America and Europe in particular.
[00:10:44] In both sides of the Atlantic,
[00:10:46] there becomes more and more prevalent
[00:10:48] in the 19th century,
[00:10:49] ideas about kind of proto-vibes,
[00:10:52] you could call them energies, currents,
[00:10:55] that there’s something that kind of,
[00:10:57] some force in the world,
[00:10:59] and often it’s deeply wedded to
[00:11:02] either proto-science or really pseudo-science,
[00:11:05] so ideas of electricity,
[00:11:07] of evolution, particularly human natural selection,
[00:11:11] ideas of magnetism, and ideas of magic,
[00:11:14] all get bound up together
[00:11:17] in concepts of some kind of energy,
[00:11:19] that human beings,
[00:11:20] individual human beings can harness,
[00:11:22] where it basically runs the spectrum to
[00:11:26] it’s a little bit like magic,
[00:11:28] to it is literally occultist magic,
[00:11:31] which is to say, from movements like
[00:11:33] New Thought in the 19th century,
[00:11:35] popular in America,
[00:11:37] kind of a proto-the secret,
[00:11:39] or proto-manifesting,
[00:11:40] the idea of that positive thinking
[00:11:43] and focusing on getting wealthy or healthy
[00:11:45] could actually make those things manifest
[00:11:47] in your life,
[00:11:48] to the more extreme end of things,
[00:11:51] figures like Josephine Pellidon
[00:11:54] or Alasdair Crowley,
[00:11:55] who actually see manifesting the will
[00:11:59] as a kind of way of getting in touch with
[00:12:01] and controlling the energy of the universe,
[00:12:04] and I sometimes joke that the story of self-making
[00:12:06] is also kind of the story of magic,
[00:12:08] but it is very much true
[00:12:11] that the idea of the self-made person
[00:12:14] is deeply bound up,
[00:12:15] and this is true from the Renaissance onwards,
[00:12:17] with ideas of the person
[00:12:20] who creates their own destiny,
[00:12:22] the person who is a self-maker,
[00:12:25] be they an artistic celebrity
[00:12:27] or a rugged, bootstrapped entrepreneur,
[00:12:30] is someone who is like a demigod,
[00:12:32] like a mage,
[00:12:33] someone who has worked out
[00:12:35] how the universe works
[00:12:37] and the energy underpinning it,
[00:12:38] and knows how to harness it.
[00:12:40] To quote Stewart Brand,
[00:12:41] the mid-20th century counterculture prophet
[00:12:45] of, basically,
[00:12:46] network computing in his whole Earth catalog,
[00:12:49] we are as gods,
[00:12:50] and we might as well get good at it.
[00:12:53] You know, there is so much ground
[00:12:56] covered in this book.
[00:12:57] You mentioned it just a second ago.
[00:12:59] I mean, the period you’re tracing out
[00:13:00] goes all the way back to the Renaissance
[00:13:02] through 19th and 20th century Europe,
[00:13:05] right up to the present, really.
[00:13:06] And there are a ton of characters in the book,
[00:13:08] and we can’t discuss most of them,
[00:13:10] but it may help
[00:13:12] to just highlight a few in particular
[00:13:14] who seem to me,
[00:13:15] at least on the surface,
[00:13:16] very unlike each other.
[00:13:18] But they’re connected in the book,
[00:13:19] and in their own way,
[00:13:20] kind of give a pretty good snapshot
[00:13:23] of this history.
[00:13:25] And the three figures are Da Vinci,
[00:13:27] Oscar Wilde,
[00:13:28] and Frederick Douglass,
[00:13:30] two of whom I think you’ve already mentioned.
[00:13:32] Can you just say a little bit
[00:13:33] about why you chose these three
[00:13:36] as case studies?
[00:13:38] Sure.
[00:13:39] So I will confess,
[00:13:40] the choice of Da Vinci in the subtitle,
[00:13:43] he is more recognizable
[00:13:44] to readers,
[00:13:45] but my personal favorite Renaissance genius
[00:13:47] is Albrecht Durer,
[00:13:48] another kind of artist lauded as a genius.
[00:13:51] But what is true,
[00:13:52] both of Durer and Da Vinci,
[00:13:54] and of other Renaissance genius
[00:13:57] sort of self-promoters of this time,
[00:13:59] was that the special thing that they had,
[00:14:03] their artistic talent,
[00:14:05] but also something greater,
[00:14:07] was understood in this era
[00:14:09] of increased social mobility,
[00:14:11] especially for members
[00:14:13] of what we might think of
[00:14:14] as the artisan middle class.
[00:14:16] All of these people
[00:14:18] who leapfrogged the social order,
[00:14:20] who didn’t quite fit.
[00:14:21] They were not aristocrats,
[00:14:22] they weren’t peasants,
[00:14:23] but perhaps they were moving
[00:14:24] in elevated circles
[00:14:25] as a result of their talent.
[00:14:27] They understood themselves
[00:14:29] and were understood
[00:14:31] as something a little bit more than human.
[00:14:34] And the implicit narrative
[00:14:36] is that they’re God’s bastards.
[00:14:39] Their legal father might be someone
[00:14:41] not of high birth,
[00:14:42] but they have a direct line somehow
[00:14:45] to, again, God, nature, fate, fortune.
[00:14:49] And this sets the stage
[00:14:51] for what becomes a really recurrent
[00:14:53] problem, question, concern, anxiety
[00:14:56] in the self-making story,
[00:14:58] which is, is the self-maker
[00:15:00] chosen and innately special?
[00:15:03] Or do they just work for it?
[00:15:06] And are they harder workers?
[00:15:08] And can anybody be a self-maker?
[00:15:10] And the statement is,
[00:15:11] and this tension and with it,
[00:15:13] this idea of a kind of secret aristocracy,
[00:15:16] no less innate
[00:15:18] than the aristocracy of blood or birth,
[00:15:21] kind of has its genesis.
[00:15:23] And the quest for that specialness,
[00:15:26] and in some cases,
[00:15:27] the claiming of that specialness,
[00:15:29] has huge political import.
[00:15:31] I think sometimes the story of self-making,
[00:15:34] we think of it as a story
[00:15:35] of liberation, of progress.
[00:15:37] That’s certainly how someone
[00:15:38] like Frederick Douglass,
[00:15:39] many centuries later,
[00:15:40] would think of it.
