Rather than leading us to a deeper, more meaningful life, this so-called happiness may be one more thing we don’t really need.
Tag: Authenticity
ESG and EDI initiatives remind me of the various English tests we used as a representation of one's English skills: I could get any student to pass the test, but it was really hard to give them the skills to get out of the airport.
The isolated individual is entirely unsatisfactory. Precisely because of a person’s social character, stable identities can only emerge in relationships with stable social contexts. Therefore, there is deep uncertainty about contemporary identity; it’s an identity crisis if you will.
"...to be educated is not to be in control or to master chance, it is to become more authentically who you are."
One may suggest that life either begins at birth or at conception, but neither option treats life very seriously. A more accurate yet more mysterious option might be “life continues through conception”.
A humble individual may be wrong but he must also feel bad about it. Even if one doesn’t feel bad about being wrong there is often real or imagined pressure to virtue signal; I may not feel bad that I was wrong, but I have to apologize as if I did.
An individual with IM occupies a reality in which one is comfortable with having more questions than answers - celebrates duly the answers she comes up with - but lives with a kind of confidence and faith that having questions is one essential part of being authentically human.
Without that inner circle of significant others, we're left with shallowness and a void: we're “known of,” but never truly known, even to ourselves.
A person who thinks of herself secretly as a completely autonomous self, with unlimited possibilities (for this concept is what society teaches), finds herself in an impossible situation.
If ... the function of organized religion turns out to be nothing more than to house justification, and canonize, the routines of mass society; if organized religion abdicates its mission to disturb individuals in the depths of their consciences, and seeks instead simply to “make converts” that will smilingly adjust to the status quo, then it deserves the most serious and uncompromising criticism.
Raymond Klassen - Ideals and Identities 