In our age of the internet, the desire for sincerity is a significant hurdle to overcome. With websites like Instagram or TikTok, the images we share with the rest of the world, which are supposed to reflect our lives but are highly curated, create a virtual identity. The images we share, if we are shaped by the likes of Instagram’s algorithm, reflect the desires of our audience. In time, we likely build a virtual character that doesn’t reflect who we are. Our capacity for expression becomes defined by our desire to appease the desires of our audience. At this moment, our capacity to express who we are, what we think, and what we look like reaches a limit. If it were to rise out of that limit, we would quickly see a proportionate drop in the attention of our audience, whose desires are no longer reflected in the image they see. When your idolaters see the real you, they lose interest.

Just as our self-image is shaped by the audience we garner, our emotions are shaped by our audience. If we build an audience or viewership that expects us to be bubbly, when we become dour or more honest about our emotions than they are accustomed to, they may lose interest or emotionally respond in kind. The best example of this I can think of is the exhortation by Feminists that Men need to express their emotions in a healthy manner. This prescription, and implicit proscription, gives Feminists, and Women generally, the capacity to define how Men can express themselves. We need not ask what the adjective “Healthy” means, all we need to recognize is that it is a blend concept.

As a blend concept, its objective quality is not defined by you but by the group making use of the term. In other words, by squeezing in this term, the emotional identity of Men becomes limited by what Feminists or Women define as acceptable, healthy emotional expression; sincere emotional expression by Men becomes an impossibility. If men ever feel that they do not like how they’re being forced to express themselves by Women, and express that distress, women – defining the term Healthy for their control – have the capacity to completely ignore a man’s plight and, more so, demonize him for it.  I.e., any emotional expression by a man that upsets women, which is very challenging indeed, becomes policeable. In this sense, the goalposts of Healthy emotional expression constantly shift. In time, Men emotionally restrain themselves just to avoid capricious scolding completely.

The counter-argument to this is that healthy emotional expression, policeable by women, makes Women safe. However, as many people who have lived through COVID lockdowns can attest, the desire for safety can be taken to a ridiculous and tyrannical extreme. In our particular context, because the object that needs to be kept safe is Women, society will act more instinctually to protect them; it will be harder to soundly think about whether a man’s emotional behavior should be policed. As a result, a man’s behavior may be needlessly policed; his capacity for expression, randomly suppressed; if he fails to live up to the protean standards of Women, he can be shamed, ostracized, or harmed by a State apparatus. In our society, we do this by pathologizing Masculine behavior as toxic; the necessary standard for such a technical term, ever-shifting to ensure female and governmental control.  Unfortunately, because the safety of women is the goal, and men are just evolutionarily considered more disposable, policing the emotional expression of women is a path seldom trodden due to its challenges. As a result, Women become the capricious arbiters of the emotional expression of men in a society that emphasizes care, especially by recruiting the power of the government. The limit on men’s sincerity is set by their audience: women.

Objectivity, within the scientific paradigm, is another fine example of our inability to be sincere. A thing that is objective has the quality of being predictable within the scientific framework. A group of scientists or an individual scientist engaging in the scientific method both can make observations, generate hypotheses, and test their hypotheses. The collectivist scientific-method requires any subgroup to share their findings with the group in general to confirm the finding’s validity. The individual scientist can do this, but he need not; as long as his findings are consistently predictable under the various relevant conditions he finds himself within, his hypothesis can be considered valid. For the latter, the utility of the generated model is only useful for the individual scientist if it is not shared. Regardless of reproducibility or soundness, for the former, a scientific model may be considered invalid for purely political reasons; the group may simply find the model to be irrelevant. In this sense, the group defines the achievable aims and the identities of the scientists engaging in the scientific method if they wish to share their ideas with others. If they do not share their ideas with others, the utility of the model can naturally be scorned for being too subjective. The aims of each scientist then, what they wish to explore, how they wish to creatively express themselves through their technique, and the ultimate identity of the scientists are limited by the scientific community.

Outside of the scientific framework, if something can be called objective, it is relevant to the general population that calls it objective. If an idea is objective, socially objective, then it is reasonable to hold that idea. Thus, if an idea is socially relevant to the general population, then it is likely to be considered a reasonable idea. If the idea you hold is not considered reasonable by the general population, then it is unlikely to be socially relevant. Here, we find a conundrum: can one hold a belief that is not relevant to the general population but is also reasonable to hold? Furthermore, if one's identity were founded on this belief, could he be considered a reasonable person? Regardless of whether a belief is valid, if the general population doesn’t consider the belief to be reasonable, or is incapable of considering the belief to be reasonable and thus doesn’t consider the belief reasonable, then that population will not consider you or the idea relevant. In this way, if we wish to be relevant, if we wish to look as if we are reasonable, we should only hold ideas that are relevant and thus reasonable to the general population

In many ways, this calls into question whether one can generally be considered a reasonable individualist. More importantly, this calls into question whether there can be such a thing as sincerity if the only valid forms of sincere expression that are permissible are the ones that are socially approved of. I'm inclined to think that the desire to sincerely express one’s self is an incommunicable resistance to over-socialization. The overly-socialized individual will be compressed by the social milieu around him. His identity will be defined by his social group, and his social group’s identity will be defined by the relevant trends of the general population. The question: who defines the relevant trends of the general population; i.e., who defines what it is to be a genuinely reasonable individual according to the group? Such a question, I think, is ultimately beyond the scope of this short editorial piece.

Without consideration for whatever or whoever defines the relevant trends of the general population, if those trends demand that the status quo remain untouched, yet disturbing the still waters of the delusional mind is required to preserve the general population, any instinctual and automatic expression of the truth of a situation will be suppressed by the general population and most of its subgroups. In theory, this should lead to the collapse of the general population because they are unable to adapt to changing circumstances or new information. Such a collapse, I think, must take its course. We can seek to ameliorate the suffering of the insane, unhinged, or hysterical, we can try to tell them “No” and sequester them, thus, limiting their power, but if the society writ large prevents us from doing so, we will be subjected to the effects of insane, unhinged, and hysterical actors. Their power will effectively be untouchable because the general population will not permit it to be touched.

Wisdom, in its weaving way, also requires me to acknowledge that the desire for sincerity is a kind of madness in itself. Like Narcissus gazing into a still pond, infatuated with his expression, those who seek sincerity, in the sense that they can, unbridled, express themselves as individuals, may want to assert their will above the group's for their gain. These individuals, if they have the means to do so, will wield a culture’s venerated notion of the sovereign individual to bludgeon the general population into permitting them to act without restraint. These narcissi will be like mercenaries; they will hold no loyalties to the population they feed from, most societies will make use of them imprudently, and the wise will only seek their aid if they have absolutely no other choice. Like a harlot, these self-indulgent individuals will prey on the grotesque necessities of the general population. They gain allure in their eyes by catering to their lower needs. In the waters of the masses, the narcissists’ reflections gaze back at them. By establishing the trends that define their forlorn consumers, they guide the populace through their degenerated and self-affirming preferences, ultimately degenerating society generally. And because these narcissists are self-indulgent, they will be unwilling to integrate information that challenges their sense of self. As a result, like the overly socialized masses, such a society defined by individual obsession is bound for self-annihilation through its degenerating tendencies.

In this way, if we wish to live truthfully, i.e., to live sincerely, and to honestly express ourselves, we must walk a fine line between narcissistic self-obsession and submission to the overly socialized collective. In one sense, we might be unwise to buck what is generally considered reasonable, in another, it could be the best decision of our lives. It takes significant consideration and, I feel, lived experience and hard-acquired wisdom to genuinely grasp the almost intuitively known difference between the two. Rebellion and Submission are, thus, two sides of the same coin.