Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.–Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosopher and Chief Instructor, Cambridge International Clown College and Brewery

Very bright young woman who used to work for me posted a note to Facebook saying, “Remind me again why I keep trying to be someone that isn’t me…” I think that’s the universal human condition in a lot of ways, but that’s a large part of the problem.

When I seek enlightenment, I turn to Bob Dylan or Hank Williams. I misquote both at times, but get the idea back. My comment to my friend was “Be yourself but decide how much of yourself you want to be.” I base that on the idea of strategic openness. I try to be the guy with no hidden agendas in my dealings with the world, but that doesn’t mean I want everyone to see everything about me at everytime. Quite the contrary…I say what I think but try to say it when it can be heard. I’m not Barrack Obama with a bully pulpit, and I’m not Bob Dylan with a mystic connection to the world. Dylan is notorious, of course, for saying what he thinks but not in a way that reveals him. There are far poorer role models. Anyway, I referred her to this peformance of one of his most optimistic songs (NOT) from Subterranean Homesick Blues — the Dylanesque version of It’s a Wonderful World.

Dylan being optimistic

There are a lot of Hank Williams songs that fit this problem. You can listen to his stuff and what you hear is total exposure of self, and yet there’s just that bit of shadow over in the corner. Watch the center, but your eye keeps being drawn to the darkness. If you listen to something like I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with You or There’ll be no teardrops tonight, you can feel the problems of concealing things that should be shown, and opening up the things that are best left in shadow. Well, he figured it all out pretty well…

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The problems of self awareness and self disclosure are pretty obvious in the legends surrounding the life and trials of Thomas More. More was something of a social climber and hatchet man for Cardinal Wolsey until Henry VII decided that More was too valuable to allow the Chancellor to keep. More tried very hard to live schizophrenically in the era of the King’s Great Matter–loyal to the king in all things save the divorce from Katherine. And, it should be noted, then withdrawing from public life, and refusing to comment until he was tricked by as supposed friend into a bit of self-revelation. Robert Bolt’s  A Man for All Seasons captures this problem marvelously. It can be read as an indictment for the thought police state, a descendant of Orwell and 1984. It can be read as a straight political indictment of totalitarianism. Or, and I think both the Paul Scofield and Charleston Heston films catch this well, it can be read as a existentialist commentary on the problem of being a good man in the normal world. More’s explanation of his behavior to the Duke of Norfolk feels a bit, on reflection, like being slammed against the wall and made to wake up and smell, not the roses, but the realities…

“Norfolk: Oh, confound all this…. I’m not a scholar, as Master Cromwell never tires of pointing out, and frankly I don’t know whether the marriage was lawful or not. But damn it, Thomas, look at those names…. You know those men! Can’t you do what I did, and come with us, for fellowship?

“More: And when we stand before God, and you are sent to Paradise for doing according to your conscience, and I am damned for not doing according to mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?“

(Personally, I’ve always found the trial in Bolt’s play to be exceptionally powerful; either the Heston or the Scofield versions are wonderful here, but Americans will seem to remember Moses, Ben Hur and Major Dundee when watching Heston. Either version is fine, but bear that in mind if watching Heston. Scofield is more Thomas and less hero, and that fits.)

More is struggling in the play and we struggle to be authentic yet live in the world. Well, life is a fatal experience. True, existential authenticity can lead to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or life; or possibly to Heidigger’s profound rejection of right, wrong, good and evil and embrace of what Sartre called nausea and H called being; or madness. Like Wittgenstein. In Kierkegaard — whom W regarded as the most profound thinker of the 18th century — there was a lot of madness or method; in Nietzsche, there’s a lot of madness and not much method; in Heidigger, there’s a lot of method to prove the best way is obfuscation; in Wittgenstein, there’s a lot of clarity disguised as madness and obfuscation.

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something — because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. — And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

I think Dylan has read a lot of Wittgenstein. Much of his work reads as does some of Wittgenstein at his most human. A lot of both of their work is about revelation — of reality, of language, of the gap between them, of self. At our most authentic, we are least self-aware; or perhaps at our most authentic, we are most self-aware. Or both. Or neither…

But if you say: “How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?” then I say: “How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?”

Dylan has the same problem — what is real, what is really real, what is true and how do we describe it. In Gates of Eden he finishes with this

At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreams/With no attempt to shovel a glimpse into the depths of what each one means./At times I think there are no words but these to tell what’s true/and there is no truth outside the gates of Eden.

Perhaps it’s unfair to add Kierkegaard here, but I think he summed it up well and with that sardonic compassion for mankind that undelies all his work, secular and religious. “Socrates says that the unexamined life is not worth living. I say that Socrates is wrong; the unexamined life is not lived.

I haven’t been writing a lot about politics per se. By most objective criteria, Barrack Obama has been a B- to B+ president. Yet, listening to bits and pieces of Mitt, Newt and Ricky the Dick, I realize that we’re living in a version of the end times where almost all the Republicans are on acid. I didn’t know acid came on IV drips. Birth control and transvaginal probes? Satan? Two dollar gasoline? Invade Iran? ARE THESE FUCKING PEOPLE TOTALLY INSANE? Corporations are people, my friends? Really — you said that. Really, you did. The trees are the right height? This is from the moderate conservative who now refers to himself as a “severe conservative?” Really, what the hell? Matt Taiibi nailed it, I think. He gets paid to write, so even though it seems oddly excessive, he does. And well. Me, I need inspiration. Still, this catches it for me:

Throughout this entire process, the spectacle of these clowns thrashing each other and continually seizing and then fumbling frontrunner status has left me with an oddly reassuring feeling, one that I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on. In my younger days I would have just assumed it was regular old Schadenfreude at the sight of people like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich suffering, but this isn’t like that – it’s something different than the pleasure of watching A-Rod strike out in the playoffs.

The two people on the stage the other night who are probably authentic are Santorum — who’s batshit crazy about social and international issues and only about a quarter not off the wall on economic issues — and Ron Paul whose radical libertarianism is economically batshit and whose foreign policy is nostalgicly batshit and who’s social views are distorted by lenses of time, place and race. But the other two…Jesus God.

Newt Gingrich is not just batshit crazy, he’s evil. He doesn’t mean to be, but in a Manichean world, he’s definitely on the dark side. For someone not a stupid man, he’s says and does profoundly stupid things. Of course, the howling mobs buy into what he says. Romney, on the other hand, is the total package of inauthenticity. I’ve had a lot of LDS friends over the years, and they’ve generally been pretty true to whom they were. Romney, not so much. Gingrich could no more do a Lean Six Sigma thing than I can swallow fire; Romney lives by that crap, inputs-process-output and doesn’t reflect on the results too much. For the human being, this is a sad thing. For the politician, it’s fatal. Honest efforts to change with times and new facts are hard enough to deal with — since the whole flip-flopping thing, the idea that the world could possibly be different than you thought at one point is beyond the ken of most politicians. Romney is hoist on his willingness to disavow his record and his common sense to try and score points with people who don’t like him. He’s a study in technocratic man trying to appeal to the worst elements of our nature. Good luck with that. Bolt’s More has a moment that reflects his view and captures mine and probably that of most thinkers on the problem of ethics and government.

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Anyway, I think that my friend really has nothing much to worry about. When you worry about whether or not you’re being true to yourself, you’re probably being true to yourself. It’s called conscience, and a person with a fully functioning conscience is never comfortable…but, they are fully alive. And, that’s worth it all…

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