Reassessing Existential Constructs and Subjectivity: Freedom and Authenticity in Neoliberalism

Abstract

In this article, I reassess two central existential constructs at their intersection with neoliberalism and the self-help industry. Freedom and authenticity, as theorized primarily in the Sartrean tradition, have been commodified by the neoliberal self-help industry into uncritical and universalizing concepts. As these contemporary caricatures of freedom and authenticity become popular, their effects on subjectivity can be problematic. I conduct a reassessment of these constructs to identify where power relations, universality, and misinterpretations not only propagate errors that become embodied in subjectivity but also demarcate inclusionary and exclusionary criteria for diverse subjectivities to access freedom and authenticity.

Introduction

Aho (2014) suggested that despite the far-reaching history of the human obsession with mortality and meaning, existentialism, as it has developed in the Western context, is largely attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and also to Martin Heidegger ¹ (1889-1976). The central existential constructs ² that have come out of Sartre’s philosophy and continued a theoretical legacy through the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), Albert Camus (1913-1960), and Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), among others, are authenticity, freedom, angst, and alienation (Earnshaw, 2006). My focus will be on the Sartrean legacy along with Heidegger, with a particular focus on freedom and authenticity. These themes appear not only in existentialism but also have entered popular consciousness via literature, film, and psychology and have notably been co-opted into the self-help industry at the neoliberal turn with the success of positive psychology. ³ These cultural inscriptions have shaped and continue to shape subjectivity in ways that not only will become apparent in this article through reassessment but also may offer a liberating potential.

I propose here the reassessment of these central existential constructs with the aim of broadening our understanding of human existence in multifarious ways. Existentialism itself was a cultural, literary, artistic, and philosophical movement that attempted to account for aspects of human existence untouched by scientific rationalism and moral philosophy (Cooper, 1999). It was, and perhaps continues to be, an antisystem philosophy and a protest against the myopic academic philosophies that reduce human existence to subject-object relations (Neilson, 2020). Sartre (1957/1968) wanted existentialism to be a political expression and a form of liberation from the rigid boundaries of academic philosophy. Kaufmann (1968) wrote, “Oddly, it is widely urged against him [Sartre] that he is in some ways strikingly unacademic, as if academic existentialism were not a contradiction in terms” (p. 40).

In the spirit of existentialism resides the ability, and arguably the duty, to reassess our conceptions of existence in ways that help us understand not only the universals that bind us together but also the nuances between us that diversify our experiences of freedom and authenticity. So, in the antisystem tradition, I propose a Nietzschean reassessment, with a Foucauldian interrogation of these specific existential constructs, to reevaluate their meanings in the contemporary world while acknowledging their power relations and potential dangers. Specifically, how do neoliberalism and the self-help industry modify the conditions for the possibility of those existential experiences? By neoliberalism, I mean a capitalist cultural logic, the foundations of which stem from economic policies that have shaped Western capitalism since the 1980s (Harvey, 2005). Neoliberal lassiez-faire economic policies focus on privatization, individualization, and self-governance, which have shaped Western social consciousness as these values have become cultural norms and have been internalized in subjectivity (W. Brown, 2015).

In this article, I reassess existential constructs in light of the effects of neoliberalism on subjectivity and discuss how existentialism can operate in this context. In this way, I hope to avoid a problem-solution dichotomy. To be clear, I do not propose a solution to suffering through the reassessment of existential ideas. I propose the reassessment because the constructs themselves pertain to valuable insights about subjectivity and I believe that we ought to accommodate these insights to diverse perspectives rather than attempting to universalize experiences. The effects of neoliberalism and the self-help industry will be shown to contribute to the problem of universality as well as distorting the meanings of existential freedom and authenticity.

Freedom and Authenticity: An Origin Story

Two core assumptions of existentialism are that we all experience freedom and struggle with authenticity (McBride, 1997). Freedom is comprised of the interaction between our past, present understanding, and future possibilities (Cooper, 1999). For Sartre (1943/1992), our past constitutes a facticity of being-in-itself. When we look to our past, we can only change our perspective on it, not the brute facts. The possibilities we have accessible to us in the present constitute the for-itself of being—namely a striving to become (in-itself). “The project of the for-itself toward the future which it is is a project toward the in-itself” (Sartre, 1943/1992, p. 104). We strive to become what we are. Our fixed being in facticity outlines the possibilities and limitations for what we can become and our exercise of them solidifies those possibilities into actualities of what we are. Freedom operates in the being-for-itself to become in-itself. These possibilities for becoming are our transcendence, a first-person perspective on our facticity that can reinterpret the brute facts about us (Sartre, 1936/1991). For Sartre (1992), our freedom is revealed in the reinterpretation of the facts about ourselves.

