How Did the Idea of Being "Self-Made" Come About? (w/ Tara Isabella Burton)

Current Affairs

Tara Isabella Burton is a novelist and the author of the new nonfiction book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, a history of the rise of the idea of a curated self. Tara's book looks at the transition from seeing human beings as made by God to being made by our own individual wills. From Renaissance painters to the famous dandy Beau Brummell to Thomas Edison to contemporary Instagram influencers and reality television stars, Tara looks at those who have carefully manufactured the picture of themselves that they show to the rest of the world. Today she joins to discuss whether, in becoming free to "self-make," we have in fact truly been liberated, and what unseen forces shape people's ideas of the selves they ought to become.

“[T]he seemingly liberatory promise that we can create ourselves has, as often as not, been warped into an excuse to create, implicitly or explicitly, two classes of people: those who are capable of shaping their destinies (and who thereby deserve their success) and those who are not (and who deserve nothing). This classification invariably places those who do not fit the dominant physical or cultural mold—women, people of color, the poor, the disabled—in the second category.That is not to say that it would be preferable to reinstate the image of a divine creator-monarch, Thomas Aquinas’s vision of a universe where the laws of the natural world and of the social world are inextricable from one another, where the right of kings to rule is as ingrained in the functioning of our earth as the propensity of heavenly bodies to fall. But we must all ask ourselves what it means—politically, ethically, socially—to live up to Stewart Brand’s predictions that we are as gods, that the world is nothing but what we make of it, and that our choices, our desires, our wanting to be or to have, are the only things that make us human, that make us us. We must, too, ask ourselves how often our desires are stoked by those with a financial interest in making us think that we both can and should shape ourselves, whether they’re selling us self-help manuals or Snake Oil skin cream." — Tara Isabella Burton

Albrecht Dürer's Christlike self-portrait can be seen here. Tara's Current Affairs article "The Making of the Self-Made Man," which previewed some of the ideas discussed in the book, can be read here. Listen to Tara's previous appearance on the podcast, discussing her book Strange Rites, here.