[00:15:41] Until basically the 20th century,
[00:15:43] the rise of the Hollywood star system,
[00:15:46] I do see self-making as having
[00:15:48] two slightly different strands.
[00:15:50] The more reactionary strand,
[00:15:52] the kind of vision of the aristocracy
[00:15:54] of the spirit that we see in dandies
[00:15:57] like Beau Brummel,
[00:15:58] later Oscar Wilde,
[00:16:00] Gabriele D’Annunzio,
[00:16:02] that ultimately kind of, let’s say,
[00:16:04] culminate in the Nietzschean idea
[00:16:06] of the ubermensch,
[00:16:08] or the kind of secrets,
[00:16:09] secret spiritual aristocrat,
[00:16:12] the self-maker as a special person
[00:16:14] who is just better than other people.
[00:16:16] And it is, in this narrative, usually he.
[00:16:18] Now, across the pond in America,
[00:16:20] we see something very different,
[00:16:23] and at first glance,
[00:16:25] more liberatory,
[00:16:27] more, perhaps more optimistic.
[00:16:30] This vision that what makes America great
[00:16:33] is that anybody,
[00:16:35] no matter when or how they are born,
[00:16:38] this is particularly moving,
[00:16:40] coming from Douglas,
[00:16:41] who was, of course, born into slavery,
[00:16:43] but that in this America that he envisioned,
[00:16:46] no matter who your father is,
[00:16:48] again, this idea of paternity,
[00:16:50] you can become a gentleman,
[00:16:52] you can become the inheritor,
[00:16:54] the metaphorical son of an Abraham Lincoln, say,
[00:16:57] because you work hard.
[00:16:59] However, by the time you get to the Gilded Age,
[00:17:02] a lot of this vision of self-governance and virtue
[00:17:05] gets replaced by make a bunch of money,
[00:17:07] and the self-made man becomes code,
[00:17:09] not for someone who is sort of virtuous and industrious,
[00:17:13] but just for a Carnegie,
[00:17:15] for a self-made captain of industry.
[00:17:26] What does the term self-made even mean?
[00:17:30] That’s coming up after a quick break.
[00:17:37] We’ll be right back.
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[00:20:29] How do you even define a term like self-making,
[00:20:32] which is a little bit,
[00:20:34] abstract.
[00:20:35] One of the interesting things
[00:20:36] you say in the book
[00:20:37] is that even the idea
[00:20:38] of self-making or self-creation,
[00:20:40] it would have been nonsensical
[00:20:42] to the pre-modern mind, right?
[00:20:44] There’s something about the modern world
[00:20:46] that provided the space
[00:20:47] for even the ambition
[00:20:49] of self-making or self-inventing
[00:20:51] or self-creating.
[00:20:52] So even when you use a term like that,
[00:20:54] what really do you mean?
[00:20:56] I like the sort of Oscar Wilde version
[00:20:58] of creating one’s life
[00:20:59] as a work of art.
[00:21:00] I think that I would say
[00:21:02] ultimately what self-making is,
[00:21:03] ultimately what self-making becomes
[00:21:05] is that one’s personality,
[00:21:08] including how one is perceived,
[00:21:10] becomes a kind of commodity
[00:21:12] for either artistic or economic profit,
[00:21:15] and increasingly for both.
[00:21:17] It’s not to say persona I’m wary of
[00:21:20] because I think that
[00:21:22] ultimately self-making
[00:21:24] kind of collapses the distinction
[00:21:26] between the persona and the real self.
[00:21:28] That our interior landscape
[00:21:30] exists to be cultivated,
[00:21:32] but part of the process
[00:21:33] of that cultivation
[00:21:35] is about how others see us.
[00:21:37] Right.
[00:21:38] And this is something that we find
[00:21:39] as much in the Renaissance
[00:21:40] with manuals about
[00:21:41] the importance of sprezzatura,
[00:21:43] the appearance of effortlessness
[00:21:45] for the courtier,
[00:21:46] whether or not it is actually effortless
[00:21:48] for him to behave in a certain way,
[00:21:51] all the way up
[00:21:52] unto kind of 19th century dandy manuals
[00:21:57] about appearing a certain way in public.
[00:22:00] Ultimately, I think self-making is about
[00:22:02] the cultivation of one’s personality
[00:22:06] in both public and private
[00:22:09] to four certain ends
[00:22:12] that are ultimately primarily about personal gain.
[00:22:15] So it sounds like branding.
[00:22:17] It is branding, yes.
[00:22:18] I think all of this is personal branding
[00:22:20] with a spiritual component.
[00:22:23] Oh, that’s a hell of a way to put it.
[00:22:24] Okay, I like that.
[00:22:26] This kind of fast-forwards us
[00:22:28] to the present a little bit
[00:22:29] because, again, there’s a ton of history
[00:22:30] to surf through here,
[00:22:31] and we just can’t do it all,
[00:22:32] so I don’t even want to try.
[00:22:33] But there is a word
[00:22:34] that comes up a ton in the book,
[00:22:36] and that word is authenticity.
[00:22:39] And the pursuit of authenticity,
[00:22:41] the need for it,
[00:22:42] is pretty pervasive today.
[00:22:44] I think people know what I mean by that.
[00:22:46] And it is obviously related
[00:22:48] to this broader project of self-creation,
[00:22:51] but you seem very wary
[00:22:55] of the idea of authenticity.
[00:22:58] Is that even true?
[00:22:59] And if it is, why?
[00:23:00] Because I think the answer to that
[00:23:01] will explain a lot.
[00:23:02] I’m extremely wary.
[00:23:03] Oh, hot take.
[00:23:04] Yeah, I don’t think it exists.
[00:23:06] So I’m very influenced.
[00:23:07] I should sort of lay my cards out.
[00:23:09] I’m very influenced
[00:23:10] by the philosopher Charles Taylor on this.
[00:23:12] But I think that authenticity
[00:23:16] is kind of this sort of
[00:23:17] weirdly meaningless word
[00:23:19] because it often seems to refer
[00:23:22] to an internally psychologically felt
[00:23:24] sense of truth
[00:23:26] that may or may not have anything to do
[00:23:28] with reality as such.