Existentialism, beyond all else, requires freedom, which entails the freedom to experience as well as deny, doubt, and self-deceive. In the complex tussle between transcendence and facticity, the freedom of the individual is revealed as the project of embodied self-making. Unlike inanimate objects in the world, our facticity—or brute facts about us—do not exist for us in an entirely determining way but rather always through a first-person interpretive lens (Sartre, 1943/1992). This first-person stance about the kind of being one is, or is becoming, is transcendence. Transcendence is our unique ability to go beyond our facticity with agency to redefine those facts or properties of our being, a freedom seemingly limited to human existence (Earnshaw, 2006). A phenomenological understanding of the existential experience in consciousness cannot be reduced to ontic objects and their relations. Freedom is then possible through conscious experience (projection) but limited by the determined and culturally conditioned circumstances that being is thrown into (thrownness; Heidegger, 1956/1958).

Determinism would argue that the origins of our conscious experiences are causally linked to external factors that are not always apparent or readily available to us (Earman, 1986; Lewis, 1973). However, the point of existential freedom is to demonstrate that facticity (or thrownness) alone cannot suffice to determine a being who can experience transcendence (or projection), or put another way, there is no reason to believe that brute facts are any more authoritative in describing one’s being than is one’s first-person perspective (Sartre, 1936/1991). In this way, the freedom to create meaning is endowed by being-in-the-world, where facticity interacts with transcendence to simultaneously discover and create one’s identity. This self-creating process happens in context and is human existence itself (Fackenheim, 1961).

For Sartre (1943/1992), consciousness of freedom is established as anguish, for it presents the possibility of future nihilation and the impossibility of past resolutions. Coming face to face with the possibility of nothingness is the ground of anguish—existential angst. For Heidegger (1927/1962) also, anxiety springs merely from being-in-the-world. Angst is not only manifested at the idea of the possibility of the nihilation of being in the future—our awareness of mortality—but also at the impossibility of negating our being in the past. Angst is experienced in the present. The present is what Sartre (1943/1992) called being-for-itself, which is a negation of being, a flight from being so that one is present. The future is the flight toward being that presence lacks but aims toward. In this way, presence lacks complete identity and is constantly in flight toward being (becoming) and away from its past. The for-itself, or presence, is not yet and always striving to be. Sartre argued,

I am my future in the constant perspective of the possibility of not being it. Hence that anguish which we have described above springs from the fact that I am not sufficiently that future which I have to be and which gives its meaning to my present: It is because I am a being whose meaning is always problematic. (p. 105)

The feeling of being incomplete, insufficient, always lacking, and constantly striving is the source of anxiety (Wong, 2010). We can thus never achieve complete being and complete consciousness of being simultaneously. To further complicate matters, the presence of the being-for-itself is so fleeting in consciousness that we can never capture it as it falls permanently into being-in-itself. Sartre (1943/1992) compared being to a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick while dragging a cart behind it—always chasing that which it will never obtain while dragging its past behind it. This, in essence, is the notion of meaninglessness. Our being is a pointless struggle to become what we can never accomplish. However, the carrot is the possibility for meaning that we are striving toward—a possibility, which to negate, must also stand as possible to obtain. Paradoxically, becoming is simultaneously meaningful and meaningless.

To remove our solipsistic blinders from the project of becoming, we must also consider being and becoming in context. Not only do we face angst at the awareness of our mortality and immutable past, and struggle with the possibilities for becoming, but we are also becoming in a world with others. The other’s look, as Sartre (1943/1992) called it, or the gaze, brings anxiety into self-consciousness because we are suddenly at the mercy of another’s judgement. Transcendence is freedom not only in self-consciousness for the self but also in judgement toward others. In the gaze of the other, we are defenseless against their freedom to judge us in the same way that they are subjected to our free judgement of them in our gaze. Our becoming is then an attempt to learn the facticity of our being through the eyes of the other. The other’s gaze sees my being “as I shall never see it. The other holds a secret—the secret of what I am” (Sartre, 1943/1992, p. 340). Sartre (1943/1992) said that I ⁴ am responsible for my being, but I do not establish it; the other creates an understanding of my being, which I try to recover, “Thus my project of recovering myself is fundamentally a project of absorbing the other” (p. 340).

