The Modern Self as Autonomous Manipulator

How Alasdair MacIntyre can help us understand Expressive Individualism

Photo by Robert Zunikoff on Unsplash

Regular readers of this Substack and my books will know that one of my favorite concepts is Expressive Individualism, the term coined by Robert Bellah (et. al) to capture the idea that the contemporary person feels that they need to discover or create an identity for themselves and express it to the world. In my book, You Are Not Your Own, I show how this idea is premised on a belief in the autonomous individual, the individual freed from all roles, traditions, values, obligations, and responsibilities given by family or culture or State or God. The contemporary individual stands radically alone and braves the surrounding culture, striving against all forces that would seek to control or define him or her, asserting themselves through self-expression (that’s the expressive individualism part). I made the argument in YANYO that this obligation to create and express an identity was actually a terrible burden, one we were not meant to bear and one that only produces anxiety, insecurity, choice paralysis, and depression. Yet the contemporary person is afraid to let go of this burden of self-creation and expression because they worry that losing autonomy to God will cost them too much. And there’s something to that. It costs, as Eliot says in The Four Quartets, “not less than everything.” But if they are honest with themselves they will recognize that expressive individualism is already failing them.

In doing some extra reading for Re-Collecting Your Life, I came across a passage in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue that speaks directly to another one of the problems with expressive individualism: perpetual competition. I like to explain the problem this way. If everyone is busy expressing their identity, who’s listening? Imagine a vast warehouse where everyone is frantically shouting their name, desperately trying to be heard over the noise, trying to be recognized and validated. Can you ever be sure that your name is heard? That you are noticed? No. All you can do is keep shouting. That’s social media. That’s our world. Everyone frantically expressing themselves for validation. But MacIntyre points out another element to this dynamic. He argues that we’re not just competing for attention, we’re also manipulating each other to remain autonomous: