Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

Walter Benjamin once wrote that “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” He was thinking about art, photography, film, and the way technological reproduction changes our relationship to presence. But his insight now reaches far beyond art. Something similar is happening to the human person.

We live in an age where the self is not only lived, but reproduced. We appear as photographs, posts, profiles, opinions, reactions, preferences, brands, and curated fragments of personality. We do not simply communicate through media. Increasingly, we come to understand ourselves through the forms of mediation that surround us.

This is why consumerism today cannot be understood merely as buying too much stuff. It has moved deeper than material acquisition. Consumerism now shapes desire, attention, identity, and self-recognition. It does not simply ask us to purchase products. It invites us to become consumable.

I still think about an encounter I once had with Rosie, a young woman who appeared at my door in the middle of the night. What stayed with me was not merely the strangeness of the situation, but the unmediated quality of it. There was no audience, no profile, no performance, no curated identity. There were simply two people sharing a small portion of reality together.

That experience now feels rare because so much of contemporary life trains us to encounter one another differently. We often meet images before persons, profiles before conversations, performances before presence. Before another human being stands before us in the fullness of their vulnerability and mystery, we have often already encountered a version of them shaped for circulation.

This changes more than social interaction. It changes perception.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that we do not first encounter a neutral world and then assign meaning to it afterward. We inhabit a meaningful world from the beginning. Our bodies, habits, memories, relationships, and cultural surroundings shape what appears important, desirable, threatening, admirable, or possible. We are not detached minds looking out at reality from a distance. We are embodied beings already situated within patterns of perception.

This helps explain why consumer culture is so powerful. It rarely feels like coercion. It often feels like personal preference. A person scrolls through music, fashion, politics, fitness, travel, interior design, lifestyle advice, moral outrage, and curated success. Over time, certain images begin to feel attractive before we know why. Certain ways of living begin to feel desirable before we have reflected on them. Certain kinds of people appear enviable before we have asked whether their lives are actually good.

Desire does not arrive in us fully private and untouched. It is formed.

René Girard’s account of mimetic desire makes this especially clear. We often learn what to want by observing what others seem to want. Objects, lifestyles, identities, and ambitions become desirable not simply because of their intrinsic worth, but because they are charged with the desire of others. In earlier societies, these patterns of imitation were shaped by families, neighbourhoods, religious communities, and local traditions. Today, desire circulates at extraordinary speed through technological systems that reproduce images, moods, personalities, and aspirations on a mass scale.

This is one reason contemporary desire often feels unstable. People pursue goals intensely while remaining uncertain whether those goals emerged from conviction or absorption. They want things, but they do not always know where the wanting came from. They become fluent in aspiration while losing the capacity to discern whether their desires are rooted in reality, imitation, anxiety, or comparison.

The problem is not that all mediated desire is false. Human beings have always learned desire from others. We are imitative creatures, relational creatures, and social creatures. The deeper problem is that our environments now organize desire at a scale and speed that often outruns reflection. By the time we begin asking what we truly want, our attention may already have been trained elsewhere.

This is where Benjamin’s concern about reproduction becomes newly relevant. Mechanical reproduction detached the work of art from its singular presence in time and place. The aura of the original weakened as the image became endlessly reproducible. Today, the human person risks a similar detachment. We no longer exist only as embodied persons rooted in relationships, histories, communities, and places. We also exist as reproducible images of ourselves.

This reproducible self is what I have elsewhere called the avatar.

The avatar is not merely a profile picture or online identity. It is the socially distributable version of the self, the version that circulates independently of embodied presence. At first, this appears liberating. We can choose how we appear. We can edit, refine, frame, and present ourselves with astonishing control. We can build an identity, express a position, and make ourselves visible.

Yet gradually, the relationship reverses. At first, the person curates the avatar. Eventually, the avatar begins curating the person.

The shift is subtle. We speak in ways that are more compatible with reception. We emphasize opinions that circulate well. We interpret our experiences according to how they might appear to others. We select our moments not only by how they are lived, but by how they can be represented. We become increasingly aware of ourselves as objects of possible visibility.

