We have so many hearts. Start to believe you understand your intentions, and you will cease to expand.
I can understand experiencing authenticity through symbolic gestures. The Mickey mouse aesthete you mention above likely links these symbols to internal emotional experiences. The outward expression of these things is likely their effort at conveying the flavor of their amygdala.
Maybe they wish to express a will to stay young at heart. Often what someone says aloud is what they want to be true. Maybe they are fighting a difficult battle to hold onto some emotional disposition of their youth. Maybe they let go and are in denial.
Of course, we will interpret their symbols through our own lenses without learning to withhold judgement until we better understand their personal context, and maybe more importantly--the way they intended for it to be understood--and further, determine why they intended it to be understood in that manner to begin with.
Self is endlessly nuanced, and the nuance continuously splinters and evolves.
This process gets you closer to the heat of what a person "is."
Same goes for self. Honesty breeds awareness. Awareness escalates multiplicatively as our capacity for self analysis and sincerity in self awareness improves.
The most important quality you could have in psychoanalysis is honesty, and the cleverness to discover the lies you tell yourself to uphold an image or prevent pain.
Almost always, fear is the limiting factor.
Always, the ways we warp our state of decisional balance to maintain a stealthy lie prevent us from growing in awareness and joy.
Anne Carson, Madeline Miller, and E. Dickenson all note the nature of their genius to be garden variety honesty in so many words across their respective bodies of work. I have met folks of a rabid intellect who stunt themselves with a lack of self awareness. IQ is a silly metric. It says very little about one's capacity for awareness.
At any rate.
Modern aesthetes push pretty deep into the world of passive expression and symbols. It can be interpreted as a kind of language. I think generally, folks are self aware that they are not a literal goth girl or whatever.
Any cookie cutter identity ultimately limits us, as we are massively more complex than "southern punk girl," or what have you.
Getting slightly off topic--I think the most threatening ideas of self we can maintain are those that flatter us. Particularly those relating to our intellect or capability. A knowledgeable person cosplaying knowledgeable is less likely to learn. I see this phenomenon with professionals often. They do not wish to be interpreted as having holes in the awareness of their field. But ask 100 phd level physicists about the nature of light and the double slit experiment. A lot of folks flat out do not understand the double slit experiment and offer muddled conceptions of light itself. There is a defensive reaction that prevents self awareness in many. Its explained by neuroscience.
A recent study on chimpanzees (focused on their capacity for accurately predicting elapsed time) showed that the chimps brain activity changed dramatically after repeatedly being proven correct. When we solve a puzzle, we are evolutionarily primed to believe in that solution. Even if it is a mediocre one. We shift into a flow state and the frontal cortex is not engaged in great depth--as when we are encountering a new problem to solve and operating fully from a state of active decisional balance.
The state of active decisional balance implies interfacing with the short term memory in a heightened state of focus, and studies link certain related mental postures to the storing of data in long term domains.
It took around 1000 incorrect guesses before the chimps would return to a state of active decisional balance and attempt to better understand the problem they were presented with.
Studies suggest that as far as learning goes, complex domains like playing a piano require around a decade of intentional engagement before flow state / auto-pilot will be driven by instincts informed enough to compete. Of course, its not a binary. Both states are useful for different goals. And this is off topic anyway :P Happy to drop sources if anyone would like. Specious present chimpanzee should bring up the referenced study. Flow state vs frontal cortex will bring up a flurry of papers on the subject. There are a few very recent studies of flow state.
Thanks for reading and thanks for the post. Needed some electricity in my brain this morning lol.
If you haven't read Walter Benjamin's "The Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," you should. It is highly enlightening on this topic. Authenticity has much more to do with preserving the potential to find lost, disguised, or unnoticed strata of meaning or value in objects than with anything to do with autopoietic identity. One can make a "perfect" reproduction of la Giaconda, but we continue to house the original (somewhere) in the Louvre because of the possibility that previously unnoticed technical values might be discovered in the future that are only transmitted by the authentic original, values that cannot be transmitted by our copies because we were not aware of them. An inauthentic Fendi bag may look to all appearances exactly like an authentic one but eventually reveal itself to be made of cheap materials that fray and wear before an authentic one would. Again, its technical values are only revealed once we can see a quality (durability) to which we were at first blind.
Hello everyone! This is my very first post here, last night I finally downloaded and subscribed to Substack specifically because of Curt and his YouTube channel.
While I am a layman in science, I have loved astronomy all my life, I am fortunate in that my town in Mexico has a teeming science community. Say for instance, through the years, I could go to a local bar on a Saturday late afternoon, bump into a group of professional astronomer friends there, and with beers in hand talk about neutrinos changing flavors, or Active Galactic Nuclei, or the mechanism of supernova collapse into a singularity.
While I don't drink anymore, nowadays I can go to my neighborhood store, and if the store is calm with few customers (especially the graveyard shift, I'm what you'd call a night owl) I'll strike up conversations with the employees, and as it turns out, we end up talking about the Double Slit, or Algebraic Rings, or the difference between Schmidt-Cassegrain and Matsukov telescopes. These are students, working their way through university in my town, the science institute is within walking distance from here.
But enough about that! From the comment I think I am replying to, by "iirises", this insight is one of many worth pausing and mulling over, but this one takes something that has previously been somewhat fuzzy to me, and managed to focus and crystallize it:
"A knowledgeable person cosplaying knowledgeable is less likely to learn."
There is a strong sense of Eastern Philosophy in this observation, the idea of how to take in, one must first become empty, rings absolutely true; the concept of how to learn and grow, "one must take the path of humility" - to paraphrase TS Eliot - "humility is endless".
It is no coincidence that my favorite episodes of TOE, the ones that I end up returning to over and over again, are the ones where this sense of humility is palpable, the guests who have embraced this at some deep, fundamental level.
To name two: Jacob Barandes and Ted Jacobson.
Anyway... thank you Curt for compelling me to "take the plunge", so to speak, to pop my head into this community, for making it easy by choosing a corner of the internet like this one, instead of all the other bloated social media platforms that I'm actively trying to avoid, you all know which ones, no names are necessary.
Can I tell you a little bit about just how cool my town is?
The spot with my favorite espresso in town is frequented by several astronomers.
A few months ago, the barista introduced me to an older gentleman from the astronomy institute, don Manuel Alvarez. We started talking, and to my astonishment, it turns out this man and his team were the creators (or founders) of a completely new field of astronomy in the late-80s or early-90s, Asteroseismology!
Their first subject was the obvious one: the Sun, but they had to track it for something like 36 continuous hours, I think it was, so they set up telescopes at several spots around the Northern Hemisphere. Then they had enough data to... I suppose it's a slew of Fourier Analysis. And thus, they made the very first detections of solar quakes.
Solar earthquakes... like a headache in the stomach.
Then to my delight, I suddenly realized... "Mr. Alvarez, do you have three sons? I know all three of them!" Also scientists. One of them, twenty years ago, made the best local craft beer I have ever had outside of Europe. But I didn't know their dad was co-creator of Asteroseismology. Funny bit: the one who made beer as a hobby, ever since high school his nickname was "El Físico", and his younger brother was "El Fisiquito" (the diminutive).
The city is Ensenada, in Baja California. There are several large science institutes or departments in town, including Physics, Astronomy and Oceanology, working closely with the nearby, sister institute of Scripps in San Diego.
Like with Hilo, Hawaii for the Keck, here in Ensenada we have the HQ for the telescopes in the Sierra De San Pedro Mártir, about a 3 hour drive south of town, then slowly up the mountain.
Twice I've been up there in the Astronomical Village, stayed in one of the cabins; one night years and years ago I even got to hang out with the guys in the 1.5 meter telescope, while they were observing Cepheid Variables in Andromeda.
Ok, I don't wanna turn this into a longer rant.
Science helped make my town shine like a jewel.
Oh my god, do I love science.
Anyways, here I am, and thank you, Curt.
EDIT: It bears mentioning that I have been recommending your program to friends in the local scientific community. I tell them about how Penrose hesitated to get technical about the quaternions, but you told him to go right ahead and off the deep end of the pool, and how Sir Roger reacted as if he's not quite used to getting this sort of go-ahead in an interview.
That little snapshot usually gets their attention.
Curt, what a marvellous piece. I’ve followed your work at a respectful distance, curious but not captured. This one held me. There’s something refreshing in its plain risk. It does not try to impress so much as to reveal, and that is rarer than we admit.
Your pursuit of authenticity reminded me why the question matters. To examine life is essential, yes, but to live only in the echo of one’s examination is its own kind of paralysis. Montaigne knew this, and so did his cat, which watched him write as if to ask, Who are you performing for now? Your piece lives in that question. Not always answering, but circling it with good company.
Not certain I agree on the nature of expression itself. Even our most sincere moments perform. A tattoo, a confession, a staggered thought mid-essay and as you say it is all presentation but that’s not immediately disqualifying. Kahneman’s fast mind blurts it, Dennett’s intentional stance shapes it, and still we hope something true survives the crossing. I think it does. Sometimes.