[00:23:29] It is a kind of emotional description
[00:23:33] of an emotional state
[00:23:35] that’s roughly like
[00:23:36] what I am doing
[00:23:38] accords with my own self-image,
[00:23:40] which I think has a certain value
[00:23:42] up to a point.
[00:23:43] But what I think has happened
[00:23:45] in contemporary culture
[00:23:48] is that authenticity,
[00:23:51] when we talk about someone like Montaigne,
[00:23:53] for example,
[00:23:54] who valorizes nakedness
[00:23:56] as the authentic state,
[00:23:58] you are getting about something true and real
[00:24:00] about the naked man
[00:24:01] because he is not putting on social clothes
[00:24:03] to clothe his authentic reality.
[00:24:06] That, I think,
[00:24:07] for reasons we’ve already discussed,
[00:24:08] I’m wary of this as a model precisely
[00:24:10] because I think that we are social beings
[00:24:12] and we are not naked creatures
[00:24:14] running around in the woods.
[00:24:15] However, I think that increasingly
[00:24:18] the idea of self-expression through creation,
[00:24:22] the idea that it is truer for David Bowie
[00:24:25] to express himself
[00:24:27] as Ziggy Stardust
[00:24:29] in a certain way
[00:24:30] than for David Bowie
[00:24:31] to run around naked in the woods
[00:24:33] is a meaningful statement
[00:24:34] and does tell us something
[00:24:35] about how we think about authenticity
[00:24:38] and self-expression
[00:24:39] and the relationship
[00:24:40] between artifice and authenticity.
[00:24:42] Another, you know,
[00:24:43] you think of Oscar Wilde saying,
[00:24:44] give a man a mask
[00:24:45] and he’ll show you the truth
[00:24:46] from another point of view.
[00:24:47] I think that there is absolutely
[00:24:49] something useful
[00:24:51] and indeed meaningful
[00:24:52] about self-expression
[00:24:53] and the way that we express
[00:24:55] whatever that we think
[00:24:56] and whatever that weird,
[00:24:58] hard, indefinable thing
[00:25:00] about our distinct humanity is
[00:25:02] through culture.
[00:25:03] I experience self-expression
[00:25:05] through clothing
[00:25:06] as many people do.
[00:25:07] But I think that when we valorize it
[00:25:10] to the extent that we valorize it now
[00:25:12] in a culture where so many of us
[00:25:15] kind of are forced to participate
[00:25:17] in personal branding for
[00:25:19] whether it’s social capital
[00:25:21] for job opportunities,
[00:25:23] whether it’s Twitter or Instagram
[00:25:25] or being on a dating profile
[00:25:26] or writing a college admissions essay,
[00:25:29] the idea that we have to perform
[00:25:32] a true version of ourselves
[00:25:34] through this kind of act
[00:25:36] of self-presentation and modulation,
[00:25:39] to me, I find deeply depressing
[00:25:43] and alienating.
[00:25:44] Yeah, I do too.
[00:25:46] And I know this sounds
[00:25:47] a little bit lazy
[00:25:48] and kind of very of the moment,
[00:25:51] but I really do think
[00:25:53] the introduction of the iPhone
[00:25:55] and social media
[00:25:56] is one of the most consequential experiments
[00:25:58] in mass psychology ever.
[00:26:00] And it has supercharged
[00:26:02] this desire for self-invention
[00:26:04] because it’s really democratized it.
[00:26:06] And now we’re all able to play this game
[00:26:09] on a virtual stage.
[00:26:11] I mean, do I sound like a Luddite here?
[00:26:13] I mean, did you spend a lot of time
[00:26:15] on TikTok for this book?
[00:26:17] I mean, have you observed
[00:26:18] the insufferable world
[00:26:19] of wellness, Instagram?
[00:26:21] What the hell do you see happening there?
[00:26:23] And how does it sort of reflect
[00:26:24] what you’re talking about?
[00:26:26] You don’t sound like a Luddite.
[00:26:27] My conviction coming away from this book
[00:26:29] is that I want to be someone
[00:26:31] who doesn’t have a smartphone.
[00:26:32] I failed.
[00:26:33] I’ve relapsed from my attempt
[00:26:35] to do this the first time,
[00:26:36] but I’m attempting to not have
[00:26:38] a smartphone with me right now.
[00:26:39] I’m trying to use an Apple Watch
[00:26:41] to get calls and texts and emails
[00:26:42] so that I don’t have to look at something
[00:26:44] with a browser or camera.
[00:26:45] And I think that more and more of us
[00:26:47] are aware of how hellish
[00:26:49] and nightmarish it is
[00:26:51] to exist through a world
[00:26:53] that is purely form-mediated
[00:26:55] or where so many
[00:26:56] of experiential opportunities
[00:26:58] are primarily seen
[00:27:00] as creative opportunities
[00:27:02] for the creation of the self.
[00:27:05] So one of the things
[00:27:06] that I hate most in the world
[00:27:08] is experiences,
[00:27:10] by which I mean
[00:27:11] the sort of commodified, like,
[00:27:13] events that exist
[00:27:14] for you to take a picture at them
[00:27:15] and put on Instagram.
[00:27:17] Certain pop-ups,
[00:27:18] certain immersive theater experiences.
[00:27:20] I love some immersive theater.
[00:27:22] But there is a sense where, like,
[00:27:24] you go to an event,
[00:27:25] you dress a certain way,
[00:27:26] but the purpose of the event
[00:27:28] is to take a picture
[00:27:30] against a nice backdrop
[00:27:32] and ultimately add this to your feed
[00:27:35] as an act of self-creation.
[00:27:37] And I cannot think of anything
[00:27:39] more depressing,
[00:27:40] and I know I’m the one
[00:27:41] who sounds like a Luddite
[00:27:42] because I have been to so many
[00:27:44] concerts, events,
[00:27:45] even nightlife events,
[00:27:47] what have you,
[00:27:48] where unless there is
[00:27:50] a particular injunction against it,
[00:27:51] and in fact,
[00:27:52] recently in one case,
[00:27:53] even though they specifically said,
[00:27:55] please do not do this,
[00:27:56] we are begging you not to do this,
[00:27:57] you cannot see the performer
[00:27:59] except through everybody else’s
[00:28:01] phone screens.
[00:28:02] And I think the kind of easy thing
[00:28:04] to say is, like,
[00:28:05] wow, it’s terrible that everybody
[00:28:06] is so addicted to their phones,
[00:28:09] which is true.
