Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

by Barbara Ehrenreich

Today we take it for granted that inside the self we present to others, there lies another, truer self, but the idea was still fresh in the 1780s when Jean-Jacques Rousseau announced triumphantly: I am forming an undertaking which has no precedent, and the execution of which will have no imitator whatsoever. I wish to show my fellows a man in all the truth of nature; and this man will be myself. Myself alone. I feel my heart and I know men. I am not made like any of the ones I have seen; I dare to believe that I am not made like any that exist. If I am worth no more, at least I am different.4 Megalomania, or the proud claim of a rebellious political thinker? Contemporary thought has leaned toward the latter; after all, Rousseau was a major intellectual influence on the French Revolution, which, whatever its bloody outcome, was probably the first mass movement to demand both individual “Liberté” and “Fraternité,” or solidarity within the collective. There is something bracing about Rousseau’s assertion of his individual self, but the important thing to remember is that it was an assertion—no evidence was offered, not that it is easy to imagine what kind of evidence that might be. As historian John O. Lyons put it, the self was “invented.”