We define ourselves through the gaze of the other and attempt to engage with the other’s notion of our being, both affirming and adopting the other’s notion of our being in our identification with it. Hence the problem of authenticity is entailed in the anxiety of never being ourselves in light of social expectations. For Heidegger (1927/1962), this problem was called fallenness, or falling prey to the world—that is, a sense of inauthenticity derived from being-with-others only for idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. It manifests from living publicly among people, doing what they do, and adopting the social constructs around us as a façade to our own being (Guignon, 1993). Inauthenticity, or falling prey to the world, is being (Dasein) turned away from itself out of anxiety, a fear without reason. “That about which anxiety is anxious is being-in-the-world itself” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 181). Being itself is anxious because it is aware that it exists, and is aware of its mortality, and this functions to alienate being to a point of solipsism (Fell, 1979). Hence, our recourse to fallenness takes place to avoid anxiety. Heidegger’s (1937/1962) three temporal dimensions, thrownness (past), projection (future), and fallenness (present), found analogs in Sartre’s (1992) facticity (past), transcendence (future), and being-for-itself (presence), where being-in-itself exists across these temporal dimensions. Inauthenticity and angst (or anxiety) then operate in similar ways in both philosophies, as given conditions of freedom experienced by a conscious being existing in a world with other conscious beings.

The problem of alienation arises out of the experiences of freedom, angst, and inauthenticity. We are alienated in two ways from our own experience of being. The first way we experience alienation is in fallenness where inauthenticity emerges as we adopt the social norms around us to fit into the normal ways people do things, thereby confounding our possibility to do authentically otherwise (Heidegger, 1927/1962). The second way we experience alienation is in recognizing that our project of becoming in a world with others is necessarily also determined by others, whose gaze on us brings forth the discomfort of being seen in the third person as an object with facticity and thereby limiting, or at least partially determining, our subjectivity (Sartre, 1943/1992). In this way, I am alienated from a dimension of my being that is subject to the freedom of others to judge me based on my facticity. I attempt to accommodate my behaviour to fit the normative standards of public life and lose sight of who I may be in the process. If I resist, I begin feeling that the world is foreign to me, or what Heidegger (1927/1962) called alien or uncanny (unheimlich) while I also feel foreign to myself. Essentially, I am alienated from the world with others and from myself in the process of being-in-the-world.

Being absorbed in the world with others runs the risk of parroting the meanings available to us while engaging mindlessly and inauthentically in everyday life. Standing apart from the world in otherness reduces normative meanings and creates angst and alienation (Sartre, 1938/1959). In the indeterminateness between normative meaning and our attempt to create personal meaning is the feeling of absurdity—the paradox that returns to the notion that the world must both have and not have meaning at the same time. This sense of absurdity is not merely theoretical but also experiential. Sartre’s and Heidegger’s points are that we experience the world phenomenologically and thus we must also attempt to understand being through those experiences. Those experiences and our ability to assess them is evidence of our freedom—that is, dependent on choosing how to perceive the world when it presents to us the absurd possibility of being indeterminate.

Do We Still Have Freedom and Authenticity? A Reassessment

The reassessment I propose here intends to look at the transition of existential constructs from philosophy into popular consciousness through the neoliberal self-help industry. Concepts like freedom and authenticity transitioned from existentialism to humanistic psychology as a way to resolve existential plights by focusing on positive and healthy outcomes in psychology (Rogers, 1959); however, humanistic psychology became criticized for a lack of empirical research that positive psychology promised to fulfill (Froh, 2004; Yen, 2014). Nevertheless, positive psychology faced its own criticisms for dubious empirical research (Fernandez-Rios & Vilarino, 2016; Miller, 2008) and for endorsing a neoliberal commodification of existential constructs as self-help technologies (Binkley, 2011; McDonald & O’Callaghan, 2008).

Freedom and authenticity were first co-opted by the Human Potential Movement of the 1960s and 1970s (Friedman, 1976; Spence, 2007), then under neoliberalism and with the help of positive psychology, repackaged as do-it-at-home self-improvement strategies (Binkley, 2014). Not only has this poor neoliberal translation of existentialism caricatured the concepts, but it has also made them problematic. In essence, the existential constructs initially aimed at liberation through self-reflection have become antithetical to their original aim by advocating for an inauthentic (to borrow Heidegger’s and Sartre’s term) subjectivity despite being marketed as fully autonomous and authentic (Held, 2004). The project of self-creating and meaning making has gained renewed popularity under neoliberalism and become commodifiable (McGee, 2005).

The contemporary world continues to be a place where meaning making is an important aspect of subjectivity. If we continue to rely on existential ideas about the self in relation to others and the world, those existential constructs require reassessment to distinguish the philosophical from the commodified forms of freedom and authenticity. In this way, we can assess and reassess the conditions for the possibility for self-help, meaning making, and change. In this reassessment, I also explore how these concepts fit into the contemporary world under the influence of a neoliberal cultural logic.

To begin at the crux of existentialism is to engage with the idea of freedom. In existentialism, the argument for freedom is based on human consciousness. The subjective first-person stance, or transcendence, is irreducible to the brute facts about the individual, or facticity, and there is no reason to give one primacy over the other (Sartre, 1943/1992). Furthermore, there seems to be something powerful about our ability to subjectively analyze our own behaviours, and the thought process governing that analysis makes it hard not to acquiesce to some form of compatibility between free will and determinism. Put in another way, it is also difficult for the hard determinist to explain all human phenomena without turning consciousness into a trite and passive process that goes against all our intuitions.