What stays with me is that quiet hope underneath your rawness. The belief that even through the clutter and cleverness, a signal might get through. When it does, it sounds like understanding, and that sound is a kind of love. Failed or not, it is worth chasing.
Thank you for chasing it. I look forward to what follows.
Take an old hammer. The wooden handle is chipped and starting to split. The metal head is loose. What, in this case, is the authentic hammer? Where is the observer qualified to judge? Does the word "authentic" meaning anything we can all agree on? Or does it only have meaning when we apply it to a person? How is the authentic person different from the person as they are conscious of themselves, as they report being? Possibly the word "soul" lingers behind "authentic".
I don’t think I believe authentic self to be any sort of reduction or some pure entity under accumulating piles of experiential sheets.
If there is an authentic self, it’s whatever you feel now. In birth, you aren’t a blank slate. Already, you carry dispositions. In the steady crawl of your life is an avalanche of alterations to the child you were. I cannot imagine the genetic dispositions to be any more meaningful than the thing we become in the onslaught of variables.
Authentic doesn’t inherently mean “true,” and “true” is a complicated word.
Even if you practice heightening your awareness for decades, always fighting to get closer to “true,” you can never be certain you have claimed it. Like dividing by two endlessly in hopes of colliding with zero. Even in a thunderbolt of sudden clarity—you will never know how far it was or if you were at the ground floor of yourself for certain.
I think there is one exception to this.
But I don’t think truth is so important. Sense of self does not have to be true to be real. We are a bouquet of emotion and bioelectric language confined to the frontal cortex and all connecting functionality—a single cell in a measurement machine that repeatedly measures and renders portraits of the universe itself in wild abstraction—tiny bolts of lightning that dart like dolphins or sperm cells along the optic nerve or ophthalmic nerve—here translated from tiny lightning bolts to a chemical language, back to tiny lightning bolts and chemicals all over again in a game bioelectric, chemical telephone wherein small mechanisms of your body converse in languages you yourself could never comprehend. All that language shuffles into the grand hallucination of you—the mechanism that exists steer the measurement machine, that exists at the intersection of inbound measurements, the airport where all languages intersect in the short term memory, whose width—I expect—is better measured across language than time. And there you are, translating the full flood of an abstracted reality into languages you know—and languages you know without knowing. All the while communicating with whatever animal stalks the accumulation of domains and triggers instincts—that kicks in when you enter a flow state—that drives your car so you can daydream about your silly frontal cortex things, like—why am I conscious?
Probably because a measurement machine built of a conscious, bioelectric watershed of language requires a kind of Valet to aim the measurement machine and inform the deep, roiling intellect that can calculate billions upon billions of things at once and provide you with a flurry of helpful memories, emotions, related data of all sorts. memory, as with all these things, really can be understood as a language. A regurgitated translation of a translation stored long ago. You respond with your own languages—often action, or by thinking, straining for more invisible and then unknown pictures, emotions, patterns of connected dots that flicker between domains you yourself can never see like the ghosts of constellations in the sky of an incomprehensible entity that is you, and somehow is not you—wildly more capable, but less autonomous, maybe. Like an echo, almost. Always responding. An echo, but with more autonomy than an echo. Like a kind of ping pong game that never ceases. The eyes measure the absence of light—and light, a bouquet of photons—each an excitation in a quantum field.
You measure, respond, and the language runs through you—
Excitations in a bioelectric field.
You and the brilliant ghost at the bottom of the ocean in your hearts. The mathematic phantom of the operation.
I’d say you exist to steer, and that without a Valet, the whole operation would be impossible. There must be a tool that exists at the intersection of language across the working memory—that collects data to flesh out all these many domains in the dark of us—in the inaccessible light of us. Without the frontal cortex, which seems to be our home, what would interpret, what would the body measure without a mechanism built to specialize in the selection process, built to gather data from a chaotic environment, and to engage in states of decisional balance imperative in the process of interfacing with the unknown and problem solving so as to create meaningful data to ferry, as intermediary between frontal cortex and the cellar strangeness where metaphor bows to a stellar unknown.
In my opinion, phenomenal consciousness as we know it, is really just an apparatus in a bioelectric watershed of language tasked with measuring, interpreting, and creating useful data to store. Something of a field agent. I suspect we are something of a hive.
Excitations in a bioelectric field.
So yeah. What is authentic LOL. It is too vague of a word—we would have to sharpen the word into a more specific question to reasonably interface with that kind of question.
To me, authentic speaks more to some alignment. An eclipse of intention and execution.
There is a phenomenon where people move away from sincerity in desire and allow themselves to be governed by some external influence. Your sister is cool. She loves Sailor moon. You prefer Inuyasha. You value the idea that she will think you are cooler if you lie and say, Sailor Moon is what you prefer. This is inauthentic. And we have taken a step away from our personal, subjective sense of desire.
I’ve seen people make lives of these choices. They become shells in a certain way. I call it “status sickness.” It’s particularly prevalent in professional settings. Compromise after compromise where we opt to value status over our true desire—it can dull your relationship with desire. Passion, willpower—these can atrophy readily.
I knew a producer with wild success for a while. He was deeply unhappy. He had no clue what he wanted. Very quiet. Seemed unsure of what to say. I picked his brain about this for a long time before coming to the conclusion that he just never listened to himself really. In our friendship even, he failed to understand what he wanted in the friendship, and instead took actions he deemed intellectually appropriate for deepening the friendship. It was an odd relationship. His life felt inauthentic to me.
On the contrary, I place a very high value on following the whims of my heart. If I feel like writing a poem, I do it. If I want to write a song, I do it. If someone seems curious in some way, I engage with them and see what comes of it. I think that to me, this is what authenticity means. Serving yourself rather than serving whatever soulless batch of choices comprise the path toward the acquisition of status. The Western World is certain of the value of that status. But what is it?
Something alien. Bloodless. Heartless. Frankly useless. The whole world can believe you are the greatest of your generation, and it will have no meaning to you. Less by far than to them. I’d say this is why we see billionaires with everything entire nations could ever want engaging in attention seeking activities on a grand scale. Status is hollow. Once acquired, it can still only be experienced second hand. And this is because status only looks real from the outside. The experience of status is limited to whoever bestows it. The recipient just feels empty and confused, and suddenly aware that being on top of a mountain is boring—nothing in any direction. The sights are nice at first. But climbing mountains is interesting. But there is no more mountain left to climb.
I think the only meaningful pursuit, and the one point of absolute self and authenticity is whatever happens to us when we are dancing. There are many ways to dance, but if you can do it with every cell of your heart, you might become the apex of whatever you are. In a trillion years of evolution, with minds 1000 times the speed and capacity of ours in this day, we will never move away from this simple truth and closer to divinity. Maybe we understand the universe better. DNA philosophy becomes startling. The mind feels like not such a mystery. Maybe we’ve evolved wings. And so we fly around with our great big minds and understand things 1231% better than our ancestors, the humans.
Maybe our conversation is better. Or maybe not. Maybe we know too much of our counterparts, and the exploration of peers becomes unbearable as we already understand them in great clarity. We move the goalposts on intellect, but we go nowhere. There are still questions without answers. There is still the madness of existence in a wildly strange and cold cosmos, where life is a weapon of mass creation and the mouths devour mouth—and somehow, from which an amygdala capable of producing adoration and love bloomed in the minds of mammals. Either as a platonic ideal, or happy accident of the biological imperative of closeness.
No matter how far you go, the beautiful thing, the perfect thing, the thing that makes us keep going no matter what horror we uncover—
always, my authentic self is happiest when dancing wildly. What else is there but to vibrate to the rhythm of an airborne, phononic translation of a deeply feeling artists amygdala, surrounded by a few dozen others doing the same.
Maybe whenever we go, it will feel something like that. A single cell eternity. Maybe there is no ocean floor in our hearts. And where we go, we go forever.
How can we stop being what we keep becoming in every second?
I threw my attempt at answering the hard problem of consciousness in there. I think it’s a solid answer, but curious if anyone else thinks so. I’ll post a full write up on the hard problem at some point, there’s a good bit of depth to that opinion with solid support. Been wanting to post it somewhere for a bit. I’ll have my book out either this upcoming summer or next spring. It’s poetry but deals with physics and neuroscience a good bit.
Wayyyyy too much for me to respond to here and now (juggling other things) ... but one thing you wrote jumped out at me ... "To me, authentic speaks more to some alignment. An eclipse of intention and execution."
When I read that, I had an immediate flashback to Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell in the 'Power of Myth' interview, particularly when Campbell said that he didn't think so much that it was 'truth' we are searching for, but rather an experience where our inner life becomes in sync with the external world ... in other words, a religious-mystic, aesthetic-transcendent, profoundly moving experience of being alive.
