第三大脑

The gospel of radical self-creation distances us from our true selves.
激进的自我创造的福音使我们远离真实的自我。

https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-dark-side-of-self-making

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.
对许多人来说，自我创造是解放的福音。你可以成为你想成为的任何人。無論你出生的人或方式，你的種族、階級、性別或家庭，你都可以把石板擦乾，決定自己的命運，成為白手起家的人。这是《美国人》神话的核心叙事——正如弗雷德里克·道格拉斯（Frederick Douglass）响亮地指出的那样，任何人都可以“走上他们走过的道路”。这是我们许多人从出生起就被灌输的叙事：我们的“真实”或“真实”自我来自我们内在的感觉或我们的创造力，我们的生活应该是一个表达和“表现”现实的过程，克服阻碍我们的社会和社区障碍。换句话说，生活就是成为最好的自己，同时摆脱社会期望的桎梏的过程。

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. 
在最好的情况下，典型的现代自我创造叙事——在互联网时代变得更加普遍和强大——确实可以成为摆脱压迫和压制的途径。但叙事也有阴暗的一面。自现代性出现以来，自作自内心的福音与其说是让个人自由选择自己的命运，不如说是确定一个新的贵族，就像旧的贵族一样排他性。新存在方式的唯一区别在于，可能是金钱、“风格”或“精神”——而不是纯粹的血统——创造了超越社会规则的权利。

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.
在文艺复兴时期出现的自我概念中，自我创造者通常被认为是近乎神圣的。例如，艺术家阿尔布雷希特·丢勒（Albrecht Dürer）将自己画得笔直——这种姿势传统上是为耶稣基督保留的。他的手指举起的姿势与耶稣经常在肖像画中的位置相似，但拼写出他自己的姓名首字母。在他1528年去世时，一位崇拜者剪掉了他一根金色的头发，就好像它是圣人的遗物一样。一个出身普通的艺术家的这种自我夸大，即使在几十年前也是不可想象的。但丢勒有意识地培养自己的形象（他花了很多时间在那些卷发上，以至于同时代人开玩笑说他可能太忙而无法接受委托）会让现代名人感到自豪。这并非巧合。我们仍在与当时释放的能量作斗争。近代早期对贵族的攻击本应带来一种高度的平等感（这在围绕法国大革命的言论中最为明显），但对自我创造的崇拜包含着内在优越感的概念，甚至比旧的贵族模式更为尖锐。这种敏感性解释了我们表面上民主社会中普遍存在的不平等自负。

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. 
在广泛的历史时间尺度上跟踪这些思想的演变是有帮助的。就好像，几个世纪以来，“自我制造”固有的可能变化在不同的时刻显现出来，名人文化或社交媒体品牌的本质反映了从文艺复兴时期到摄政时期的英国再到镀金时代的对话。

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.
在文艺复兴时期，向上流动的资产阶级的人文主义哲学家将个人功绩设想为属于“真正的贵族”范畴。其中一位哲学家波焦·布拉乔利尼（Poggio Bracciolini）出生时只是一个药剂师的儿子，他认为“真正的贵族”不能被教导或获得，而必须是与生俱来的。他写道：“它必须通过一种神圣的力量和恩惠以及命运的隐藏运动来掌握，而不能通过父母的教导来获得。

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.
这种自我创造者拥有特殊和独特的个人力量的感觉一直持续到十九世纪和二十世纪。在摄政时代，当像博·布鲁梅尔（Beau Brummell）这样的名人花花公子开创了因出名而出名的艺术时，它与ton的概念有关：这个词在法语中字面意思是“方式”，但在摄政英格兰，它有自己的生活。Ton是——嗯——je ne sais quoi，博·布鲁梅尔拥有的神秘优雅，而未来的富裕暴发户和粗鲁的贵族都没有。

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?”
Brummell（如此时尚和有影响力，以至于当他戴上海狸皮帽子时，据说北美的海狸数量明显下降）是这一趋势的分水岭。布鲁梅尔与他的朋友乔治王子（后来成为乔治四世国王）闹翻后，在一次聚会上遇到了他，大声问一个熟人，“阿尔万利，谁是你的胖朋友？

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.
这是贵族和君主制从未真正恢复的削减。布鲁梅尔有吨，而乔治王子没有——出生或血统的特权不能超过这个基本事实。

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. 
对自我制造的崇拜倾向于分裂为两种平行的叙事。在一种（主要是欧洲的概念）中，自我创造适用于一种非常特殊、非常特殊的人——“天生贵族”。“花花公子主义”现象被理解为这种思想的表达。

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.”
在美国变体中，自制是任何人都可以做的事情，只要他们投入足够的砂砾和肘部油脂。但是，如果这种愿景表面上更加平等，那么白手起家的人的形象就更容易解雇任何不是那样的人。毕竟，如果努力工作意味着你可以成为下一个安德鲁·卡内基，那么任何不是千万富翁的人肯定都不够努力。许多自我创造的支持者积极阻止扩大社会服务以改善穷人的状况，理由是这会阻止他们使用一些好的老式肘部油脂 - 并且在更广泛的范围内，它会阻碍进化的进展，这使得最优秀的人类能够生存和繁荣，同时杀死较弱的个体。正如社会达尔文主义哲学家赫伯特·斯宾塞（Herbert Spencer，在19世纪末广受欢迎）所说：“如果[人]足够完整地生活......那么他们应该生活就好了。如果他们不够完整，无法生存，他们就会死，最好是他们应。

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.
在我们这个时代，自我创造的福音几乎是普遍的。任何拥有智能手机的人——占美国人口的85%——都可以创建一个数字化身、一张过滤自拍、一个个人品牌，以利用注意力经济令人眼花缭乱的潜力，这种潜力通常会以经济上的成功来奖励审美策展。像“显化”这样的自助教义承诺，任何人都可以连接到宇宙的能量，并且可以利用这种能量来帮助我们实现今生的目标。

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.
但我们仍然继承了自我创造传统的双重有害假设：我们天生的特殊人格是我们力量的源泉（它们使我们与平凡的、“基本的”或“绵羊”区分开来），如果我们没有过上最好的生活，成为最好的自己，那是因为我们不够努力， 还不够想要它。为了文化和经济上的成功而创造自己的自我的需求已经将我们所有人都变成了商品：因为我们拼命地试图证明我们——而且只有我们——是有价值的原创者，是有权决定自己生活的半神人。我们已经忘记了道格拉斯所知道的真理，即“正确地说，世界上没有白手起家的人”，我们都依赖他人，依靠我们的家庭和社区以及语言和故事的广阔共同政体来了解我们自己。

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.
再多的抗衰老技术、数字过滤或自信的“表现”都无法改变这一点。作为完全的人类，需要认识到我们实际上不是神。即使是我们中间最成功或最有主见的人，仍然容易受到其他人的影响和服从——他们造就了我们，即使我们造就了他们。关于我们真实身份的故事比我们最想成为谁的幻想更复杂，也更丰富。

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.
塔拉·伊莎贝拉·伯顿（Tara Isabella Burton）是三部小说的作者，包括即将出版的《在阿瓦隆》（Here In Avalon）和两本非小说类书籍，包括《白手起家：从达芬奇到卡戴珊家族创造我们的身份》（阿歇特，2023 年），本文经许可改编自该书。