Freedom in existentialism is not passively granted in consciousness but rather earned through self-analysis. The exercise of freedom takes precedence over its mere possibility and places the onus on the individual to make meaning of the world and their place within it. Under neoliberalism, freedom is subsumed as a political category that is either restricted or liberated via economic policy, privatization, responsibilization, and self-governance (Harvey, 2005). Freedom is then a possibility made available to individuals as a political right, and privilege, and a form of personal responsibility. In his influential work, Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman (1962) explicitly argued that political freedom was irrevocably dependent on economic freedom. Prima facie this proposition is not at direct odds with existential freedom, as neoliberal freedom seems to be about accessibility (freedom to do; Friedman, 1962) and existential freedom is about engagement (commitment to embrace freedom; Heidegger, 1927/1962; Sartre, 1943/1992). However, as neoliberal economic policy turns into an embodied neoliberal culture that influences subjectivity, the freedom to do creates the possibility for the freedom to exploit (Polanyi, 1944). Neoliberal freedom enables what I call a relationship of usury ⁵ between the state and the subject (Harvey, 2005) and with subjects-in-themselves. I call the latter relationship a relationship of usury with the self (I return to it later in this article).

These relationships of usury also undercut authenticity. In facticity, the brute facts about the individual do not exist in a vacuum outside an interpretive lens but are always products of collective meaning making with others in the world (Heidegger, 1927/1962). In the neoliberal world, facticity is intimately interwoven with power relations. To reiterate the argument made earlier, when facticity is interpreted through the existential freedom in transcendence, it enables authenticity in subjectivity; however, the gaze of the other disrupts this process by alienating one from oneself (Sartre, 1943/1992). Revealed through the eyes of the other is not only our experience of angst with regard to the other’s freedom to judge and determine our facticity but also with regard to their judgement in relation to the appeals they make to the power structures that sustain their beliefs.

The gaze, which invariably has the effect of enabling inauthenticity, whether individual or institutional, can also be necessary for confirmation and validation. For Foucault (1975/1995), the gaze, like power, was a phenomenon requiring interrogation, “In fact, power produces, it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production” (p. 194). I would not know who I am independent of another’s gaze. I am inhibited in who I am by another’s gaze. The gaze both shapes and constricts me. The institutions and bodies of knowledge that enact factic relations to my body sustain available possibilities for my subjectivity, my interpretation of it, and conditions the possibilities for judgements that others can make about me. If it is a necessary evil, the only possible change is in reshaping the power–knowledge relation of the gaze. A validating gaze can be empowering. Thus, reassessing in the tradition of Foucault, the gaze is not simply a unidimensional construct but also a form of power with indeterminate effects, the basis for which knowledge and understanding can make alterations.

For Foucault (1977/1980), knowledge was not an end in itself, or what he called the will to knowledge. The will to knowledge can be dangerous, “For to knowledge, no sacrifice is too great” (p. 164). Knowledge is itself subject to interrogation, along with truth, in the historicizing of concepts. For disambiguation, we do obtain knowledge in a critical analysis of concepts and their histories, but knowledge here is not the aim. The aim is understanding, which creates possibilities for change. When the aim becomes knowledge, we become dangerous because we sacrifice all else to this aim.

We should admit, rather, that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. (Foucault, 1975/1995, p. 27)

These power–knowledge relations subjugate individuals and turn them into objects of knowledge. As objects of knowledge, they become scientifically and politically observable and classifiable. Furthermore, in the power–knowledge relationship, the formulation of knowledge through power instills a body of knowledge that then stands to reinforce that power, the effects of which are inscribed in subjectivity (Foucault, 1975/1995).

Through understanding, we make concepts visible, see their lineages, discover their discontinuities, and exploit them. The purpose of understanding concepts is to unravel their powerful hold on us and enable our freedom to change. Foucault (1982) argued that his method of criticism alters the subject’s mode of thinking and enables the freedom to change how we are, what we do, how we think, and what we think we are. I keep this notion of freedom in mind as I begin here to discuss the intersections of neoliberalism on existential constructs. Freedom here is the condition for the possibility of change. ⁶ However, this possibility may be limited by neoliberalism if freedom is redefined under its totalizing gaze. As a system of power relations, neoliberalism can control the bodies of knowledge and truth conditions for what we accept as freedom.

In the neoliberal ethos, power dynamics are veiled and simultaneously reinforced (Joseph, 2013). The illusion of freedom is that one is unimpeded by systemic power while the system is commodifying their subjectivity to be sustainable and economically viable. Neoliberalism does not operate to oppress subjectivity but rather enables insidious exploitation to commodify one’s own experiences and identities, thereby erasing resistance to exploitation (Gershon, 2011; Toffoletti & Thorpe, 2018). What is authentic in diverse subjectivities is confounded with what is marketable about them. Much like the women’s empowerment movement, authentic resistance is obscured when the criteria for authentic expression becomes fashionable and profitable (Bay-Cheng, 2015; Rutherford, 2018). Authenticity is then sold as an identity with specified parameters that persuade individuals to opt-in via conformity to the new standards—precisely an existentially inauthentic existence. This process is especially exploitative toward marginalized groups, when their sites of authentic meaning making become commodifiable niche categories.

Freedom and authenticity become realizable in neoliberalism as sets of behaviours in conformity with niche subjectivities, marketable for their empowerment and cultural capital, and resolved of their resistance potential to threaten the power structures (Joseph, 2013; Rimke, 2000). In this way, neoliberalism emulates the basis of colonial mentality—that is, to occupy, assimilate, and replicate the valuable aspects of the indigenous and then erase the indigenous to ameliorate the threat to the dominant class (Smith, 2006). For example, sponsorship from a powerful corporation for a social cause supporting a fight against some form of oppression may be simultaneously lucrative and counterproductive. On the one hand, without the support the fight may lack sustainability, and on the other hand, the support may diminish the resistance to the oppression. This process occurs within the realm of neoliberalism, which also manufactures the condition that neoliberalism is the only possible form of government and/or self-governance when resistance is so easily absorbed and commodified, while the uncommodifable become invisible or erased (W. Brown, 2015). A further obfuscation occurs on the individual level in the self-assessment of authenticity when authentic and inauthentic lines are blurred under the neoliberal ethos (Genz, 2015). How then does one live authentically under neoliberalism?

Authenticity is the distinction between my success or failure to act as I would, with an awareness of my own context and limitations, in contrast to acting as they (anyone) do. In a simplified form, to do as I do is authentic, and to do as they do is inauthentic (Heidegger, 1927/1962). What exactly does it mean to do as I do authentically outside the influence of others? I do not act outside the world with others, but among them, because of them, and partially conditioned by them. Both Sartre (1943/1992) and Heidegger (1927/1962) agree that we do act in context (Fell, 1979), and the delimitation of authenticity rests in the freedom to choose an action in commitment with the self, in contrast to an unreflexive action in conformity with available social constructs. Understanding, awareness, and reflexivity then determine authenticity. For Sartre (1938/1959), to act in bad faith ⁷ is to pretend a choice does not exist. For Heidegger (1956/1958), being inauthentic means losing your subjectivity among others in conformity with standards you did not assess for yourself. The question of choice, however, remains open to scrutiny. Choice is at least partially socially influenced, biologically determined, and sociopolitically restricted through power relations, among other things (Lukes, 2021). Even if existential freedom is primarily a prereflective phenomenon, the importance of choice comes into play in our behaviour, which is where authenticity is affected (Rogers, 1957), especially by neoliberal notions of freedom as deliberate and unimpeded choice.

Furthermore, authenticity itself is a norm. It is especially privileged in the Western world where uniqueness and individuality are praised while conformity is reprehended (Guisinger & Blatt, 1994). When authenticity is co-opted under neoliberalism and sold as a self-help technique, it creates a way for us to be ironically inauthentic—namely, accepting a commodified and authoritative prescription for how to behave in alignment with our “best” selves from books (and other resources) marketed to the masses for profit. To reiterate, authenticity necessitates freedom in committing to a self-making project. However, neoliberal society’s freedom of choice occurs within a context that submits subjectivity to power relations, which determine access to possibilities (Lukes, 2021). I return to Sartre’s (1992) donkey to illustrate the point. The carrot represents an abstract possibility for becoming, which we run toward but can never reach, yet this possibility must be realizable for it to be real despite our inability to obtain it (Sartre, 1943/1992). However, when our freedom of choice is limited by our sociopolitical status, it obscures possibility and realizability. For example, “Jean-Paul Sartre had forgotten that the Negro suffers in his body quite differently from the white man” (Fanon, 1952/1968, p. 106). For Fanon (1952/1968), becoming was rendered impossible because he is factically tied to his Blackness while expected to transcend it. It is something he can never accomplish authentically in a White world. Living within the boundaries of a White world, he can never transcend his Blackness because he is always Black in the gaze of the other, and he can never authentically accept his Blackness because it is deviant from the White male ontology assumed as the universal standard of being.