And that cascaded into another memory... the first time I watched Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk, I was unprepared, and I cried like a baby at the end. Soon afterward, I exchanged a few emails with her, asking for permission to let my seminar students here in Japan translate her talk. I hadn't realized that not only the talk, but her book had already been translated into several languages.
My academic background was in applied linguistics, but my undergrad was in biology, and that was about the same time I climbed Wittgenstein's ladder without a parachute and explored the implications of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. The downshot — I've come to believe that we can only refer to that flow state from either a past memory of it, or in anticipation. Once we enter that union of 'self and other' and then try to identify it, the identifying 'we' and 'other' have become separated.
I guess that's one reason I love improvisational aspects of jazz so much ... but also the structure of 'good' song writing in that it prepares a bed, anticipates or remembers those moments of transcendence and include the immediate audience and/or environment in the musical experience.
I also occasionally follow the Ponerology Substack (on the intersection between psychopathy and politics) and Dr. Ramani's podcasts, increasingly focussing on how to identify and deal with various kinds of pathological narcissists in one's personal life.
Living as an ethnic minority in Japan for 43 years, I've come increasingly to believe tribal narcissism (not just nation-states, but also sports fans, followers of a particular artist or genre, etc.) is one hell-of-a-muddy mix of genetic predispositions and provisional social constructs. And here I am, expected to lead a 2 hour workshop next Sunday at the local ward office on 'Identity'. Will have to walk a very thin line, if at all, regarding the implications of an impending unique 'digital identity' being rolled out world-wide.
I enjoyed the read, and I have lots to say here, but even more on my plate at the moment.
I don't feel it's a reference to some constant, unchanging self or soul, necessarily. I do feel, sometimes, when I'm at my best, that I am aligned, in some way. A bit like how iron responds to the presence of a magnet. Most of the time, everything is jumbled up: my head wants one thing, my heart another, and my (capacious) gut a third, for example. And mostly that doesn't matter at all. But sometimes they all get in line, and I feel a sense of moral clarity that's normally absent. I would describe the things I do then as 'authentic'.
but I suppose 'earnest' might equally apply. Although 'earnest' conveys a sense of difficulty, of being 'earned' so to speak. That has its own value. But the 'authentic' thing for me: in those moments, which are few, there is no difficulty whatsoever. It's clear, limpid.
You define authentic in terms of specific alignment of threads in consciousness that you feel represent you authentically. So if you say, "I am authentically..." something you mean "this is who I think I am when I'm in one particular conscious condition." I think this is the best we can do. But it does say that your authenticity is to be judged by you, subject to your conscious experience. Is that what we want "authentic" to mean, when someone uses the word? What would it mean for that conscious experience of yours to be non-authentic? Where are we drawing our criteria for what's authentic from? From what an authentic Hermes bag is compared to a cheap fake? Then you'd be saying "this experience of myself is authentic, compared to other ways I experience myself." What makes one experience authentic compared to another? It does presuppose there is some standard drawn from outside your consciousness. Some ideal you have, drawn from commercial beer slogans--"be all you can be"? Where else can we draw them from, in a secularized culture? Then the Mickey Mouse costume doesn't seem so misplaced.
How can my authentic not be different from your authentic?
all fair points... on your last question: only if the magnet is the same, so to speak. And, on that, I haven't the slightest idea whether it is (which would be like god, I suppose, although I am not religious).
You are reduced to calling on god-like agents better able than us to make certain judgments. But if we dismiss the possibility of such agents I think such judgments have to be dismissed at meaningless. We must dismiss authenticity as a meaningless concept. That's what I really believe.
'that is what I really believe' - you're being ironic? Always hard to tell in text like this... either way, where are you getting that belief from? On the substantive point, not sure if there's an 'agent' exactly. Not sure about anything tbh. But a 'personal' agent, nope.
Authenticity is supposed to be about being your true self and not about being true to yourself or 'telling it like it is'. The scenarios that you describe are either cop-outs or people trying to find their true self and falling prey to hedonistic interpretations.
But being your true self isn't always about others. It's about knowing when to protect your boundaries and when and how much to let them be permeable. Focus too much on others, regardless of your motives, and eventually you burn up.
I was in college in the late sixties, a tumultuous cultural time, especially for young Americans. I was only the second of my four siblings to graduate from high school and the first to attend college. War protests, Black Power, the Feminist Movement, Gay Pride, etc. roiled traditions and families. I remember vividly my beloved mother (my only parent) telling me, in my opposition to the Vietnam war, that "no one gets to choose their war." Her husband and her two brothers served in WWII, and I understood the historical context of her comment, but I could not disagree with it more. Personal agency can be suppressed, even outright denied, but one’s right to agency is inviolate. The Declaration and The Constitution make it so.
So many express frustration about what to do with our current state of affairs. So much at times seem overwhelming. I could elaborate my own thoughts in lengthy prose but drawing upon my history, and particularly the results of last night's election results, let me offer these few words: LIVE YOUR GOODNESS. In exercising your franchise to vote, in expressing yourself in political discourse, etc., in dealing and identifying with others who choose different ways to live from you, LIVE YOUR GOODNESS. None of us is going anywhere. Is there anything better to have in common than this imperative? Our "common good" is precisely that--maximizing the goodness we all can offer and share. Call it “woke” if you must. Just keep awake to all of us, including the ignored working underclass that constitutes the MAGA base and that Trump repulsively and shamelessly exploits.
I'm breathing better today than yesterday before the result came in. Trump ran in 2016 not to hold office (he never expected to win) but to burnish his brand. Last night his brand was savaged, and for all the right authentic reasons.
I think what’s important is the process of knowing yourself. When you start to value your subjective experience, you get closer to the paradox of identity. By acting on that question you find it’s not an easy thing to answer. So knowing oneself cannot be removed from knowing the world. If it becomes a return to natural philosophy.
This is spot on, and in alignment with French's recent NYT article on "transparency" (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/opinion/trump-corruption-zelensky-johnson-biden.html ) and its amoral and perverse exploitation by Trump and MAGA. Why value authenticity for its own sake? There's much about humanity to celebrate and perhaps more to disparage. Real truth (earnestness, integrity, moral fiber, etc.) involves the capacity to know how to distinguish what to celebrate from what to disparage. So, one can, like Trump, be shamelessly corrupt and endlessly bamboozling with pride. This is something to celebrate if not worship? Really? This upside-down, unthinking, unreflective, amoral mindset is the heart of rot in the GOP. And it must be resisted and challenged, every day. Authentic freedom-loving souls must heed the call.
Michael, your sincerity is obvious about our odious leader/s, but one might make the argument that there currently is no lesser evil to root for. anymore, in terms of running/ ruining this country.
That said, I'd change a few items in your sentences above:
"This upside-down, sideways, unthinking, script-reading, unreflective and unseeable in mirrors, amoral to highly immoral and ritualistically-inclined evil mindset is the rotten center (and not heart because it's no longer discernable from feigned concern) of the corrupted and collusive GOP and DNC fake party system and its actors. And this mindset must be resisted and challenged, every day. Authentic freedom-loving souls must heed the call to think and discern truth from lie, and act as sovereign individuals and independent communities and not participate in the staged dueling and dualism of political theater."
Actually, I am less cynical after realizing the posturing of pols and the polls of the press are mostly predetermined and serve the same side for an agenda. Proponents and controlled opposition both get us there where they want us to be, divided and hostile, because too many have become emotionally invested in the Red v. Blue drama. Meanwhile, the Agenda gets advanced and we're facing full-on fascism and a techno-bleak future, if we survive.
It's freeing to realize we're lied to about nearly everything, and there is nothing authentic in politics, and dare I say public life? But as individuals and/or smaller communities working out what we consider problems, what to do about them, and then trying solutions, we might encounter some realness and meaning without being badly used and co-opted by name players wearing partisan jerseys, sure, but who've sworn fealty to a unified Agenda in their clubs, chambers, and lodges.
Politics and agenda and strategy-setting is a long game that knows it can outlast our lifetimes. We can be savvy and see the game for what it is, though, before sidestepping it and constructively doing for ourselves and snowballing our efforts bigger. You and I may have different issues or problems we're passionate about, and that's fine. Best for all of us, though, if we don't play into the hands of manipulative, prevaricating, professional poseurs who serve unelected bosses who've set out and agreed upon what the future will be at the end of this current game, despite our rooting for one team over the other.
I was in college in the late sixties, a tumultuous cultural time, especially for young Americans. I was only the second of my four siblings to graduate from high school and the first to attend college. War protests, Black Power, the Feminist Movement, Gay Pride, etc. roiled traditions and families. I remember vividly my beloved mother (my only parent) telling me, in my opposition to the Vietnam war, that "no one gets to choose their war." Her husband and her two brothers served in WWII, and I understood the historical context of her comment, but I could not disagree with it more. Personal agency can be suppressed, even outright denied, but one’s right to agency is inviolate. The Declaration and The Constitution make it so.
