The authentic self is godlike. Our true thoughts and feelings shouldn’t be repressed behind the old-fashioned curtain of ‘manners’. We should ‘be real’ and disparage those who are ‘fake’. Our self is its own justification. What the self wants, it should have. What the self thinks, it should say. The innermost core of man’s nature, the deepest layers of his personality, the base of his ‘animal nature’, is positive in nature. These ideas, which seemed so radical in the Big Sur of the 1960s, have grown to become enormously prevalent today. The problem is they’re based on a premise that’s false.
...more