[00:28:10] But I think that what is behind it
[00:28:12] is this idea that we so feel
[00:28:15] this compulsive neurotic need
[00:28:17] to construct ourselves
[00:28:19] such that, you know,
[00:28:21] there is very little appetite
[00:28:24] for pure receptivity,
[00:28:26] for invisibility,
[00:28:27] for attending things
[00:28:28] as audience members
[00:28:29] rather than as kind of main characters
[00:28:32] in whatever drama we’re enacting
[00:28:35] for our followers.
[00:28:36] And the fact that whole careers
[00:28:39] can be made because of this,
[00:28:40] economies run on this,
[00:28:42] as a writer,
[00:28:43] as a freelance writer
[00:28:45] who would like people to buy my book,
[00:28:46] I cannot, I mean,
[00:28:47] I could opt out of it,
[00:28:48] but I think my publishers
[00:28:49] would be really mad at me
[00:28:50] if I did.
[00:28:51] Like, there are material reasons
[00:28:54] to do this.
[00:28:55] This is not just pure narcissism,
[00:28:57] so to speak.
[00:28:58] And I do wonder then,
[00:29:00] when I think about this,
[00:29:01] and I think about being
[00:29:02] a freelance writer
[00:29:03] who, like, wishes I were funnier
[00:29:05] on Twitter than I am
[00:29:06] so that I could go viral
[00:29:07] so that everyone would buy
[00:29:08] everything I’ve ever written,
[00:29:09] is whether privacy will become
[00:29:10] a certain kind of luxury good,
[00:29:12] whether sometimes I think
[00:29:13] I’ll know that I’ve made it
[00:29:15] professionally
[00:29:16] when I become one of those people
[00:29:18] who, like, doesn’t check my email
[00:29:19] and doesn’t have any social media,
[00:29:20] and, you know, requires people
[00:29:22] to write handwritten letters
[00:29:23] or what have you,
[00:29:24] that it is only when
[00:29:26] one has attained a degree
[00:29:28] of financial success
[00:29:29] or career success
[00:29:31] that one can opt out
[00:29:33] of being seen.
[00:29:36] If there was some resistance
[00:29:37] bubbling up in me a little bit
[00:29:39] during parts of your book,
[00:29:40] I think it had to do
[00:29:41] with something we’re
[00:29:42] circling around here.
[00:29:43] This impulse,
[00:29:44] which I have sometimes,
[00:29:45] to dismiss self-creation
[00:29:48] or self-invention
[00:29:49] as meaningless precisely
[00:29:51] because it is kind of
[00:29:52] a performance,
[00:29:53] and maybe you’re not even
[00:29:54] dismissive in that way,
[00:29:55] but I know plenty of people are,
[00:29:56] and I guess I wonder
[00:29:57] what you make of
[00:29:58] some of these existentialist thinkers
[00:30:00] who you reference in the book
[00:30:01] who say that, you know,
[00:30:02] hey, the God-ordered world
[00:30:05] was an illusion,
[00:30:06] perhaps a very useful one,
[00:30:08] and we are confronted
[00:30:09] with an absurd existence,
[00:30:10] and the way you create meaning
[00:30:12] in that situation
[00:30:14] is to turn your life
[00:30:15] into a kind of experiment,
[00:30:17] to make the most
[00:30:18] of your performance
[00:30:19] in this tragic comedy
[00:30:21] we call life.
[00:30:22] Do you find inspiration
[00:30:23] in that call?
[00:30:24] Do you find it beautiful
[00:30:25] but perhaps maybe a little
[00:30:26] too spiritually empty
[00:30:28] in the end?
[00:30:29] Hmm.
[00:30:30] So I think I have a lot of time
[00:30:32] for existentialists,
[00:30:33] so I’m a person of faith,
[00:30:35] so I don’t think
[00:30:36] it’s all meaningless.
[00:30:37] And sometimes I think
[00:30:38] I’m persuaded
[00:30:39] I had a professor in grad school
[00:30:40] who basically said, like,
[00:30:42] we don’t have to worry
[00:30:43] about Richard Dockett,
[00:30:44] we have to worry about Nietzsche,
[00:30:45] sort of, you know,
[00:30:46] it’s Dostoevsky,
[00:30:47] if God is dead,
[00:30:48] I don’t necessarily think
[00:30:49] that at all.
[00:30:50] But I do think that
[00:30:51] in the absence
[00:30:52] of an account
[00:30:54] of transcendent truth
[00:30:56] or transcendent goodness,
[00:30:58] and that does not necessarily
[00:30:59] need to be the account
[00:31:01] that I think it is,
[00:31:02] but I think that
[00:31:03] in the absence of that,
[00:31:04] a challenge does arise,
[00:31:06] which is,
[00:31:07] where does the good come from?
[00:31:09] What kind of commitments
[00:31:10] can we make
[00:31:11] and hold ourselves to
[00:31:13] outside of our own desires?
[00:31:15] And I think that it’s not,
[00:31:17] it is not
[00:31:18] impossible,
[00:31:19] but it is difficult.
[00:31:20] I think that the question
[00:31:22] of seeking the good
[00:31:24] is something that does require
[00:31:28] or should require
[00:31:31] access to or an attempt
[00:31:33] to understand something
[00:31:35] beyond our personal,
[00:31:37] immediate desire.
[00:31:39] And I think that faith
[00:31:42] in a particular kind of conception
[00:31:44] of that transcendence does help,
[00:31:46] but I think one
[00:31:47] of the kind of fundamentally wise things
[00:31:51] that is true of,
[00:31:53] I’d say,
[00:31:54] nearly all wisdom traditions globally
[00:31:56] is a sense that
[00:31:57] our own personal sense of self
[00:31:59] is only part of the story.
[00:32:02] Yeah, I mean,
[00:32:03] I struggle even to articulate this,
[00:32:05] and maybe this is
[00:32:06] some of the influence
[00:32:07] that Nietzsche has had on me
[00:32:09] sort of coming out here,
[00:32:10] but I do believe
[00:32:12] that there are real,
[00:32:13] you know, let’s call them
[00:32:14] creative spirits,
[00:32:15] like a David Bowie,
[00:32:16] who you just mentioned,
[00:32:17] who incidentally was a big admirer
[00:32:18] and reader of Nietzsche.