So many express frustration about what to do with our current state of affairs. So much at times seem overwhelming. I could elaborate my own thoughts in lengthy prose but drawing upon my history, and particularly the results of last night's election results, let me offer these few words: LIVE YOUR GOODNESS. In exercising your franchise to vote, in expressing yourself in political discourse, etc., in dealing and identifying with others who choose different ways to live from you, LIVE YOUR GOODNESS. None of us is going anywhere. Is there anything better to have in common than this imperative? Our "common good" is precisely that--maximizing the goodness we all can offer and share. Call it “woke” if you must. Just keep awake to all of us, including the ignored working underclass that constitutes the MAGA base and that Trump repulsively and shamelessly exploits.
I'm breathing better today than yesterday before the result came in. Trump ran in 2016 not to hold office (he never expected to win) but to burnish his brand. Last night his brand was savaged, and for all the right authentic reasons.
He’s a product of his social environment. A product is hard to change. A social environment is a more complex thing to change, but behaves somewhat more predictably, and involves sincere progress.
It’s brutal to be a human and know 25,000 are starving every day. 50 million slaves, many dead before 20. Knowing the wealthy of the world have no interest in these things. And that the hoarded resources cannot be used. Wealth buys only wealth at a point. It’s insanity. Breaks my heart. But this is the nature of status. Desperate and grasping, absolutely certain of its experiential reality. But there is no experience of status. It’s empty. It’s a kind of sickness.
I think advocating for blue collar workers and speaking for the starving and the slaves when we have a chance of reaching something is the best we can do right now. The anger is so real, but also a hindrance to tactical thinking. Not that tactics tend to matter in these small interpersonal exchanges in huge ways. I have to believe they do matter though.
Think of a flower and phototropism.
Imagine being one cell tasked with facing the flower at the sun. You can’t. Best you can do is face the light and find joy in it. Hope that the other cells come to face the light as well. In the case of the flower, they do.
And just like that, a single cell in a peony can steer an incomprehensible god across the sky in pursuit of warmth. It’s not much, but it’s a metaphor that I find comforting. Stay strong, despair is proof of your will for a better world. Carrying that torch is the greatest thing we can do. We didn’t let the fire go out. For now, maybe that’s enough. The kids are smart as shit these days. Here’s to a steady, intergenerational effort at dissolving the pipelines of hate ❤️🔥
To iirises: I don't believe Trump is simply a victim of his social environment and all he's doing can be excused by that reality. That belief robs him (and others, even in vastly different circumstances) of the agency to change and to better themselves--a belief that once damaged, always damaged and immune from healing. Trump is a pathologically over-compensating human being. He wears that affliction as a gold badge of honor. I thought Nixon was a tragic figure. Trump surpasses him by light years and I have no confidence that he will change his stripes or his trajectory. I think he dreamt as a 9 year old to never be less rich than he already was (and I believe at that age he was already a millionaire). He and his followers are, at their best and at the least, a vital teaching moment for all our youth, their parents and all the rest of us. So much can be learned from bad examples. There lies my hope.
My old man was such an example, and I chose not to duplicate his tragedy.
I don’t think he’s victim. I don’t excuse him either. I just don’t think there is anything useful to think or say of that man which might translate to a positive shift in the world. The damage is done, and deescalations of that damage are all we really have. I am trans. I have been impacted by all of this rhetoric. Not emotionally, but in losing a friend to a pipeline which pushed him to change his perception of me. I mentor a lot of girls in the community who need advice and help. The younger folks are having an awful time emotionally behind closed doors. Seeing a similar thing happen in my Latinx friends, who are feeling that same aura of fear and loathing in their communities. If you have meaningful insight into political tactics I’m all ears, always.
I think he is a train of a man spinning a plastic steering wheel and continuing on down the same tracks as ever. That guys internal roots are so deep they’re probably on fire.
I think privilege in gross capacities robs folks of their ability to grow and develop. If you’re born with everything and told you’re a Demi-god, the impetus to become something better is not so strong. I had a pretty rough time as a teenager and 20 something and it’s honestly a wonder my back hasn’t broken from my passion to become something meaningful. I think society is a kind of strainer. Whatever variables went into creating trumps mentality are ultimately undying. I see trump as a symptom of a broader culture sickness. Abundance tends to breed entitlement. Adversity tends to breed empathy, the details beyond basic observations like this are nuanced and complex.
I don’t think trump will ever change. Certainly not now. He’s awful. Entitled. Lacks ethics. Takes quite a lot of dark money which he cannot spend, nor can his children spend it, nor his children’s children.
It’s baffling. I think grotesque wealth belongs in the dsm-5. It contains all the trappings of a personality disorder, not that I think the officially recognized disorders are platonic ideals so much as commonly tangled wires.
I was in college in the late sixties, a tumultuous cultural time, especially for young Americans. I was only the second of my four siblings to graduate from high school and the first to attend college. War protests, Black Power, the Feminist Movement, Gay Pride, etc. roiled traditions and families. I remember vividly my beloved mother (my only parent) telling me, in my opposition to the Vietnam war, that "no one gets to choose their war." Her husband and her two brothers served in WWII, and I understood the historical context of her comment, but I could not disagree with it more. Personal agency can be suppressed, even outright denied, but one’s right to agency is inviolate. The Declaration and The Constitution make it so.
So many express frustration about what to do with our current state of affairs. So much at times seem overwhelming. I could elaborate my own thoughts in lengthy prose but drawing upon my history, and particularly the results of last night's election results, let me offer these few words: LIVE YOUR GOODNESS. In exercising your franchise to vote, in expressing yourself in political discourse, etc., in dealing and identifying with others who choose different ways to live from you, LIVE YOUR GOODNESS. None of us is going anywhere. Is there anything better to have in common than this imperative? Our "common good" is precisely that--maximizing the goodness we all can offer and share. Call it “woke” if you must. Just keep awake to all of us, including the ignored working underclass that constitutes the MAGA base and that Trump repulsively and shamelessly exploits.
I'm breathing better today than yesterday before the result came in. Trump ran in 2016 not to hold office (he never expected to win) but to burnish his brand. Last night his brand was savaged, and for all the right authentic reasons.
"I know my current existing state is one of polluted, covetous ugliness."
In the 3+ years I've been following you, there's been no distinguishable evolutionary growth within "Curt Jaimungal". The Truth lessens suffering and increases contentment. It does this by revealing that which is false and taken to be true. This delusional state of taking that which is false as true, is the source of all suffering.
I've been showing you for >3 years that THOUGHT ITSELF is that which is false.
Now you have interviewed Elan Barenholtz, who is a PhD level academic who is saying the same thing.
Do you live in a state of polluted, covetous ugliness, or is that an exclusively conceptual state that has no intrinsic connection with your true Self (the Tao that is not measured by thought)?
The status quo; the trajectory of your channel, isn't lessening your suffering, is it?
Could your channel present THE final concluding theory and then flip into Curt conducting the experiment that verifies or refutes the theory? What do you have to lose? Polluted, covetous ugliness apparently.
Otherwise your channel is turning into a place where people come to watch Curt chase his own tail.
I'd say that a statement like "[I exist in a state of] polluted covetous ugliness," is one of the hardest emotional hurdles to overcome. Particularly for a person whose most frequent human interactions are distorted by chasms in balance of power.
Here he is an intelligent content creator interfacing with an uninformed and often haughty mass of content consumers. He exists on a pedestal in these interactions, because placed their by social circumstance. Its an uncomfortable pedestal that warps expectations.
In interviews, he is speaking to specialists who live lives hyper focusing on some niche in a capacity that creates an imbalance of power that disadvantages Curt. The relationship is almost student teacher. There is nothing wrong with this. Its not a competition. They both know this. But psychologically, we are primed to interpret these relationships in unfortunate ways. It can take a bit of labor to humble yourself before a population of fans who are already primed to imagine the interviewer as nothing more than a catalyst for the true intellect in the room. We all want to be seen for our capability when it is hard fought.
And in interviews, he must ask questions which make him look ignorant. And when he is sincerely ignorant, learning means exposing the details of where his knowledge stops and starts to hundreds of thousands of viewers, many of whom were brought up conditioned to believe showing traces of ignorance to be a cardinal sin or something.
When you live with these kinds of social power imbalances, it becomes quite difficult to avoid understandings of the world that are perverted by concepts of 'value' and 'status' relating to depth in understanding.
It breeds a covetous spirit. But if self aware, that spirit can be transcended. It is so very hard to be honest about your ugly qualities. But once you are, progress starts. And the escalation of self awareness is a hard train to stop.
Aesthetic is as aesthetic does.
We have so many hearts. Start to believe you understand your intentions, and you will cease to expand.
I can understand experiencing authenticity through symbolic gestures. The Mickey mouse aesthete you mention above likely links these symbols to internal emotional experiences. The outward expression of these things is likely their effort at conveying the flavor of their amygdala.