This is not simple dishonesty. Most people remain sincere inside these systems. The problem is more delicate than hypocrisy. It is the fragmentation between lived presence and reproducible identity. A person may genuinely believe what they are saying and still find that their perception has been shaped by the demands of visibility, approval, circulation, and response.

This is why contemporary consumerism reaches so deeply into the self. Lifestyles become brands. Political commitments become aesthetic signals. Personality becomes optimized. Even vulnerability can become content. The self is not merely expressing itself. It is being formatted for reception.

Hannah Arendt helps us see the moral danger here. She worried that mass society weakens the forms of judgment and common sense necessary for sharing a world with others. Common sense, for Arendt, did not mean mere practicality. It meant the capacity to inhabit a shared reality with other people through judgment, plurality, and conversation.

Mass society undermines this capacity when people become easier to categorize than encounter. A person becomes a demographic, a consumer type, a political symbol, a market segment, a brand identity, or an ideological opponent. We meet the abstraction before we meet the person.

This is not only a political problem. It is a spiritual problem. To encounter another human being truthfully requires attention. It requires patience before mystery. It requires a willingness to let the other person interrupt our categories. But systems of mass mediation often move in the opposite direction. They sort, accelerate, classify, provoke, and simplify. They train us to respond before we have truly perceived.

The result is a world that feels emotionally crowded but relationally thin. We are surrounded by representations of others while often lacking the unstructured presence through which genuine recognition occurs. We know how to remain visible, but we are less sure how to remain present.

Artificial intelligence intensifies this concern, but it did not create it. Long before current debates about AI, corporate and algorithmic systems were already learning how to organize attention. Their intelligence is not personal consciousness, but adaptive optimization. Platforms learn which desires circulate, which anxieties hold attention, which images invite comparison, and which forms of expression produce engagement.

Human attention becomes the raw material.

This does not require a conspiracy. The process is more ordinary and more pervasive than that. Systems organized around growth, circulation, visibility, and engagement reshape the environments in which persons learn to perceive. Over time, we may begin to lose the ability to encounter reality without mediation. Silence becomes uncomfortable. Boredom becomes intolerable. Reflection weakens because attention rarely remains still long enough for deeper perception to emerge.

The answer is not simply to reject technology. Nor is it to romanticize some imagined past where human beings were pure, local, and unmediated. The question is not whether we can escape mediation entirely. We cannot. The question is whether we can recover forms of presence strong enough to resist being reduced by it.

Thomas Merton is helpful here because he understood contemplation not as escape, but as deeper contact with reality. The contemplative life is not a withdrawal from the world’s suffering. It is a transformed attentiveness to the world. For Merton, the danger was not involvement in ordinary life, but the loss of inward freedom. Without that freedom, the person becomes absorbed into systems of utility, performance, abstraction, and distraction.

Silence, prayer, friendship, conversation, art, exercise, meditation, worship, and unstructured presence all matter because they interrupt the constant pressure of mediated perception. They do not make us immune to social influence. They create enough distance for us to notice how we are being shaped.

Without such practices, consumerism expands inward until identity itself becomes consumable. We begin living toward circulation rather than relation. We confuse visibility with significance. We become responsive to signals while losing continuity across time.

Authenticity, then, cannot mean simply expressing whatever desire happens to arise within us. Desire itself has already been shaped. The deeper task is learning to discern where our desires come from, what they are making of us, and whether they lead us toward reality or away from it.

To become authentic in an age of self-consumerism is not to invent a more impressive identity. It is to recover the capacity for truthful presence. It is to become less governed by the avatar and more grounded in the embodied life that no image can fully reproduce. It is to resist the temptation to become a consumable self and instead become a person capable of attention, judgment, love, and continuity.

Perhaps that is why I still think about Rosie.

Her appearance at the door interrupted the entire logic of mediation. She did not arrive as a profile, a performance, a political symbol, or a reproducible image. She arrived as a person. The moment mattered because it was local, vulnerable, embodied, and unrepeatable. It could not be optimized. It could only be received.

That kind of encounter now feels strangely rare. And perhaps its rarity tells us something important about the kind of society we are becoming, and the kind of selves we must struggle to recover.