[00:32:20] You know, people like that
[00:32:21] who really do turn their lives
[00:32:23] into works of art,
[00:32:24] who really do experiment with life.
[00:32:25] But I think most of us
[00:32:26] are not like this.
[00:32:27] Most of us are not artists
[00:32:28] in that way.
[00:32:29] So when we brand ourselves online
[00:32:30] or when we work so hard
[00:32:32] to create and project our identity,
[00:32:35] I’m not sure what we’re doing exactly
[00:32:38] other than groping about
[00:32:40] for recognition.
[00:32:41] And you know what?
[00:32:42] Maybe that’s all that Bowie
[00:32:43] or any other successful artist
[00:32:44] is doing in the end.
[00:32:45] I don’t know,
[00:32:46] but there does seem
[00:32:47] to be a difference there.
[00:32:48] I’m not quite sure
[00:32:49] how to pin it down.
[00:32:50] I think the kind of hunger
[00:32:51] for recognition
[00:32:53] and the ability to convey
[00:32:55] something about our personality,
[00:32:58] something about our us-ness,
[00:33:00] I think it’s at the core
[00:33:01] of all art in a different way.
[00:33:03] And this is not in the book.
[00:33:04] This is just stuff
[00:33:05] that I was thinking about
[00:33:06] while watching my friend’s
[00:33:07] rock concert a couple of weeks ago
[00:33:09] that I think that there are
[00:33:11] other art forms
[00:33:12] and such as the novel
[00:33:14] that can explore
[00:33:15] in a particular way
[00:33:16] that desire for recognition
[00:33:18] or the ways that we tell stories
[00:33:19] about ourselves
[00:33:20] as being complicated
[00:33:22] by all the other stories
[00:33:24] that other people are telling
[00:33:25] about themselves.
[00:33:26] The reason that Dostoevsky
[00:33:27] is one of my favorite novelists
[00:33:28] is because I think he does that.
[00:33:29] His novels are about
[00:33:30] everyone’s kind of stories
[00:33:32] crashing against each other.
[00:33:34] But I think that something
[00:33:35] that particularly rock music
[00:33:37] does really effectively
[00:33:39] is it conveys
[00:33:41] the pure personality
[00:33:44] of the performer
[00:33:46] to an audience.
[00:33:47] There is a kind of
[00:33:48] deep individualism to it.
[00:33:49] There’s a real sexiness to it
[00:33:51] of a kind of self-disclosure
[00:33:54] through performance
[00:33:55] that is about the distinctiveness
[00:33:57] of the person.
[00:33:58] It’s often like
[00:33:59] when you think of a rock star,
[00:34:00] you don’t necessarily think
[00:34:01] of someone who is like
[00:34:02] a technically gifted singer
[00:34:03] or perhaps even
[00:34:04] a technically gifted composer,
[00:34:06] but someone who is conveying
[00:34:07] their selfhood effectively.
[00:34:09] Now, I have no idea
[00:34:10] why rock does this
[00:34:12] and other genres don’t.
[00:34:13] I’m not a music historian.
[00:34:15] But I do think that there are
[00:34:16] particular genres,
[00:34:17] and certainly Bowie being
[00:34:19] a great example of glam rock,
[00:34:20] that are about the communication
[00:34:23] of one’s personal individuality.
[00:34:34] Coming up after a quick break,
[00:34:37] we discuss the Internet’s role
[00:34:39] in accelerating the drift
[00:34:41] into commodification.
[00:34:42] This is a stay tuned
[00:34:58] New Year’s Eve presentation.
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[00:35:11] Here’s mine.
[00:35:12] I take last year’s resolutions and change I resolve to, I resolve not to.
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[00:37:39] The internet, as it often is, is a really important accelerant here.
[00:37:50] And I think it’s accelerated some of this drift into commodification.
[00:37:55] And, you know, I mean, two characters in the book,
[00:37:58] who you call the most prominent self-creators of the past 20 years,
[00:38:02] I think speak to this exquisitely, if not depressingly.
[00:38:05] And they are Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump.
[00:38:08] And you even call it Kardashian.
[00:38:09] Quote, the apex of the nihilistic aristocratic tradition.
[00:38:14] So what does someone like a Kardashian or a Trump sort of represent in this story?
[00:38:19] Or what do they illustrate about really this moment?
[00:38:23] So I think the culmination of the idea that you are whoever you want to be
[00:38:27] is that reality itself is downstream of desire.
[00:38:30] Reality is what you make it.
[00:38:32] And the kind of logic goes something along the lines of
[00:38:37] ultimately reality is just humanness.
[00:38:39] It’s just human perception because there is no transcendent reality.
[00:38:42] And so that the way that you shape reality is by shaping human perception.
[00:38:46] So if you can make people believe it’s true, it’s true.
[00:38:48] And this is something that is like specifically encoded
[00:38:51] more sort of technically in the tradition of new thought,
[00:38:53] this self-help tradition that was and remains very popular in the United States
[00:38:56] and was kind of really brought back into prominence in the mid-20th century
[00:39:01] by Norman Vincent Peale, Christian pastor who kind of Christianized this new thought movement
[00:39:06] and who was the personal pastor to the Trump family.
[00:39:09] And whom Donald Trump has cited as an influence.
[00:39:12] And that’s not to say that like Norman Vincent Peale brainwashed Trump into becoming Trump,
[00:39:16] but rather that I think the cultural tendencies that new thought and Peale represent
[00:39:21] did kind of find perhaps a perfect vessel in someone who one might say personality-wise
[00:39:30] was primed to believe that truth was whatever you made it.
[00:39:33] And I think that like this is also something that we see true in,
[00:39:38] and I do not speculate,
[00:39:39] about the internal life of Kim Kardashian.
[00:39:41] But in Kim Kardashian, the character that we see,
[00:39:44] who is an extremely sort of manicured and exaggerated figure,
[00:39:48] who’s a parent, although she, of course, denies surgical intervention,
[00:39:53] who’s a parent surgical intervention,
[00:39:55] leans into this idea that she like made herself into a cyborg, so to speak.
[00:39:59] That we know that however Kim Kardashian looks
[00:40:02] is how Kim Kardashian has chosen to or wants to look.
[00:40:06] Or at least that is the sort of thing
[00:40:09] that her style gets across.