Maybe they wish to express a will to stay young at heart. Often what someone says aloud is what they want to be true. Maybe they are fighting a difficult battle to hold onto some emotional disposition of their youth. Maybe they let go and are in denial.
Of course, we will interpret their symbols through our own lenses without learning to withhold judgement until we better understand their personal context, and maybe more importantly--the way they intended for it to be understood--and further, determine why they intended it to be understood in that manner to begin with.
Self is endlessly nuanced, and the nuance continuously splinters and evolves.
This process gets you closer to the heat of what a person "is."
Same goes for self. Honesty breeds awareness. Awareness escalates multiplicatively as our capacity for self analysis and sincerity in self awareness improves.
The most important quality you could have in psychoanalysis is honesty, and the cleverness to discover the lies you tell yourself to uphold an image or prevent pain.
Almost always, fear is the limiting factor.
Always, the ways we warp our state of decisional balance to maintain a stealthy lie prevent us from growing in awareness and joy.
Anne Carson, Madeline Miller, and E. Dickenson all note the nature of their genius to be garden variety honesty in so many words across their respective bodies of work. I have met folks of a rabid intellect who stunt themselves with a lack of self awareness. IQ is a silly metric. It says very little about one's capacity for awareness.
At any rate.
Modern aesthetes push pretty deep into the world of passive expression and symbols. It can be interpreted as a kind of language. I think generally, folks are self aware that they are not a literal goth girl or whatever.
Any cookie cutter identity ultimately limits us, as we are massively more complex than "southern punk girl," or what have you.
Getting slightly off topic--I think the most threatening ideas of self we can maintain are those that flatter us. Particularly those relating to our intellect or capability. A knowledgeable person cosplaying knowledgeable is less likely to learn. I see this phenomenon with professionals often. They do not wish to be interpreted as having holes in the awareness of their field. But ask 100 phd level physicists about the nature of light and the double slit experiment. A lot of folks flat out do not understand the double slit experiment and offer muddled conceptions of light itself. There is a defensive reaction that prevents self awareness in many. Its explained by neuroscience.
A recent study on chimpanzees (focused on their capacity for accurately predicting elapsed time) showed that the chimps brain activity changed dramatically after repeatedly being proven correct. When we solve a puzzle, we are evolutionarily primed to believe in that solution. Even if it is a mediocre one. We shift into a flow state and the frontal cortex is not engaged in great depth--as when we are encountering a new problem to solve and operating fully from a state of active decisional balance.
The state of active decisional balance implies interfacing with the short term memory in a heightened state of focus, and studies link certain related mental postures to the storing of data in long term domains.
It took around 1000 incorrect guesses before the chimps would return to a state of active decisional balance and attempt to better understand the problem they were presented with.
Studies suggest that as far as learning goes, complex domains like playing a piano require around a decade of intentional engagement before flow state / auto-pilot will be driven by instincts informed enough to compete. Of course, its not a binary. Both states are useful for different goals. And this is off topic anyway :P Happy to drop sources if anyone would like. Specious present chimpanzee should bring up the referenced study. Flow state vs frontal cortex will bring up a flurry of papers on the subject. There are a few very recent studies of flow state.
Thanks for reading and thanks for the post. Needed some electricity in my brain this morning lol.
love the sushi comment lol
+1 xD
Kurt,
If you haven't read Walter Benjamin's "The Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," you should. It is highly enlightening on this topic. Authenticity has much more to do with preserving the potential to find lost, disguised, or unnoticed strata of meaning or value in objects than with anything to do with autopoietic identity. One can make a "perfect" reproduction of la Giaconda, but we continue to house the original (somewhere) in the Louvre because of the possibility that previously unnoticed technical values might be discovered in the future that are only transmitted by the authentic original, values that cannot be transmitted by our copies because we were not aware of them. An inauthentic Fendi bag may look to all appearances exactly like an authentic one but eventually reveal itself to be made of cheap materials that fray and wear before an authentic one would. Again, its technical values are only revealed once we can see a quality (durability) to which we were at first blind.
This is interesting. Thank you!
I'm a big fan.
Hello everyone! This is my very first post here, last night I finally downloaded and subscribed to Substack specifically because of Curt and his YouTube channel.
While I am a layman in science, I have loved astronomy all my life, I am fortunate in that my town in Mexico has a teeming science community. Say for instance, through the years, I could go to a local bar on a Saturday late afternoon, bump into a group of professional astronomer friends there, and with beers in hand talk about neutrinos changing flavors, or Active Galactic Nuclei, or the mechanism of supernova collapse into a singularity.
While I don't drink anymore, nowadays I can go to my neighborhood store, and if the store is calm with few customers (especially the graveyard shift, I'm what you'd call a night owl) I'll strike up conversations with the employees, and as it turns out, we end up talking about the Double Slit, or Algebraic Rings, or the difference between Schmidt-Cassegrain and Matsukov telescopes. These are students, working their way through university in my town, the science institute is within walking distance from here.
But enough about that! From the comment I think I am replying to, by "iirises", this insight is one of many worth pausing and mulling over, but this one takes something that has previously been somewhat fuzzy to me, and managed to focus and crystallize it:
"A knowledgeable person cosplaying knowledgeable is less likely to learn."
There is a strong sense of Eastern Philosophy in this observation, the idea of how to take in, one must first become empty, rings absolutely true; the concept of how to learn and grow, "one must take the path of humility" - to paraphrase TS Eliot - "humility is endless".
It is no coincidence that my favorite episodes of TOE, the ones that I end up returning to over and over again, are the ones where this sense of humility is palpable, the guests who have embraced this at some deep, fundamental level.
To name two: Jacob Barandes and Ted Jacobson.
Anyway... thank you Curt for compelling me to "take the plunge", so to speak, to pop my head into this community, for making it easy by choosing a corner of the internet like this one, instead of all the other bloated social media platforms that I'm actively trying to avoid, you all know which ones, no names are necessary.
I'm so glad to see you here and hear from you Juan
My pleasure as well, Curt, believe me.
Can I tell you a little bit about just how cool my town is?
The spot with my favorite espresso in town is frequented by several astronomers.
A few months ago, the barista introduced me to an older gentleman from the astronomy institute, don Manuel Alvarez. We started talking, and to my astonishment, it turns out this man and his team were the creators (or founders) of a completely new field of astronomy in the late-80s or early-90s, Asteroseismology!
Their first subject was the obvious one: the Sun, but they had to track it for something like 36 continuous hours, I think it was, so they set up telescopes at several spots around the Northern Hemisphere. Then they had enough data to... I suppose it's a slew of Fourier Analysis. And thus, they made the very first detections of solar quakes.
Solar earthquakes... like a headache in the stomach.
Then to my delight, I suddenly realized... "Mr. Alvarez, do you have three sons? I know all three of them!" Also scientists. One of them, twenty years ago, made the best local craft beer I have ever had outside of Europe. But I didn't know their dad was co-creator of Asteroseismology. Funny bit: the one who made beer as a hobby, ever since high school his nickname was "El Físico", and his younger brother was "El Fisiquito" (the diminutive).
The city is Ensenada, in Baja California. There are several large science institutes or departments in town, including Physics, Astronomy and Oceanology, working closely with the nearby, sister institute of Scripps in San Diego.
Like with Hilo, Hawaii for the Keck, here in Ensenada we have the HQ for the telescopes in the Sierra De San Pedro Mártir, about a 3 hour drive south of town, then slowly up the mountain.
Twice I've been up there in the Astronomical Village, stayed in one of the cabins; one night years and years ago I even got to hang out with the guys in the 1.5 meter telescope, while they were observing Cepheid Variables in Andromeda.
Ok, I don't wanna turn this into a longer rant.
Science helped make my town shine like a jewel.
Oh my god, do I love science.
Anyways, here I am, and thank you, Curt.
EDIT: It bears mentioning that I have been recommending your program to friends in the local scientific community. I tell them about how Penrose hesitated to get technical about the quaternions, but you told him to go right ahead and off the deep end of the pool, and how Sir Roger reacted as if he's not quite used to getting this sort of go-ahead in an interview.
That little snapshot usually gets their attention.
Wow! Thank you for sharing that Juan. I need to get more into astronomy :)
Curt, what a marvellous piece. I’ve followed your work at a respectful distance, curious but not captured. This one held me. There’s something refreshing in its plain risk. It does not try to impress so much as to reveal, and that is rarer than we admit.
Your pursuit of authenticity reminded me why the question matters. To examine life is essential, yes, but to live only in the echo of one’s examination is its own kind of paralysis. Montaigne knew this, and so did his cat, which watched him write as if to ask, Who are you performing for now? Your piece lives in that question. Not always answering, but circling it with good company.
Not certain I agree on the nature of expression itself. Even our most sincere moments perform. A tattoo, a confession, a staggered thought mid-essay and as you say it is all presentation but that’s not immediately disqualifying. Kahneman’s fast mind blurts it, Dennett’s intentional stance shapes it, and still we hope something true survives the crossing. I think it does. Sometimes.
