AUTHENTICITY IS EVIL:

 Roger Scruton once remarked to me that, "if one is tempted to turn back to oneself, to encounter oneself, one immediately discovers that there's actually nothing there." When he said this, it filled me with horror. In fact, he meant that in the attempt to encounter oneself, one must epistemically isolate oneself, but the isolated self is an illusion, given that I am only I inasmuch as I am I-in-relation-to-You. 

Ideas sundered from the reality from which they're abstracted, especially those that orbit the chief fiction of the 'authentic self,' are at the very zenith of self-deception. Our declining civilisation is one that is in the grip of this illusory condition, which is accordingly expressed by every duped modern, from the teenager routinely taking 'selfies' to the trans-activist who declares his 'true identity' and consequently forces others to say things that both he and they know to be untrue. All such people run roughshod over reality in pursuit of the 'authentic self'--and it's obvious to any sane onlooker that, of course, there's actually nothing there. 

The perennial teaching of all wisdom traditions--one that was raised to the status of holiness by Christianity--is that self-actuation comes by self-forgetting and not by self-discovery. And the perfect overturning of this humanising truth by modernity is the ultimate proof both of our epoch's falsity and malevolence. All this stupidity and chaos is derived from starting one's intellectual quest from the wrong point of departure: with the illusion of the self rather than--like a child pointing and asking "what's that?"--with the (much more interesting) world out there. The person, of course, who gave this error philosophical respectability was Descartes, by whom we continue to be cursed.

The reason why, so often in my writing, I advocate hiking, riding, hunting, and foraging, and why I encourage the learning of real things, from the history of nations to the names of trees, is because I think we're all very unwell and such things are part of my prognosis. Now, I want to add archery to this list of treatments.

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