[00:40:11] That her desire to have reality go a certain way
[00:40:15] is written upon her body.
[00:40:18] And this sense that reality is fungible
[00:40:20] is so much a part of both of their persona.
[00:40:23] But, you know, Kardashian turns herself into a product, right?
[00:40:27] She sort of becomes famous for being famous.
[00:40:29] And I think we all get what she’s doing there,
[00:40:31] making lots and lots of money, branding herself like that.
[00:40:34] But what the hell are the millions and millions and millions of non-Kardashians out there,
[00:40:39] basically behaving like Kardashian without all the profit?
[00:40:43] What are they doing?
[00:40:44] And why are they doing it?
[00:40:46] I think some of it is a hope of, you know,
[00:40:48] it is a viable path for fame and fortune.
[00:40:52] I think that particularly in an economy
[00:40:55] that features increasing numbers of gig workers,
[00:40:58] in which many of us have side hustles,
[00:41:01] in which the attention economy ties into more and more of our professional lives,
[00:41:06] I think that more and more of us,
[00:41:08] have to sort of internalize the idea
[00:41:10] that, like, self-performance is just part of what you do.
[00:41:13] It’s like clocking into work.
[00:41:14] It’s like updating your resume.
[00:41:16] And even if you don’t specifically want to become an influencer,
[00:41:20] I think it’s just kind of,
[00:41:23] perhaps we don’t even examine this impulse
[00:41:26] because it has become so quickly encoded into our cultural life
[00:41:29] that we all just, like, it’s what you do and it’s what you have to do.
[00:41:33] And not doing it would be stupid in a way.
[00:41:35] Like, not doing it would be a dereliction of the duty.
[00:41:38] Like, not doing it would be a dereliction of the duty.
[00:41:38] We have toward ourselves to present our best selves.
[00:41:42] Like, if you are someone who does not have social media
[00:41:44] or public-facing social media,
[00:41:46] you’re a little bit weird
[00:41:47] or it’s a little bit of an act of folly in some way.
[00:41:51] Part of this, to me, just feels like,
[00:41:53] in some ways, self-expression is kind of the only refuge
[00:41:57] for the individual in a world without much community
[00:42:00] or real-world solidarity, right?
[00:42:02] And so, to the extent we do have identity at all
[00:42:05] or shared identity at all,
[00:42:06] it’s mostly hollow and superfluous,
[00:42:08] because it plays out on these, like, vapid virtual platforms
[00:42:12] that incentivize exactly this kind of thing.
[00:42:14] And here’s, I’m not sure quite what to make of this,
[00:42:17] but I do think what’s very strange is some,
[00:42:19] and, like, Gia Tolentino’s written about Instagram face
[00:42:22] and the kind of uniformity of certain looks of makeup.
[00:42:24] Yeah, yeah.
[00:42:25] But that it’s not exactly self-expression either,
[00:42:28] which is to say, like, there’s fewer weirdos out there.
[00:42:32] And I say this with love for the weirdos,
[00:42:34] that there seems to be a kind of personal branding
[00:42:37] that requires…
[00:42:38] There’s fitting into specific influencer molds
[00:42:42] in a way that doesn’t even seem to have the joy
[00:42:45] or the individuality of the Oscar Wilde.
[00:42:48] And I don’t know why that is
[00:42:51] or why we finally have the tools to all be dandies
[00:42:54] and what we seem to be doing with it
[00:42:57] is all becoming Kim Kardashian.
[00:43:00] Well, that’s exactly right.
[00:43:02] And that’s kind of, there’s no there there.
[00:43:04] There’s nothing behind it.
[00:43:05] And that’s kind of what’s so instructive
[00:43:06] about the hyper-reality,
[00:43:08] the hyper-reality of someone like a Donald Trump.
[00:43:11] And let’s just set aside the politics stuff for now, right?
[00:43:13] Like, his whole public persona is this insane example
[00:43:18] of the authority of the image,
[00:43:20] the authority of branding.
[00:43:21] He’s like, his whole public life is shambolic
[00:43:23] and he knows it and he tells you as much.
[00:43:25] And it just doesn’t matter
[00:43:26] because the spectacle is the point.
[00:43:28] The fantasy is the point.
[00:43:30] And there’s just something very, very American
[00:43:32] about Trump in that way.
[00:43:35] And I think it’s something
[00:43:36] maybe a lot of people don’t want to grapple with.
[00:43:38] Because of what it says about the vacuousness
[00:43:41] of our culture or whatever.
[00:43:42] But I think there’s something there or something to that.
[00:43:46] All right, let me ask you this,
[00:43:47] because I don’t want to live in the old medieval world
[00:43:53] in which our station in life was predetermined
[00:43:58] by other mammals using God
[00:44:00] or some other divine authority as their justification.
[00:44:02] And I also don’t want to live in the present world
[00:44:05] where the obsession with status and authenticity
[00:44:08] reduces us to shallow, neurotic creatures.
[00:44:12] So where’s the happy medium here, Tara?
[00:44:14] Like, how can we live in a world
[00:44:15] where the individual is liberated
[00:44:18] from artificial constraints and fear of judgment and all that,
[00:44:21] but also isn’t obsessed with selling
[00:44:23] and projecting their identity in unhealthy ways?
[00:44:27] That’s a super easy question.
[00:44:28] You have 30 seconds to answer it.
[00:44:29] Go.
[00:44:30] Sure.
[00:44:32] Everyone should touch more grass
[00:44:33] and get to know their neighbors.
[00:44:35] And I always say that the best antidote to self-making
[00:44:37] is genuine self-love.
[00:44:38] And relationships with people
[00:44:39] who basically can see through our bullshit
[00:44:41] make it a lot harder to maintain facades.
[00:44:45] And I think that’s all the easier
[00:44:46] if more of us had the kind of,
[00:44:49] a degree of economic security
[00:44:50] could at least ameliorate the desperation
[00:44:53] to get ahead in the gig economy.
[00:44:56] You mentioned Dostoevsky earlier.
[00:44:57] Can I ask you a question about him?
[00:44:58] Sure.
[00:44:59] I’m a big admirer of his.
[00:45:00] We’ve talked about him a bunch on the show.
[00:45:03] And you wrote a very interesting essay about him recently.
[00:45:06] And I think it does tie into this.