What stays with me is that quiet hope underneath your rawness. The belief that even through the clutter and cleverness, a signal might get through. When it does, it sounds like understanding, and that sound is a kind of love. Failed or not, it is worth chasing.
Thank you for chasing it. I look forward to what follows.
Take an old hammer. The wooden handle is chipped and starting to split. The metal head is loose. What, in this case, is the authentic hammer? Where is the observer qualified to judge? Does the word "authentic" meaning anything we can all agree on? Or does it only have meaning when we apply it to a person? How is the authentic person different from the person as they are conscious of themselves, as they report being? Possibly the word "soul" lingers behind "authentic".
I don’t think I believe authentic self to be any sort of reduction or some pure entity under accumulating piles of experiential sheets.
If there is an authentic self, it’s whatever you feel now. In birth, you aren’t a blank slate. Already, you carry dispositions. In the steady crawl of your life is an avalanche of alterations to the child you were. I cannot imagine the genetic dispositions to be any more meaningful than the thing we become in the onslaught of variables.
Authentic doesn’t inherently mean “true,” and “true” is a complicated word.
Even if you practice heightening your awareness for decades, always fighting to get closer to “true,” you can never be certain you have claimed it. Like dividing by two endlessly in hopes of colliding with zero. Even in a thunderbolt of sudden clarity—you will never know how far it was or if you were at the ground floor of yourself for certain.
I think there is one exception to this.
But I don’t think truth is so important. Sense of self does not have to be true to be real. We are a bouquet of emotion and bioelectric language confined to the frontal cortex and all connecting functionality—a single cell in a measurement machine that repeatedly measures and renders portraits of the universe itself in wild abstraction—tiny bolts of lightning that dart like dolphins or sperm cells along the optic nerve or ophthalmic nerve—here translated from tiny lightning bolts to a chemical language, back to tiny lightning bolts and chemicals all over again in a game bioelectric, chemical telephone wherein small mechanisms of your body converse in languages you yourself could never comprehend. All that language shuffles into the grand hallucination of you—the mechanism that exists steer the measurement machine, that exists at the intersection of inbound measurements, the airport where all languages intersect in the short term memory, whose width—I expect—is better measured across language than time. And there you are, translating the full flood of an abstracted reality into languages you know—and languages you know without knowing. All the while communicating with whatever animal stalks the accumulation of domains and triggers instincts—that kicks in when you enter a flow state—that drives your car so you can daydream about your silly frontal cortex things, like—why am I conscious?
Probably because a measurement machine built of a conscious, bioelectric watershed of language requires a kind of Valet to aim the measurement machine and inform the deep, roiling intellect that can calculate billions upon billions of things at once and provide you with a flurry of helpful memories, emotions, related data of all sorts. memory, as with all these things, really can be understood as a language. A regurgitated translation of a translation stored long ago. You respond with your own languages—often action, or by thinking, straining for more invisible and then unknown pictures, emotions, patterns of connected dots that flicker between domains you yourself can never see like the ghosts of constellations in the sky of an incomprehensible entity that is you, and somehow is not you—wildly more capable, but less autonomous, maybe. Like an echo, almost. Always responding. An echo, but with more autonomy than an echo. Like a kind of ping pong game that never ceases. The eyes measure the absence of light—and light, a bouquet of photons—each an excitation in a quantum field.
You measure, respond, and the language runs through you—
Excitations in a bioelectric field.
You and the brilliant ghost at the bottom of the ocean in your hearts. The mathematic phantom of the operation.
I’d say you exist to steer, and that without a Valet, the whole operation would be impossible. There must be a tool that exists at the intersection of language across the working memory—that collects data to flesh out all these many domains in the dark of us—in the inaccessible light of us. Without the frontal cortex, which seems to be our home, what would interpret, what would the body measure without a mechanism built to specialize in the selection process, built to gather data from a chaotic environment, and to engage in states of decisional balance imperative in the process of interfacing with the unknown and problem solving so as to create meaningful data to ferry, as intermediary between frontal cortex and the cellar strangeness where metaphor bows to a stellar unknown.
In my opinion, phenomenal consciousness as we know it, is really just an apparatus in a bioelectric watershed of language tasked with measuring, interpreting, and creating useful data to store. Something of a field agent. I suspect we are something of a hive.
Excitations in a bioelectric field.
So yeah. What is authentic LOL. It is too vague of a word—we would have to sharpen the word into a more specific question to reasonably interface with that kind of question.
To me, authentic speaks more to some alignment. An eclipse of intention and execution.
There is a phenomenon where people move away from sincerity in desire and allow themselves to be governed by some external influence. Your sister is cool. She loves Sailor moon. You prefer Inuyasha. You value the idea that she will think you are cooler if you lie and say, Sailor Moon is what you prefer. This is inauthentic. And we have taken a step away from our personal, subjective sense of desire.
I’ve seen people make lives of these choices. They become shells in a certain way. I call it “status sickness.” It’s particularly prevalent in professional settings. Compromise after compromise where we opt to value status over our true desire—it can dull your relationship with desire. Passion, willpower—these can atrophy readily.
I knew a producer with wild success for a while. He was deeply unhappy. He had no clue what he wanted. Very quiet. Seemed unsure of what to say. I picked his brain about this for a long time before coming to the conclusion that he just never listened to himself really. In our friendship even, he failed to understand what he wanted in the friendship, and instead took actions he deemed intellectually appropriate for deepening the friendship. It was an odd relationship. His life felt inauthentic to me.
On the contrary, I place a very high value on following the whims of my heart. If I feel like writing a poem, I do it. If I want to write a song, I do it. If someone seems curious in some way, I engage with them and see what comes of it. I think that to me, this is what authenticity means. Serving yourself rather than serving whatever soulless batch of choices comprise the path toward the acquisition of status. The Western World is certain of the value of that status. But what is it?
Something alien. Bloodless. Heartless. Frankly useless. The whole world can believe you are the greatest of your generation, and it will have no meaning to you. Less by far than to them. I’d say this is why we see billionaires with everything entire nations could ever want engaging in attention seeking activities on a grand scale. Status is hollow. Once acquired, it can still only be experienced second hand. And this is because status only looks real from the outside. The experience of status is limited to whoever bestows it. The recipient just feels empty and confused, and suddenly aware that being on top of a mountain is boring—nothing in any direction. The sights are nice at first. But climbing mountains is interesting. But there is no more mountain left to climb.
I think the only meaningful pursuit, and the one point of absolute self and authenticity is whatever happens to us when we are dancing. There are many ways to dance, but if you can do it with every cell of your heart, you might become the apex of whatever you are. In a trillion years of evolution, with minds 1000 times the speed and capacity of ours in this day, we will never move away from this simple truth and closer to divinity. Maybe we understand the universe better. DNA philosophy becomes startling. The mind feels like not such a mystery. Maybe we’ve evolved wings. And so we fly around with our great big minds and understand things 1231% better than our ancestors, the humans.
Maybe our conversation is better. Or maybe not. Maybe we know too much of our counterparts, and the exploration of peers becomes unbearable as we already understand them in great clarity. We move the goalposts on intellect, but we go nowhere. There are still questions without answers. There is still the madness of existence in a wildly strange and cold cosmos, where life is a weapon of mass creation and the mouths devour mouth—and somehow, from which an amygdala capable of producing adoration and love bloomed in the minds of mammals. Either as a platonic ideal, or happy accident of the biological imperative of closeness.
No matter how far you go, the beautiful thing, the perfect thing, the thing that makes us keep going no matter what horror we uncover—
always, my authentic self is happiest when dancing wildly. What else is there but to vibrate to the rhythm of an airborne, phononic translation of a deeply feeling artists amygdala, surrounded by a few dozen others doing the same.
Maybe whenever we go, it will feel something like that. A single cell eternity. Maybe there is no ocean floor in our hearts. And where we go, we go forever.
How can we stop being what we keep becoming in every second?
Ok, well. That escalated but I’m not upset lol.
I threw my attempt at answering the hard problem of consciousness in there. I think it’s a solid answer, but curious if anyone else thinks so. I’ll post a full write up on the hard problem at some point, there’s a good bit of depth to that opinion with solid support. Been wanting to post it somewhere for a bit. I’ll have my book out either this upcoming summer or next spring. It’s poetry but deals with physics and neuroscience a good bit.
Hello iirises,
Wayyyyy too much for me to respond to here and now (juggling other things) ... but one thing you wrote jumped out at me ... "To me, authentic speaks more to some alignment. An eclipse of intention and execution."
When I read that, I had an immediate flashback to Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell in the 'Power of Myth' interview, particularly when Campbell said that he didn't think so much that it was 'truth' we are searching for, but rather an experience where our inner life becomes in sync with the external world ... in other words, a religious-mystic, aesthetic-transcendent, profoundly moving experience of being alive.