Fanon’s (1952/1968) critique was that the Black man does not experience the same existential freedom as the White man when it comes to his identity. This critique, in Black Skin White Masks (Fanon, 1952/1968), came 6 years after Sartre’s (1946/2007) Existentialism as a Humanism was published. Nearly a decade later, in Fanon’s (1961/2004) The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre (1961/2004) wrote the preface, imploring White Europeans to read the book and experience the shame of what I will here call White privilege. It appears that Sartre understood the limitations of existentialism in accounting for diverse embodied experiences and also promoted change as a form of responsibility. BIPOC (Black, indigenous, people of colour) existentialists have continued this legacy to address race and racism through diverse embodied existential experiences (Bernasconi, 2003; Coulthard, 2014; Gordon, 1995, 1997; Gordon, 2000; Lemberger-Truelove, 2016; Malone, 2015; Sharpley-Whiting, 1997), and there have also been some advances in humanistic psychology toward race and multiculturalism (Comas-Diaz, 2012; DeRobertis, 2014; Felder & Robbins, 2021; L. Hoffman, 2016; L. Hoffman et al., 2014). Race is one among many confounding factors with regard to possibilities for freedom and change.

These arguments are not novel. However, they linger with a discomforting reality that permeates into the neoliberal forms of subjectivity (Teo, 2018) and authenticity. For example, the fact of Blackness has not been resolved with equity but has been offered instead an equal opportunity for commodification under niche categories. Blackness has become marketable as an authentic subjectivity for Black folks, provided they fit the niche, and also as cultural capital (e.g., music, colloquialisms, art) in which non-Black folks can invest (P. H. Collins, 2006). Commodification is profitable through investment and sponsorship of empowerment narratives.

Neoliberal subjectivities are presented with the illusion of authenticity and freedom. What is misleadingly branded as “authentic” is what is marketable (Genz, 2015). The choice to commit to an alternative is reduced when subversive narratives fail to obtain visibility. Visibility is granted through investment and sponsorship, which then creates a new niche that dissolves authenticity when the individual lacks the intent to act as they would in the absence of the influence of the other. In this case, the other takes the form of a power–knowledge dynamic that determines their facticity. In other words, the freedom to be authentic is mediated by power, and access to that power is conditioned by marketability, which, in turn, influences how authenticity is presented and performed, thereby ironically producing inauthenticity. Authenticity then becomes subjected to a relationship of usury.

Returning to my earlier point, the neoliberal relationship of usury between the state and the subject is embodied in subjectivity as a relationship of usury with the self (Teo, 2018). The relationship of usury with the self invokes a colonial mentality to assimilate to the dominant power or the culturally valuable domains of the self while erasing the rest (Gordon, 2015). The culturally valuable is appraised by its profitability and investment potential (or sponsorship), then commodified and marketed. Neoliberal subjectification absorbs the social constructs of neoliberalism into an inauthentic subjectivity that relies on bad faith (Sartre, 1938/1959) for sustainability. Individuals are encouraged to perform neoliberal forms of “authenticity” (like empowerment narratives) that return social or financial capital at the expense of compromising one’s existential freedom and authenticity.

In internalizing the neoliberal values of individualization, privatization, entrepreneurialism, competition, and self-governance, you begin to treat yourself instrumentally in a relationship of usury with yourself. Your authentic sites of internal meaning become commodities that you exploit for social and financial capital. Neoliberal subjectivity endorses the exploitation of internal qualities as resources for production, which you self-manage in an instrumental relationship with yourself (Teo, 2018). When capital value supersedes personal value, you no longer behave in commitment with yourself but are subject to the external values you have adopted for self-sustenance.

Even if you realize you are being subjected to inauthenticity, you must deny your freedom to choose alternatives in order to protect your identity and capital. If your only practical alternative is to accept marginalization, the reliance on bad faith seems justifiable. However, this is why Fanon (1952/1968) proposed resistance that transcends the self through collective action and solidarity (e.g., Black power movement). Sartre (1943/1992) also advocated for intersubjectivity as indispensable to understanding oneself and even attempted to bring the Other into a pre-ontological relationship with the self to negate solipsism (Zahavi, 2002). In other words, he tried to highlight the importance of the relationships we have with others as formative of the human experience.

If your only options are selling out or marginalization, and you have an authentic commitment to freedom, you rely on others who share your suffering to band together to fight against the systemic powers marginalizing you. The choice then seems to boil down to a fight with yourself or a fight with the state. Resistance is a reaction to oppression and limits freedom when choice boils down to survival. Huey P. Newton (1942-1989), the founder of the Black Panther Party, argued that marginalized people are forced to resist in order to bring awareness to the masses at their own expense. “A true revolutionary realizes that if he is sincere death is imminent. The things he is saying and doing are extremely dangerous. Without this realization it is pointless to proceed as a revolutionary” (Newton, 1972/1995, p. 17).