[00:45:08] You know,
[00:45:08] I’ve always been pretty speechless
[00:45:10] before the argument
[00:45:10] the Grand Inquisitor famously makes
[00:45:12] in his book,
[00:45:13] The Brothers Kermasov.
[00:45:14] And the argument that the Inquisitor famously makes
[00:45:18] is about how human beings are secretly horrified
[00:45:23] by the very thing they claim to want most,
[00:45:26] which is freedom, right?
[00:45:27] The freedom to be themselves,
[00:45:28] to create themselves, whatever.
[00:45:31] And, you know,
[00:45:31] true freedom brings with it
[00:45:33] that responsibility to create yourself.
[00:45:35] And the Inquisitor makes a pretty strong case
[00:45:37] that we don’t really want to be free.
[00:45:38] We don’t really want that.
[00:45:39] And we can’t really handle that.
[00:45:40] And that’s why we deliver ourselves over
[00:45:42] to movements and people who settle
[00:45:44] our identities for us.
[00:45:47] Do you think there’s real truth
[00:45:49] in the Inquisitor’s argument there,
[00:45:50] even if you don’t want there to be?
[00:45:52] Yes, I do.
[00:45:53] And I think that,
[00:45:54] particularly if I were not a person of faith,
[00:45:55] I would find it extremely convincing.
[00:45:57] But I think that true freedom
[00:46:00] is kind of an abstraction.
[00:46:02] Like, we are in space.
[00:46:03] We are in time.
[00:46:05] We are not infinite creatures.
[00:46:06] And our ability,
[00:46:08] ability to even conceive of existence
[00:46:11] comes to us so socially mediated
[00:46:14] through language, through image, through story,
[00:46:16] that to me, the idea of perfect freedom
[00:46:19] feels like a math problem.
[00:46:20] It’s something that I can abstract,
[00:46:23] but I don’t think is kind of relevant to human life
[00:46:27] because, I mean, we’re all going to die.
[00:46:30] And I think the horizon of death
[00:46:32] against which we struggle
[00:46:34] means that whatever we make of it,
[00:46:37] whatever we make of it,
[00:46:38] whether we conclude that,
[00:46:40] well, we’ve only got a certain amount of time
[00:46:41] and we might as well, like,
[00:46:42] decide what we’re going to do with it,
[00:46:44] or whether we fit ourselves to certain kinds of virtue,
[00:46:48] I’ve become, perhaps morbidly, increasingly convinced
[00:46:50] that, like, all of life is, in a certain way,
[00:46:53] preparation for death
[00:46:54] or a kind of engagement with death,
[00:46:57] our own and that of everybody else.
[00:47:00] Against that horizon, I think one can say,
[00:47:03] we can talk about giving meaning to our lives
[00:47:06] or we can talk about abandoning
[00:47:08] hope for an afterlife.
[00:47:10] But what we’re not talking about is complete freedom.
[00:47:13] Can I push you in a way that you might resist
[00:47:15] and you can just punt if you want?
[00:47:17] Sure.
[00:47:18] I think there is a real world view
[00:47:24] guiding your approach to all of this,
[00:47:25] and I think you rightly don’t let it cloud
[00:47:28] or overwhelm the story you’re telling,
[00:47:31] but I’m fascinated by it.
[00:47:32] And I would love to pull it out of you
[00:47:33] just a little bit if I can.
[00:47:35] And I don’t want to,
[00:47:38] I don’t want to invoke
[00:47:38] these really kind of stale categories
[00:47:40] like left or right
[00:47:41] or progressive or conservative.
[00:47:44] But I see something deeper in you.
[00:47:45] Maybe it is religious.
[00:47:46] Maybe you would call it something else
[00:47:48] that shapes your critiques
[00:47:50] of the contemporary world.
[00:47:52] And I guess I wonder if you have
[00:47:53] a clear internal sense of what that is
[00:47:54] and what’s pushing you
[00:47:55] and maybe kind of what you’re really fighting for
[00:47:58] or arguing for here.
[00:47:59] Absolutely.
[00:48:00] Yeah, I don’t want to punt that at all.
[00:48:02] I’m a Christian.
[00:48:03] I’m Episcopalian.
[00:48:04] Christian humanist is what I’d call myself.
[00:48:06] And in terms of the commitment,
[00:48:08] that I bring to my work,
[00:48:09] I believe in good and evil.
[00:48:10] I believe in the dignity of the human person
[00:48:14] and the irreducibility of each human person
[00:48:18] and of the kind of,
[00:48:20] one of the sort of things that you,
[00:48:22] one of the things that goes with the territory
[00:48:23] as a Christian is the sense that like
[00:48:26] God becoming man is this wondrous mystery
[00:48:29] that means that in human existence
[00:48:31] and all its contingency,
[00:48:33] there is something holy and sacred.
[00:48:35] And that’s the commitments
[00:48:37] that I bring to myself.
[00:48:38] I bring to my work.
[00:48:38] I hope they don’t sort of overshadow my work.
[00:48:40] But I think that if there is a commitment
[00:48:42] I bring to self-made or to strange rights,
[00:48:45] it’s not necessarily saying like,
[00:48:47] this is what I believe in people
[00:48:48] who don’t believe that they are wrong.
[00:48:49] It’s the awareness that just as
[00:48:52] my philosophical and spiritual commitments
[00:48:55] shape how I feel about everything,
[00:48:57] I think that many people
[00:49:00] in the quote unquote secular world
[00:49:02] maybe are not encouraged to think as systematically
[00:49:06] about the ways in which I am.
[00:49:07] And I think that’s the awareness that I bring to myself.
[00:49:07] And I think that’s the awareness that I bring to myself.
[00:49:07] And I think that’s the awareness that I bring to myself.
[00:49:07] The ways in which their own commitments
[00:49:09] about the world,
[00:49:11] the nature of good,
[00:49:12] the nature of evil,
[00:49:13] the nature of our relationships with one another
[00:49:15] might also be connected.
[00:49:17] Which is to say,
[00:49:17] I think that like,
[00:49:19] there are many systematic ways
[00:49:21] one could approach the world.
[00:49:23] What fascinates me about theology,
[00:49:25] why I wanted to study it
[00:49:26] long before I was a person of faith,
[00:49:28] was the idea that like,
[00:49:29] how I thought about God,
[00:49:30] how I thought about like the plant in the park,
[00:49:33] how I thought about my dog
[00:49:34] and how I thought about my mother
[00:49:36] might all be related.