And that cascaded into another memory... the first time I watched Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk, I was unprepared, and I cried like a baby at the end. Soon afterward, I exchanged a few emails with her, asking for permission to let my seminar students here in Japan translate her talk. I hadn't realized that not only the talk, but her book had already been translated into several languages.
My academic background was in applied linguistics, but my undergrad was in biology, and that was about the same time I climbed Wittgenstein's ladder without a parachute and explored the implications of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. The downshot — I've come to believe that we can only refer to that flow state from either a past memory of it, or in anticipation. Once we enter that union of 'self and other' and then try to identify it, the identifying 'we' and 'other' have become separated.
I guess that's one reason I love improvisational aspects of jazz so much ... but also the structure of 'good' song writing in that it prepares a bed, anticipates or remembers those moments of transcendence and include the immediate audience and/or environment in the musical experience.
I also occasionally follow the Ponerology Substack (on the intersection between psychopathy and politics) and Dr. Ramani's podcasts, increasingly focussing on how to identify and deal with various kinds of pathological narcissists in one's personal life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPsFZD6XSVw
Living as an ethnic minority in Japan for 43 years, I've come increasingly to believe tribal narcissism (not just nation-states, but also sports fans, followers of a particular artist or genre, etc.) is one hell-of-a-muddy mix of genetic predispositions and provisional social constructs. And here I am, expected to lead a 2 hour workshop next Sunday at the local ward office on 'Identity'. Will have to walk a very thin line, if at all, regarding the implications of an impending unique 'digital identity' being rolled out world-wide.
I enjoyed the read, and I have lots to say here, but even more on my plate at the moment.
Cheers from Japan.
I don't feel it's a reference to some constant, unchanging self or soul, necessarily. I do feel, sometimes, when I'm at my best, that I am aligned, in some way. A bit like how iron responds to the presence of a magnet. Most of the time, everything is jumbled up: my head wants one thing, my heart another, and my (capacious) gut a third, for example. And mostly that doesn't matter at all. But sometimes they all get in line, and I feel a sense of moral clarity that's normally absent. I would describe the things I do then as 'authentic'.
but I suppose 'earnest' might equally apply. Although 'earnest' conveys a sense of difficulty, of being 'earned' so to speak. That has its own value. But the 'authentic' thing for me: in those moments, which are few, there is no difficulty whatsoever. It's clear, limpid.
You define authentic in terms of specific alignment of threads in consciousness that you feel represent you authentically. So if you say, "I am authentically..." something you mean "this is who I think I am when I'm in one particular conscious condition." I think this is the best we can do. But it does say that your authenticity is to be judged by you, subject to your conscious experience. Is that what we want "authentic" to mean, when someone uses the word? What would it mean for that conscious experience of yours to be non-authentic? Where are we drawing our criteria for what's authentic from? From what an authentic Hermes bag is compared to a cheap fake? Then you'd be saying "this experience of myself is authentic, compared to other ways I experience myself." What makes one experience authentic compared to another? It does presuppose there is some standard drawn from outside your consciousness. Some ideal you have, drawn from commercial beer slogans--"be all you can be"? Where else can we draw them from, in a secularized culture? Then the Mickey Mouse costume doesn't seem so misplaced.
How can my authentic not be different from your authentic?
all fair points... on your last question: only if the magnet is the same, so to speak. And, on that, I haven't the slightest idea whether it is (which would be like god, I suppose, although I am not religious).
You are reduced to calling on god-like agents better able than us to make certain judgments. But if we dismiss the possibility of such agents I think such judgments have to be dismissed at meaningless. We must dismiss authenticity as a meaningless concept. That's what I really believe.
'that is what I really believe' - you're being ironic? Always hard to tell in text like this... either way, where are you getting that belief from? On the substantive point, not sure if there's an 'agent' exactly. Not sure about anything tbh. But a 'personal' agent, nope.
Authenticity is supposed to be about being your true self and not about being true to yourself or 'telling it like it is'. The scenarios that you describe are either cop-outs or people trying to find their true self and falling prey to hedonistic interpretations.
But being your true self isn't always about others. It's about knowing when to protect your boundaries and when and how much to let them be permeable. Focus too much on others, regardless of your motives, and eventually you burn up.
Curt is the Thomas of Aquino of our time ;) More seriously though, I couldn't agree more, very well written.
I was in college in the late sixties, a tumultuous cultural time, especially for young Americans. I was only the second of my four siblings to graduate from high school and the first to attend college. War protests, Black Power, the Feminist Movement, Gay Pride, etc. roiled traditions and families. I remember vividly my beloved mother (my only parent) telling me, in my opposition to the Vietnam war, that "no one gets to choose their war." Her husband and her two brothers served in WWII, and I understood the historical context of her comment, but I could not disagree with it more. Personal agency can be suppressed, even outright denied, but one’s right to agency is inviolate. The Declaration and The Constitution make it so.
So many express frustration about what to do with our current state of affairs. So much at times seem overwhelming. I could elaborate my own thoughts in lengthy prose but drawing upon my history, and particularly the results of last night's election results, let me offer these few words: LIVE YOUR GOODNESS. In exercising your franchise to vote, in expressing yourself in political discourse, etc., in dealing and identifying with others who choose different ways to live from you, LIVE YOUR GOODNESS. None of us is going anywhere. Is there anything better to have in common than this imperative? Our "common good" is precisely that--maximizing the goodness we all can offer and share. Call it “woke” if you must. Just keep awake to all of us, including the ignored working underclass that constitutes the MAGA base and that Trump repulsively and shamelessly exploits.
I'm breathing better today than yesterday before the result came in. Trump ran in 2016 not to hold office (he never expected to win) but to burnish his brand. Last night his brand was savaged, and for all the right authentic reasons.
Let's keep going.
I think what’s important is the process of knowing yourself. When you start to value your subjective experience, you get closer to the paradox of identity. By acting on that question you find it’s not an easy thing to answer. So knowing oneself cannot be removed from knowing the world. If it becomes a return to natural philosophy.
‘Know thy self’ as a mantra of self inquiry by way of Ramana Maharishi is the way Socrates meant to be applied. It’s a question rather than an answer.
This is spot on, and in alignment with French's recent NYT article on "transparency" (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/opinion/trump-corruption-zelensky-johnson-biden.html ) and its amoral and perverse exploitation by Trump and MAGA. Why value authenticity for its own sake? There's much about humanity to celebrate and perhaps more to disparage. Real truth (earnestness, integrity, moral fiber, etc.) involves the capacity to know how to distinguish what to celebrate from what to disparage. So, one can, like Trump, be shamelessly corrupt and endlessly bamboozling with pride. This is something to celebrate if not worship? Really? This upside-down, unthinking, unreflective, amoral mindset is the heart of rot in the GOP. And it must be resisted and challenged, every day. Authentic freedom-loving souls must heed the call.
Michael, your sincerity is obvious about our odious leader/s, but one might make the argument that there currently is no lesser evil to root for. anymore, in terms of running/ ruining this country.
That said, I'd change a few items in your sentences above:
"This upside-down, sideways, unthinking, script-reading, unreflective and unseeable in mirrors, amoral to highly immoral and ritualistically-inclined evil mindset is the rotten center (and not heart because it's no longer discernable from feigned concern) of the corrupted and collusive GOP and DNC fake party system and its actors. And this mindset must be resisted and challenged, every day. Authentic freedom-loving souls must heed the call to think and discern truth from lie, and act as sovereign individuals and independent communities and not participate in the staged dueling and dualism of political theater."
Actually, I am less cynical after realizing the posturing of pols and the polls of the press are mostly predetermined and serve the same side for an agenda. Proponents and controlled opposition both get us there where they want us to be, divided and hostile, because too many have become emotionally invested in the Red v. Blue drama. Meanwhile, the Agenda gets advanced and we're facing full-on fascism and a techno-bleak future, if we survive.
It's freeing to realize we're lied to about nearly everything, and there is nothing authentic in politics, and dare I say public life? But as individuals and/or smaller communities working out what we consider problems, what to do about them, and then trying solutions, we might encounter some realness and meaning without being badly used and co-opted by name players wearing partisan jerseys, sure, but who've sworn fealty to a unified Agenda in their clubs, chambers, and lodges.
Politics and agenda and strategy-setting is a long game that knows it can outlast our lifetimes. We can be savvy and see the game for what it is, though, before sidestepping it and constructively doing for ourselves and snowballing our efforts bigger. You and I may have different issues or problems we're passionate about, and that's fine. Best for all of us, though, if we don't play into the hands of manipulative, prevaricating, professional poseurs who serve unelected bosses who've set out and agreed upon what the future will be at the end of this current game, despite our rooting for one team over the other.
Miss P.
