The Dark Side of Self-Making
The gospel of radical self-creation distances us from our true selves.
To many, self-making is a gospel of liberation. You can become whoever you want to be. No matter who or how you were born, your race or class or gender or family, you can wipe the slate clean, determine your own destiny, become self-made. It’s the narrative at the heart of the myth of The American—the promise, as Frederick Douglass ringingly put it, that anyone could “make the road on which they had travelled.” It is the narrative with which so many of us have been inculcated from birth: that our “true” or “authentic” selves are derived from our internally-felt sensations or our creative powers, and that our lives ought to be a process of expressing and “manifesting” that reality, overcoming the social and communal obstacles that stand in our way. Life, in other words, is the process of becoming our best selves, while throwing off the shackles of social expectation.
At its best, the quintessentially modern narrative of self-making—one that has become more widespread and more robust in the Internet Age—can indeed be an avenue for freedom from both oppression and repression. But the narrative also has a darker side. As often as not, as it has played out since the advent of modernity, the gospel of self-making has been less about freeing individuals to choose their own destinies as about identifying a new aristocracy, just as exclusive as the old one. The sole difference in the new way of being is that it may be money, “style,” or “spirit”—as opposed to purely lineage—that creates the right to transcend society’s rules.
In the conception of self that emerged with the Renaissance, the self-creator was often perceived as nearly divine. The artist Albrecht Dürer, for instance, painted himself facing straight-on—a pose that had traditionally been reserved for Jesus Christ. His fingers were raised in a similar position as Jesus’ often were in portraiture but spelling out his own initials. At his death in 1528 an admirer sliced off a golden lock of his hair exactly as if it had been a saint’s relic. Such self-aggrandizement by an artist, a person of common birth, would have been unthinkable even decades earlier. But Dürer’s conscious cultivation of his own image (he spent so much time on those curls that contemporaries joked he might be too busy to take commissions) would have done a modern celebrity proud. And that is not coincidental. We are still contending with the energy unleashed at that time. The assault on aristocracy that characterized the early-modern centuries was supposed to usher in a heightened sense of equality (this was evident above all in the rhetoric surrounding the French Revolution), but the cult of self-making contains within it notions of intrinsic superiority even more acute than in the older aristocratic model. That sensibility accounts for much of the conceits of inequality that pervade our ostensibly democratic societies.
It is helpful to follow the evolution of these ideas on a wide historical time scale. It is as if, over several centuries, the possible variations inherent in “self-making” have at different moments revealed themselves, and the essentials of celebrity culture or social media-branding mirror conversations running from the Renaissance to Regency England to the Gilded Age.
In the Renaissance, humanist philosophers of an upwardly-mobile bourgeoisie envisioned personal merit as falling under the category of “true nobility.” One such philosopher, Poggio Bracciolini, born a mere apothecary’s son, argued that “true nobility” couldn’t be taught or earned but had to be innate. “It must be grasped by a kind of divine power and favor and by the hidden movement of fate, and cannot be gained by parental instruction,” he wrote.
This sense of the self-creator as possessed of special and unique personal power continued well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the Regency era, when celebrity-dandies like Beau Brummell pioneered the art of being famous for being famous, it was associated with the concept of ton: a word that literally means “manner” in French but which took on, in Regency England, a life of its own. Ton was—well—je ne sais quoi, the mysterious elegance that Beau Brummell had and that both would-be wealthy upstarts and boorish aristocrats did not.
Brummell (so fashionable and influential that, when he took to wearing beaver-skin hats, North America’s beaver population is said to have markedly declined) is a watershed figure in this trend. Having fallen out with his friend Prince George (later to be King George IV), Brummell, coming across him at a party, loudly inquired of an acquaintance, “Alvanley, who’s your fat friend?”
It was a cut from which aristocracy and monarchy never really recovered. Brummell had ton and Prince George didn’t—and the privileges of birth or blood couldn’t outweigh that essential fact.
The cult of self-making tends to split into two parallel narratives. In one (which is predominantly a European conception), self-making was available to a very particular, very special kind of person—a “natural aristocrat.” The phenomenon of “dandyism” is understood as an expression of this idea.
In the American variant, self-making was something anybody could do so long as they put in sufficient amounts of grit and elbow-grease. But if that vision was ostensibly more egalitarian, the figure of the self-made man made it all the easier to dismiss anyone who wasn’t that. After all, if hard work meant you could become the next Andrew Carnegie, say, then surely anyone who wasn’t a multi-millionaire just wasn’t trying hard enough. Many proponents of self-making actively discouraged the expansion of social services to ameliorate the condition of the poor, on the grounds that it would discourage them from applying some good old-fashioned elbow grease—and, on a broader scale, that it would stymie the progress of evolution, which allowed the best human beings to survive and prosper while killing off weaker individuals. As the Social Darwinist philosopher Herbert Spencer (wildly popular in the late 19th century) put it: “If [people] are sufficiently complete to live….it is well that they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best that they should die.”
In our own era, the gospel of self-making has become nearly universal. Anyone with a smartphone—85 percent of America’s population—can create a digital avatar, a filtered selfie, a personal brand, in order to capitalize on the dizzying potential of the attention economy, which often rewards aesthetic curation with economic success. Self-help doctrines like “manifesting” promise that anyone can connect to the energy of the universe and that that energy can be harnessed to help us achieve our goals in this life.
But we have still inherited the twin noxious assumptions of the self-making tradition: that our innate special personalities are the source of our power (and that they set us apart from the ordinary, the “basic,” or the “sheeple”), and that if we have failed to live our best lives, to be our best selves, it’s because we didn’t work hard enough, didn’t want it badly enough. The demand to create our own selves for cultural and financial success alike has transformed us all into commodities: as we desperately attempt to prove that we—and we alone—are worthy originals, demigods with the right to determine our own lives. We have forgotten the truth that Douglass knew, that, “Properly speaking, there are in the world no such men as self-made men,” that we are all reliant upon others, on our families and communities and the vast shared polity of language and story, to understand ourselves.
No amount of anti-aging technology, digital filtering, or confident “manifesting” can change that. Being fully human demands recognizing that we are not, in fact, gods. Even the most successful or self-determined among us remains vulnerable to, and subject to, other people—who make us, even as we make them. The story of who we really are is more complicated than, and far richer than, the fantasy of who we most want to be.
Tara Isabella Burton is the author of three novels, including the forthcoming Here In Avalon, and two non-fiction books, including Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians (Hachette, 2023), from which this essay is adapted with permission.
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“ To many, self-making is a gospel of liberation. You can become whoever you want to be. No matter who or how you were born, your race or class or gender or family, you can wipe the slate clean, determine your own destiny, become self-made. It’s the narrative at the heart of the myth of The American—the promise, as Frederick Douglass ringingly put it, that anyone could “make the road on which they had travelled.”
This is wrong. So wrong. The self-made ethos is that people can maximize their potential… make a good life. It is not that false promise that an idiot can become a genius… it is that and idiot, with hard work, dedication and persistence can become less of an idiot and a productive member of society worthy of some status.
Those that mistake this ethos tend to be malcontents… or advocates of malcontents… people that are pissed that their lives have not returned them the status they feel they deserve.
But people are still risking their lives to come to this country illegally because of this ethos. Where they are from they would be stuck with no opportunity to rise from their low rank.
Except for me, I'm self made.