Can We Really Choose Who to Be?

Who we are is up for debate.

Photo by Kinga Howard on Unsplash

‘invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, / don’t swim in the same slough. / invent yourself and then reinvent yourself and / stay out of the clutches of mediocrity.’

So wrote Charles Bukowski, everyone’s favourite wastrel-poet (and there is some competition). His ‘No Leaders, Please’ exhorts the reader to ‘change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorise you.’ It is a call for radical independence, an attack on blind obedience to authority – an authority so oppressive, so determined to reduce us to members of some group that we must, like Proteus, shape-shift so often we can never be grasped. This makes Bukowski’s poem something of a liberal anthem, in the classical sense of the term: resist classification, resist labels. Per Gore Vidal: ‘To be categorised is to be enslaved.’

His ‘No Leaders, Please’ exhorts the reader to ‘change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorise you.’

Of course, behind this idea is the belief that we can invent ourselves. And it is far from clear that this is the case. For we are shaped by our social conditions in childhood and adolescence and only later warp or embellish that shape by our free choices. Even in adulthood, we are influenced by those around us to a great degree. The Harvard professor David McClelland has suggested that 95 percent of our success (or failure) in life can be put down to the five people we spend the most time with (which isn’t, by the way, to urge you to treat people as means to ends).

If we simply consider how people behave in groups, we can see in stark terms how easy to influence we are. In a famous study, the researcher Solomon Asch presented his participants with a picture of three lines of various lengths. He then asked them to pick the shortest line. It was laughably easy to do this; but unknown to the participants Solomon had invited a handful of actors to take part in the study, too, and these actors self-confidently declared that the shortest line was, not in fact, the shortest line. A large number of the participants, in the study’s various manifestations, chose to go along with what the actors said rather than give the right answer.

If we simply consider how people behave in groups, we can see in stark terms how easy to influence we are.

So we are not so independent. We care what others think and what we think of us, and change accordingly. Connected to this is the notion of the ‘looking-glass self’, developed in 1902 by Charles Horton Cooley. This is a theory that suggests we form our self-image based on how we think others see us, and what we think they feel about us. For Charles, we are mirrors reflecting reflections, trapped in an endless hall of social perception and judgement. If everyone around us treats us as jaw-droppingly beautiful, the chances are that we will see ourselves as jaw-droppingly beautiful. On the other hand, if they treat us as an utter pain in the neck, we will likely see ourselves as a burden and a bother.

Our modern preoccupation with identity betrays our confusion about the extent to which we are independent. For it is common for us at one and the same time to blame our failings and the flaws in our character on outside circumstances, stress our group identity or identities and assert our autonomy. I do not think that inconsistency or even paradox has to be a problem, by the way. (‘Contradiction,’ wrote Simone Weil, ‘is the criterion of the real’.) After all, we accept, or at least act as if we have free will, but also acknowledge that we are moulded by outside events. But can our twin emphases on our independence and dependence really sit so comfortably beside one another? I am not so sure they can.

Our modern preoccupation with identity betrays our confusion.

We may be shaped by our surroundings, but surroundings change, and their influence on us may want as we grow older. Someone living through Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the transformation of Soviet Russia by Lenin, Stalin and sundry other crackpots might no longer recognise the context in which she was shaped. But those are very anomalous cases; and at any rate culture is far more robust and deeply rooted than we tend to think. So however radical we think ourselves to be, the basis of much of what we are will always spring from our surroundings, and insofar as we accept ourselves – while appreciating, no doubt, that there is quite a bit of room for improvement – we must to some extent accept those surroundings, too. Few of us can throw stones at our culture for long with much zeal. Our culture made us and continues to make us. If we harbour resentment towards it, then we must to some degree harbour it towards ourselves. Hence the view of the Machiavelli and de Tocqueville scholar and Havard professor Harvey Mansfield that progressives have a ‘loathing for themselves … fanatical penitentialism.’

But we do change, even if our power to invent ourselves is limited. And there are ways we can take control of the story of who we are. But if others do not consent to who we wish ourselves to be, then we will still be liable to end up frustrated or isolated. Psychologists talk about ‘self-concept’, who we believe ourselves to be, and set this against who others believe us to be (or who we believe others believe us to be). We must negotiate with those others if we are to reach a place where who we think we are and who others think we are are more or less in line. Without the consent of others in our project of selfhood, we are doomed to become individualistic selves, expressing ourselves exclusively on the internet, where we can to a large extent control others’ perceptions, or underground, which by definition is on the fringes of social life. In all likelihood, we will be unhappy.

Without the consent of others in our project of self-assertion, we are doomed to be individualistic selves.

It gets more difficult with time to negotiate ourselves with others. ‘Coming out’ describes at one and the same time the mental darkening and seclusion mixed up with having a sense of self that is wildly different from who others think we are, and leaving that tension unresolved (understandably) for a long period of time. In the best of all worlds, we would keep each other in the loop, chiefly through our actions, which tend to be a far better guide to who we are and what we think than what we say (and perhaps believe) are our beliefs. There are good reasons why we may be wary of doing this, as I have alluded to; but there are other, more prosaic reasons why this does not happen, and one of them is our growing separateness and the availability of various weak forms of affirmation on the internet. It is easy for us to play at being different people, to try on identities, or, even if we are authentic, to hide in public and express ourselves online, in private. Being in the world – the real, social world – isn’t always easy.

With so much control, we find ourselves with a choice: do we want to be individualistic selves or consensual ones? That little word ‘consensual’ compresses the idea that individualism here is not being set against a total loss of self in the sea of other people’s desires, like someone in a mob. Nor does it imply an uncritical obedience to the authority of a culture which may not accept us fully. Rather, I am suggesting that there is a space between independence and dependence, between our needs and wants and those of others, between personal fulfilment and the fulfilment of others, between a self-respect that we generate ourselves and a respect earned through our encounters with others. These are not in opposition: to a great extent, if you like, what is good for the hive is good for the bee. In individual and social life, there exists the possibility of harmony.