In the introduction to Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From the Women’s Liberation Movement, Morgan (1970) wrote, “This book is an action” (p. xiii) and outlined the many sacrifices that the contributing women endured in the process of compiling the anthology, including divorce, losing friends, having articles withdrawn because of spouses or rewritten by them, picketing, arrests, and imprisonment, many while rearing newborn children. In the same anthology, Beale (1970) wrote about the intersections of womanhood and Blackness in capitalist America, where Black men were denied employment, forcing Black women to be the family breadwinners and simultaneously degraded for not obtaining the standard of White femininity, which meant staying home and raising children. These narratives create authentic sites of meaning for marginalized people, yet it is easy to see with Beale’s example how the trope of the strong Black woman was born out of necessity and yet can be easily commodified under neoliberalism as an “authentic” personality to market products (e.g., television shows, ads).

However, here may be another category for those who will not fight themselves or the state (or who are unaware of this power relation). For the nonconformists who seek authenticity outside of neoliberalism, the answers are often sold through the self-help industry. The self-help industry can benefit from revolutionary discourse and repackage it to the dominant class consisting of a primarily White audience while simultaneously, and perhaps inadvertently, defusing the revolutionary power (Rimke, 2000). As an independent source of collective wisdom and empirically backed techniques, self-help seemingly offers the opportunity for introspection and self-making that resides outside of the capitalist framework. The self-help industry not only provides readymade solutions based on the meaning-making constructs developed in existential thought, but also, I argue that self-help piggybacks on the aura of antisystem philosophy that defines existentialism.

By providing the wisdom and techniques to succeed as “hacks” or shortcuts to success, the implication is that one can be outside the capitalist rat race and find alternative avenues to success or beat the system. For example, books like Confidence Hacks (Davenport, 2014), Hacking Growth (Ellis & Brown, 2017), Mind Hacking (Hargrave, 2016), and Hack Your Motivation (B. Hoffman, 2017), as well as The Secret (Byrne, 2000), sell these shortcuts to success. In this way, the guise of antisystem philosophy is implicitly draped over the self-help industry and targeted to the nonconformist sentiment. Simultaneously, self-help often presents itself as a rational and powerful tool for the business oriented and the entrepreneurial—for example, books like Awaken the Giant Within (Robbins, 1992), Dare to Lead (B. Brown, 2018), and Good to Great (J. Collins, 2001). In the most ironic instances, the self-help industry sells an entrepreneurial nonconformists’ subjectivity in the narratives of successful “self-made” public figures like Steve Jobs (1955-2011), Bill Gates (1955- ), and Elon Musk (1971- ) with books like Steve Jobs (Isaacson, 2011), Bill Gates: The Man Behind Microsoft, A Look at the Man Who Changed the World We Live In (MacGregor, 2018), and Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Vance, 2015). These figures are idolized for their authenticity, self-actualization, autonomy, self-reliance, and resilience. Most of all they are praised for their antisystem approach to success. Their names are a brand, and the self-help industry says yours can be also.

This reassessment so far highlights the accidents and errors that give rise to false notions of truth and being that continue to persist in consciousness under the authoritative titles of freedom and authenticity. The misuse of these existential constructs becomes dangerous under neoliberal subjectivity by surreptitiously reviving a colonialist mentality toward others and the self. These dangers become inscribed in the embodied subjectivity carried over generations and accepted as truths, which perpetuate the errors. As Foucault (1977/1980) put it, “The body manifests the stigma of the past experience and also gives rise to desires, failings, and errors” (p. 148). The body then becomes the archive of conflicting errors.

In my experience, I have observed the ways that social media mirrors the neoliberal self-help industry and presents possibilities to auto-commodify subjectivity online. You can be an influencer on social media provided your identity can become a followable brand. The more authentic you appear, the more appealing you will be. Followers want to see the “real you” and tend to criticize accounts that are too manicured for being pretentious and staged. There seems to be a visceral draw toward the imperfections that make popular users seem more approachable and human. This often means sharing (or oversharing) personal information as part of one’s platform to obtain a marketable level of vulnerability. Authenticity is then framed as honesty, vulnerability, and approachability on social media, which can include sharing mental health issues, asking for comfort from followers, emotional purging (sometimes crying), and personal struggle narratives, among others. When the most common contemporary afflictions, anxiety and depression, become commodifiable for users on social media platforms, the intersections of freedom and authenticity may resurface in problematic ways.

The social media influencer is an extreme example of the relationship of usury with the self in neoliberal subjectivity where the (presumably) authentic self is conditioned by its marketability and personal experiences become commodifiable. The pressure to maintain one’s volatile status in the online economy depends on diversifying by absorbing soft skills and adapting to new technologies, new platforms, social standards, norms, and politics (Sugarman, 2015). The strain to remain in the limelight and maintain an income may create angst, and alienation from the self and others, which is maintained under the disciplinary power of self-surveillance (Zuboff, 2019).

