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There is a strange tension in contemporary western culture. On the one hand we are bombarded with platitudes about how the good life consists of being free to be yourself, i.e. the postmodern ethic of self-actualization. On the other hand when your desires clash with who you actually are in reality and you for instance end up with body dysphoria, we are told that if you think people should be themselves, you are a horrible reactionary bigot and paradoxically get accused of not letting people be themselves. Ironically the same people who make such accusation often have little issue with telling bodybuilders on gear or transhumanists that they are insane and should accept their natural body (which is correct in my opinion, I'd just like them to extend this to gender related transhumanism as well).
I think a key to understanding this problem is that there is an unspoken assumption that your true self is primarily to be found in your desires. This is interestingly a complete inversion of the more negative view of the "passions" which most premodern Western thinkers had (both pagan and Christian). Traditionally passions are considered to be fleeting, unstable and for a good life one needs to learn how to control the passions lest the passions control you. I don't know much about eastern thought, but my superficial stereotype of Buddhism also includes a negative view of the passions. Much philosophical work has been done and is being done with regards to the question of what a self is or whether a self even exists and I will not make a judgment on that question in this comment, but at least I agree with the ancients that the passions are a particularly implausible and silly candidate for locating one's self.
This unspoken interpretation of self-actualization as maximally indulging ones passions is in my opinion the cause of much of the cultural woes of contemporary Western society. Passions being fleeting, unstable and insatiable, it is no coincidence that our culture is reaching ever sillier ways of actualizing ones true self. "The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing". Once we get people telling us that amputating perfectly healthy parts of their body is the only way they will ever be able to really be themselves or pursuing literal vampirism to extend oneself throughout time, we should maybe pause and think what on earth went wrong in our culture. I believe to recover from this madness we need to regain a sense of some sort of human nature and when our passions point at things that are at odds with human nature, one's true self is to be found in human nature and not in said passions. Things only get their beauty and meaning and identity from their place as a part of a meaningful whole. In other words, we need to recover the value of limits, moderation and propriety, but limits are anathema to a Left that seeks to emancipate us from all hierarchy and a Techno-Right that wants to move fast and break things.
From the Centuries of Meditations by Thomas Traherne:
"His Power bounded, greater is in might,
Than if let loose, ‘twere wholly infinite.
He could have made an endless sea by this,
But then it had not been a sea of bliss.
Did waters from the centre to the skies
Ascend, ’twould drown whatever else we prize.
The ocean bounded in a finite shore,
Is better far because it is no more.
No use nor glory would in that be seen,
His power made it endless in esteem.
Had not the Sun been bounded in its sphere,
Did all the world in one fair flame appear,
And were that flame a real Infinite
’Twould yield no profit, splendor, nor delight.
Its corps confined, and beams extended be
Effects of Wisdom in the Deity.
One star made infinite would all exclude,
An earth made infinite could ne’er be viewed:
But one being fashioned for the other’s sake,
He, bounding all, did all most useful make
And which is best, in profit and delight
Tho’ not in bulk, they all are infinite."
This was never the case. If you decided to be gun loving religious republican, you were never celebrated for your unique identity. As usual, it was word game since the beginning, where the only legitimate identity is the progressive one. Every other identity is unauthentic, performative and driven by false consciousness and internalized isms and phobias such racism, misogyny and whatnot. As James Lindsay said, activists share your vocabulary but not your dictionary. It goes with all other words including the words I used, but also words like ally, representation, violence, inclusion or even democracy and myriads of other words.
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As someone who has massively struggled with how I look in a non-trans way;
This could not be less true for me and my experiences. If you have problems with yourself aesthetically, you are roundly shamed for trying to get help in fixing them. Vanity is bad! And vanity operations and cosmetic surgery are superfluous! And shameful! You need to go to therapy to have some boring middle aged woman who could not be more removed from current culture talk at you until you agree there's nothing wrong with you just to make her shut up!
Becoming okay with being your ugly self is the ONLY option presented to you if you have non-trans related dysmorphia. Anything else and you're being shallow, you're being vain. And nobody cares what you look like! (This is the biggest lie of all time, I get treated MUCH MUCH better by randos ever since I fixed myself up and became beautiful.)
I dislike trans healthcare because if I had claimed to be trans, I would have been immediately shuttled off down a route of all the surgery and other interventions I wanted. But because I don't want to grow fried-egg man-tits and cut my dick off, I got nothing but being told to make peace with an ugly body I despised.
Yeah I was thinking mostly of trans stuff when I said that. I agree with you that our culture is very hypocritical and incoherent when it comes to this, which is the very tension I was trying to point out. Which is why the very sentence after the one you quote says:
I'm happy to add ugly men to that list (or ugly women when they can't frame their vanity as transgressive feminism trying to dismantle the patriarchy trying to control their sexuality or something like that). I have no clue what your personal struggles were of course, but I will say fixing some sort of obvious deformity or a scar or something to me is qualitatively very different than trying to look like another gender, trying to look half your age or trying to have cartoon action figure musculature or unnatural gigantic boobs or something. Depending on the specifics I might well still come down on the "make peace with the body you were given" side, but I have much more sympathy for somebody who feels insecure about some unattractive feature of their body and just wants to look normal, compared to people who want to look like a transhuman abomination.
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This is the one-sentence explanation, and it is both simple and correct.
The implied theory behind most 'authenticity' talk today is that you simply are your desires. No line can be drawn between the self and its desires.
It is probably worth reflecting at some point, actually, on how this outright contradicts pretty much every major spiritual tradition in the world. You are not your desires, and the more you follow them, the more you become a slave to them. Maybe an effortpost for another day.
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