Authenticity
is incredibly important. To me, authenticity comes when your thoughts,
your words, and your deeds have some relation to each other. It comes
when there’s a real organic relationship between the way you think, the
way you talk, and the way you act. You have to fight for authenticity
all the time in this world, and if you don’t fight for it you will get
derailed…
Some people are afraid to think, because thinking can present
problems. When you have thoughts, you have to decide what to do with
them. We can save them and take them to a therapist, or we can go to a
bar and drink them away, or we can talk about them. But immediately we
have to deal with self-censorship. Talking honestly can have
consequences. Take an easy example. If you’re involved in a
relationship and there’s something bothering you about the relationship,
and you tell the other person your thoughts, that may be the end of the
relationship. You’re in a funny bind because if you talk about it you
may risk the relationship, but if you don’t talk about it you know that
down the road the same problem will be there. What do you do?
Authenticity is about making that decision.
Then once you’ve said something, the question is, ‘What are you going
to do about it?’ A lot of people don’t do anything. Trying to be
authentic is another way of saying you are struggling to let out the
best part of who you are, the part that will act and take risks. We all
have a choice: we can choose to be made by history, or we can choose
to participate in making history.
Abe Osheroff: On The Joys and Risks of Living Authentically in the Empire (Robert Jensen, 2005)
Use the link below to read the full June 2005 interview with North American dissident and social activist ABE OSHEROFF:
https://robertwjensen.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Abe-Osheroff-interview-by-Robert-Jensen.pdf
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