The surveillance power and collective online gazes we experience now have a permanence that neither Foucault nor Sartre could have anticipated. ⁸ Digitally recorded surveillance creates the possibility for ongoing reinterpretations of facticity that do not have the fallibility of organic memory and is furthermore extended to the virtual gazes of thousands and sometimes millions of people. The disciplinary power of this surveillance (Foucault, 1975/1995) is then also magnified exponentially and becomes particularly effective in policing the already powerless. If one’s primary source of social and financial capital depends on an online economy and that economy is compromised by doxing, that individual lacks other avenues of power to defend themselves or ignore the virtual charges.

Those with access to power can effectively withstand an online blowback with access to wealth, public relations agents, media outlet support, platforms to make amends, acts of goodwill (e.g., donations, apologies), and marketable reformation narratives (Graves, 2018). Powerful people such as politicians and celebrities accused of misbehaviour have a greater chance of reclaiming their status because of their existing offline power and are furthermore not entirely dependent on their online power for sustenance. For example, Donald Trump was elected president despite the recording exposing his sexist and vulgar comments about women (Victor, 2017), and Graves (2018) stated that several celebrities accused during the #MeToo allegations are looking to make a comeback—“For the accused, there are people who can help them to rehabilitate their reputations—for a price” (para. 5). The power of collective surveillance and gazes then demonstrably intersects with neoliberalism and perpetuates a disproportionate favour to those already in power to help themselves.

What is also interesting is how both freedom and authenticity can be retheorized under these new parameters. Simultaneously, the disciplinary power of surveillance becomes self-surveillance and intersects with neoliberalism when one faces the possibility of reshaping their facticity in the virtual public sphere, especially when they face online criticism. Subjectification operates under the power of the collective gaze as the individual demonstrates reflexive behavioural self-analysis and change in the face of moral scrutiny. Existential freedom is positioned at the intersection between doing as one would do in accordance with their self-perception versus doing as they do (Heidegger, 1927/1962). The intent is measured as authentic or inauthentic, both internally in self-surveillance and externally under the collective moral surveillance.

Authenticity and freedom become indeterminate when the power–knowledge relations that condition their possibility reside in normative moral constructions. Social norms are the very target of existential reassessment in both Heidegger and Sartre as they form the basis for negating freedom and authenticity. Yet their liberation is now impossible if we shift the focus from the knowledge production process itself to understanding, as Foucault (1982) suggested. Understanding creates the conditions for the possibility for liberation from the pressure to decide on authenticity. Resorting to undecidability on authenticity through understanding paradoxically frees one from a forced choice, between authentic and inauthentic, which is arguably free and authentic-in-itself. Part of this work here is to facilitate that understanding through the reassessment of existential constructs at the intersection with neoliberalism.

Conclusion

What I have attempted is a reassessment of two central existential constructs, freedom and authenticity, as they have become cooped under neoliberalism and into the self-help industry. Once again, the reassessment itself interrogates the power–knowledge relations to produce understanding, the aim of which is liberation. Transcendence is going beyond one’s facticity and highlighting that there is more to human existence than brute facts about us. This self-interpretation happens in a context where social norms are absorbed into our meaning-making process, reassessing our facticity, and reframing it through the realm of a contemporary world. Understanding this process creates the conditions for the possibility of liberation and change. The purpose of change, especially in a volatile world—politically, economically, and sustainably—is not only to produce conditions for a better life but in essence also to give life meaning (Wong, 2010).

The project of contemporary meaning making is shown here to be obfuscated by a neoliberal ethos that oversimplifies our understandings of freedom and authenticity, among other things, and may in fact have contradictory effects. The existential freedom in consciousness to reinterpret our facticity is replaced with a neoliberal freedom that assumes unsubstantiated autonomy to self-create based on universal internal resources. Neoliberalism assumes that economic freedom is the nexus from which individuals obtain political freedom to create meanings in their lives without impediment. This illusory and uncritical neoliberal freedom may become meaningless, especially as it relates to authenticity. With the popularity of the neoliberal self-help industry, authenticity has become a fashionable catchphrase that seems to mean one’s internal beliefs, signaling that one is genuine and unique. Furthermore, that uniqueness is categorized into commodified niche authenticities that become marketable sources of meaning. Empowerment narratives, cultural practices, and even race become commodities that everyone can invest in as sites of authenticity. However, not only does this arguably become inauthentic by definition, but the process of commodifying authenticity is also exploitative with existing power relations that disproportionately affect the already marginalized and favour the already powerful.

This work is evidently not the final word on this matter. I have avoided a problem-solution binary in favour of understanding. What I hope to have achieved is a way of revaluating existential freedom and authenticity through critical thinking, which I believe creates the possibility for change. The change that is suggested in this article is the potential to move away from neoliberal values in understanding our subjectivities and toward diverse perspectives that challenge existing power-knowledge relations.