I was in college in the late sixties, a tumultuous cultural time, especially for young Americans. I was only the second of my four siblings to graduate from high school and the first to attend college. War protests, Black Power, the Feminist Movement, Gay Pride, etc. roiled traditions and families. I remember vividly my beloved mother (my only parent) telling me, in my opposition to the Vietnam war, that "no one gets to choose their war." Her husband and her two brothers served in WWII, and I understood the historical context of her comment, but I could not disagree with it more. Personal agency can be suppressed, even outright denied, but one’s right to agency is inviolate. The Declaration and The Constitution make it so.
So many express frustration about what to do with our current state of affairs. So much at times seem overwhelming. I could elaborate my own thoughts in lengthy prose but drawing upon my history, and particularly the results of last night's election results, let me offer these few words: LIVE YOUR GOODNESS. In exercising your franchise to vote, in expressing yourself in political discourse, etc., in dealing and identifying with others who choose different ways to live from you, LIVE YOUR GOODNESS. None of us is going anywhere. Is there anything better to have in common than this imperative? Our "common good" is precisely that--maximizing the goodness we all can offer and share. Call it “woke” if you must. Just keep awake to all of us, including the ignored working underclass that constitutes the MAGA base and that Trump repulsively and shamelessly exploits.
I'm breathing better today than yesterday before the result came in. Trump ran in 2016 not to hold office (he never expected to win) but to burnish his brand. Last night his brand was savaged, and for all the right authentic reasons.
Let's keep going.
He’s a product of his social environment. A product is hard to change. A social environment is a more complex thing to change, but behaves somewhat more predictably, and involves sincere progress.
It’s brutal to be a human and know 25,000 are starving every day. 50 million slaves, many dead before 20. Knowing the wealthy of the world have no interest in these things. And that the hoarded resources cannot be used. Wealth buys only wealth at a point. It’s insanity. Breaks my heart. But this is the nature of status. Desperate and grasping, absolutely certain of its experiential reality. But there is no experience of status. It’s empty. It’s a kind of sickness.
I think advocating for blue collar workers and speaking for the starving and the slaves when we have a chance of reaching something is the best we can do right now. The anger is so real, but also a hindrance to tactical thinking. Not that tactics tend to matter in these small interpersonal exchanges in huge ways. I have to believe they do matter though.
Think of a flower and phototropism.
Imagine being one cell tasked with facing the flower at the sun. You can’t. Best you can do is face the light and find joy in it. Hope that the other cells come to face the light as well. In the case of the flower, they do.
And just like that, a single cell in a peony can steer an incomprehensible god across the sky in pursuit of warmth. It’s not much, but it’s a metaphor that I find comforting. Stay strong, despair is proof of your will for a better world. Carrying that torch is the greatest thing we can do. We didn’t let the fire go out. For now, maybe that’s enough. The kids are smart as shit these days. Here’s to a steady, intergenerational effort at dissolving the pipelines of hate ❤️🔥
To iirises: I don't believe Trump is simply a victim of his social environment and all he's doing can be excused by that reality. That belief robs him (and others, even in vastly different circumstances) of the agency to change and to better themselves--a belief that once damaged, always damaged and immune from healing. Trump is a pathologically over-compensating human being. He wears that affliction as a gold badge of honor. I thought Nixon was a tragic figure. Trump surpasses him by light years and I have no confidence that he will change his stripes or his trajectory. I think he dreamt as a 9 year old to never be less rich than he already was (and I believe at that age he was already a millionaire). He and his followers are, at their best and at the least, a vital teaching moment for all our youth, their parents and all the rest of us. So much can be learned from bad examples. There lies my hope.
My old man was such an example, and I chose not to duplicate his tragedy.
I don’t think he’s victim. I don’t excuse him either. I just don’t think there is anything useful to think or say of that man which might translate to a positive shift in the world. The damage is done, and deescalations of that damage are all we really have. I am trans. I have been impacted by all of this rhetoric. Not emotionally, but in losing a friend to a pipeline which pushed him to change his perception of me. I mentor a lot of girls in the community who need advice and help. The younger folks are having an awful time emotionally behind closed doors. Seeing a similar thing happen in my Latinx friends, who are feeling that same aura of fear and loathing in their communities. If you have meaningful insight into political tactics I’m all ears, always.
I think he is a train of a man spinning a plastic steering wheel and continuing on down the same tracks as ever. That guys internal roots are so deep they’re probably on fire.
I think privilege in gross capacities robs folks of their ability to grow and develop. If you’re born with everything and told you’re a Demi-god, the impetus to become something better is not so strong. I had a pretty rough time as a teenager and 20 something and it’s honestly a wonder my back hasn’t broken from my passion to become something meaningful. I think society is a kind of strainer. Whatever variables went into creating trumps mentality are ultimately undying. I see trump as a symptom of a broader culture sickness. Abundance tends to breed entitlement. Adversity tends to breed empathy, the details beyond basic observations like this are nuanced and complex.
I don’t think trump will ever change. Certainly not now. He’s awful. Entitled. Lacks ethics. Takes quite a lot of dark money which he cannot spend, nor can his children spend it, nor his children’s children.
It’s baffling. I think grotesque wealth belongs in the dsm-5. It contains all the trappings of a personality disorder, not that I think the officially recognized disorders are platonic ideals so much as commonly tangled wires.
iirises,
I was in college in the late sixties, a tumultuous cultural time, especially for young Americans. I was only the second of my four siblings to graduate from high school and the first to attend college. War protests, Black Power, the Feminist Movement, Gay Pride, etc. roiled traditions and families. I remember vividly my beloved mother (my only parent) telling me, in my opposition to the Vietnam war, that "no one gets to choose their war." Her husband and her two brothers served in WWII, and I understood the historical context of her comment, but I could not disagree with it more. Personal agency can be suppressed, even outright denied, but one’s right to agency is inviolate. The Declaration and The Constitution make it so.
So many express frustration about what to do with our current state of affairs. So much at times seem overwhelming. I could elaborate my own thoughts in lengthy prose but drawing upon my history, and particularly the results of last night's election results, let me offer these few words: LIVE YOUR GOODNESS. In exercising your franchise to vote, in expressing yourself in political discourse, etc., in dealing and identifying with others who choose different ways to live from you, LIVE YOUR GOODNESS. None of us is going anywhere. Is there anything better to have in common than this imperative? Our "common good" is precisely that--maximizing the goodness we all can offer and share. Call it “woke” if you must. Just keep awake to all of us, including the ignored working underclass that constitutes the MAGA base and that Trump repulsively and shamelessly exploits.
I'm breathing better today than yesterday before the result came in. Trump ran in 2016 not to hold office (he never expected to win) but to burnish his brand. Last night his brand was savaged, and for all the right authentic reasons.
Let's keep going.
"I know my current existing state is one of polluted, covetous ugliness."
In the 3+ years I've been following you, there's been no distinguishable evolutionary growth within "Curt Jaimungal". The Truth lessens suffering and increases contentment. It does this by revealing that which is false and taken to be true. This delusional state of taking that which is false as true, is the source of all suffering.
I've been showing you for >3 years that THOUGHT ITSELF is that which is false.
Now you have interviewed Elan Barenholtz, who is a PhD level academic who is saying the same thing.
Do you live in a state of polluted, covetous ugliness, or is that an exclusively conceptual state that has no intrinsic connection with your true Self (the Tao that is not measured by thought)?
The status quo; the trajectory of your channel, isn't lessening your suffering, is it?
Could your channel present THE final concluding theory and then flip into Curt conducting the experiment that verifies or refutes the theory? What do you have to lose? Polluted, covetous ugliness apparently.
Otherwise your channel is turning into a place where people come to watch Curt chase his own tail.
Just stop
I'd say that a statement like "[I exist in a state of] polluted covetous ugliness," is one of the hardest emotional hurdles to overcome. Particularly for a person whose most frequent human interactions are distorted by chasms in balance of power.
Here he is an intelligent content creator interfacing with an uninformed and often haughty mass of content consumers. He exists on a pedestal in these interactions, because placed their by social circumstance. Its an uncomfortable pedestal that warps expectations.
In interviews, he is speaking to specialists who live lives hyper focusing on some niche in a capacity that creates an imbalance of power that disadvantages Curt. The relationship is almost student teacher. There is nothing wrong with this. Its not a competition. They both know this. But psychologically, we are primed to interpret these relationships in unfortunate ways. It can take a bit of labor to humble yourself before a population of fans who are already primed to imagine the interviewer as nothing more than a catalyst for the true intellect in the room. We all want to be seen for our capability when it is hard fought.
And in interviews, he must ask questions which make him look ignorant. And when he is sincerely ignorant, learning means exposing the details of where his knowledge stops and starts to hundreds of thousands of viewers, many of whom were brought up conditioned to believe showing traces of ignorance to be a cardinal sin or something.
When you live with these kinds of social power imbalances, it becomes quite difficult to avoid understandings of the world that are perverted by concepts of 'value' and 'status' relating to depth in understanding.
It breeds a covetous spirit. But if self aware, that spirit can be transcended. It is so very hard to be honest about your ugly qualities. But once you are, progress starts. And the escalation of self awareness is a hard train to stop.