[00:49:38] There might be this kind of unified way
[00:49:40] of looking at the world
[00:49:42] based on what I think is true.
[00:49:45] And I think that if I am trying to do anything,
[00:49:48] it is applying,
[00:49:49] let’s say it’s like my systematic theology hat on,
[00:49:52] trying to work out
[00:49:53] what a systematic theology of modernity might be.
[00:49:56] I obviously,
[00:49:57] I think it’s wrong insofar as like,
[00:49:59] I believe in God.
[00:50:00] But I also,
[00:50:02] I think that there is,
[00:50:03] like any worldview,
[00:50:04] it contains a multitude,
[00:50:06] and deserves to be teased out.
[00:50:09] I’m interested in like,
[00:50:10] figuring out what the implicit religion of modernity is.
[00:50:13] But I, yeah,
[00:50:14] of course I recognize that I come at it with an angle,
[00:50:16] but I hope that,
[00:50:17] I don’t know,
[00:50:18] I hope the humanistic part of the angle
[00:50:20] comes to the forefront
[00:50:22] and that I keep any priggishness in check,
[00:50:25] or at least I should.
[00:50:26] Yeah, I mean,
[00:50:27] I think the religion of modernity
[00:50:28] is a religion that doesn’t recognize itself as such.
[00:50:32] And that’s part of the problem,
[00:50:34] I think.
[00:50:35] And I am,
[00:50:36] I should say,
[00:50:36] I am very sympathetic to this enlightenment desire
[00:50:40] to throw off these arbitrary customs
[00:50:42] and liberate our minds and bodies.
[00:50:44] And you can draw a straight line
[00:50:46] from that awakening to these later revolutions
[00:50:50] in sexuality and gender and individual freedom.
[00:50:53] And those are good things.
[00:50:55] But I think part of what worries you
[00:50:58] is this trade-off.
[00:51:00] It is sort of what Nietzsche calls
[00:51:03] the terrifying death of God, right?
[00:51:04] Where we free ourselves from the constraints
[00:51:06] of yesterday,
[00:51:08] of established authority.
[00:51:09] But then that sort of puts society
[00:51:11] into a little bit of disequilibrium and chaos
[00:51:14] because we also lose some of those binding myths
[00:51:17] that serve as a foundation for our own persons
[00:51:20] and for our shared culture.
[00:51:23] And we’re sort of still living in the shadow
[00:51:27] of that disruption in many ways.
[00:51:29] I agree.
[00:51:29] I mean, I laugh sometimes.
[00:51:30] I’m an Episcopalian,
[00:51:32] and so I’m used to annoying everybody
[00:51:33] by being too middle of the road.
[00:51:35] I’ve annoyed,
[00:51:36] I’ve annoyed everybody.
[00:51:36] I’ve annoyed lots of conservative Catholics
[00:51:38] and I’ve annoyed,
[00:51:39] I just annoy everybody.
[00:51:40] But I do think with my extremely moderate
[00:51:43] Episcopalian hat on
[00:51:44] that it is precisely in kind of prudential moderation.
[00:51:50] Like, I think that freedom is great
[00:51:53] and also that being in community
[00:51:56] and bound to things greater than ourselves,
[00:51:58] these are both good things.
[00:52:00] And an ideal debate for me
[00:52:03] would be one that recognized
[00:52:04] that both of these things,
[00:52:06] are goods that like,
[00:52:08] in order to function in the world,
[00:52:10] we have to figure out how to rightly order
[00:52:12] rather than seeing,
[00:52:14] like seeing freedom as bad
[00:52:16] and authority as good or vice versa.
[00:52:19] I think both of those things are mistakes
[00:52:21] because both of them,
[00:52:22] both views kind of misrepresent the fact that
[00:52:25] we have these competing goods in being human.
[00:52:28] And sometimes being human is about working out
[00:52:30] what to do with that.
[00:52:32] Absolutely.
[00:52:32] And I love that you went there.
[00:52:33] And I think you maybe just clarified for me,
[00:52:35] one of the reasons,
[00:52:36] why I find a lot of solidarity with you as a thinker.
[00:52:39] I think we share a lot of overlapping concerns.
[00:52:42] And this book trudged up a lot of thoughts for me.
[00:52:45] I often have a difficult time
[00:52:47] categorizing myself as a political thinker.
[00:52:49] I’m not really a fan of isms
[00:52:50] and I don’t really fit neatly into any ideological box.
[00:52:55] And sometimes people I know call me a moderate
[00:52:57] or something like that.
[00:52:58] And I never liked that
[00:52:59] because what people usually mean by moderate is milquetoast.
[00:53:02] And I’m not that.
[00:53:04] I do have commitments.
[00:53:05] But on Sunday,
[00:53:06] deep level,
[00:53:07] I do see political life and social life
[00:53:09] as an attempt to live in this tension
[00:53:11] between the desire for order and progress.
[00:53:15] And that negotiation is impossibly difficult,
[00:53:19] but it is what’s required.
[00:53:20] And I think you’re exploring a related tension
[00:53:24] between individualism and collectivism,
[00:53:27] between the desire to assert ourselves
[00:53:29] and our individual freedom
[00:53:30] and this absolute need we have to exist
[00:53:32] as part of a self-transcendent collective.
[00:53:35] And I think the history,
[00:53:36] you lay out in the book
[00:53:37] is at least partly the history of that negotiation,
[00:53:40] which is really just a bloated way of saying,
[00:53:42] I think it’s a great book.
[00:53:42] And it was a pleasure to talk to you about it.
[00:53:45] Well, thank you so much.
[00:53:46] It was an absolute delight.
[00:53:47] Once again, the book is called
[00:53:48] Self-Made, Creating Our Identities
[00:53:50] from Da Vinci to the Kardashians.
[00:53:53] Tara Isabella Burton.
[00:53:54] Thank you.
[00:53:54] Thank you.
[00:53:55] Thank you for coming in.
[00:54:06] Eric Janikas is our producer.
[00:54:15] Patrick Boyd engineered this episode.
[00:54:18] Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
[00:54:20] And A.M. Hall is the boss.
[00:54:24] As always, let us know what you think.
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