I didn’t see it mentioned in the comments so I guess I get to be the person to post the quote!

> “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be”

Excerpt From Mother Night Kurt Vonnegut

This is often quoted from Mother Night but it’s actually in the preface so I don’t know how many people actually see it within the work. Anyways, rather than self aggrandizing in the way the linked article is, the story in the book is a cautionary take. The book is about a Nazi propagandist that is secretly an American agent feeding broadcast lines to the Allied forces in subtleties in communicating his propaganda like pauses in between words and other tics.

The idea in the book is what does it matter to be a good person in private but a driver of evil in public? How much bad does it take to outweigh good and if you do bad things to effect something positive, are you absolved of those bad things anyways?

No, I think not. If you do ill to achieve good you are accountable to both. It is easy, sometimes, to imagine that some thing you’ve done has overridden and eliminated some other thing you’ve done but it isn’t really true. You’ve done both. I recognize I’m speaking in circles a little but I think it’s important to confront the idea that the things you’ve done are not undone by other things you’ve done just because you feel the ends have justified the means.

Remember that who you think you are is a private fantasy. Who you actually are is how you are experienced.

  I find the Franklin model far more useful [...] because it gives you agency.

Does it? If our present actions make our future selves, that means our past actions made our present self. The moments in a person's life are a row of dominoes, one causing the next. There is no agency anywhere.

Interesting, this post mentions two views but glosses over what many (most? I don't know) Americans have always believed: That we humans are inherently corrupt and evil by nature and need to be taught to do good and need to have a spiritual rebirth (the term is "born again") to transform our nature. The "born again" part from what I understand is mainly evangelized by protest Christians but the rest is consistent across all denominations.

I know that the percentage of Christians has declined over the years, back in the early days of the country they used to even have mass at congress every Sunday. So, fair to say the amount of Americans who believe this has declined, but still a significant portion.

Nevertheless, Ben Franklin and the rest may have been famous but they by no means reflect the beliefs of the masses at the time. As much as Obama, AOC and Tom Cruise's beliefs don't reflect modern American's views.

It's quite the contrast. across societies, even people isolated from the rest of humanity for thousands of years, you'll find the same moral failures such as murder, rape, invasions and wars of aggression, prejudice,etc.. The view that "the world corrupts us" is hard to buy, even when we have everything we could possibly want (think healthy billionaire good), our moral character doesn't change, even when one is born into that life. Even without considering complexities like the meaning of morality, by a person's own accepted beliefs of morality and ethics, we fail by default. we do what is convenient over what we believe is right.

The title of "You are how you act" is sort of true, but it is more accurate to say "You are how you decide". If we're programs, a program is the instructions it executes. The input data it processes and the execution environment will decide which instructions it processes for sure, and most bugs are triggered by specific input, but that does not change the fact that the bugs exist as an inherent nature of the program. And for us at least, we prefer to execute the most efficient (convenient) instructions instead of the most correct.

I find this shallow and useful for white-washing self.

This line of thinking allows you to frame yourself as good just because you did a couple of arguably good things and blanket the things you did with this couple of "deeds".

The mask becomes the face

Our society lives and breathes this contradiction. We believe in determinism and demands justice. We believe in an omnipotent God and is sinful. On a personal level, there is quite literally nothing "you" can do to change yourself; to change oneself, one has to change to one that changes oneself. This is recursive. Looking at it this way, the important thing is to create an environment, situation, society that makes it easier to change oneself for the better. "Show me the incentives, and I will tell you what happens" as someone might say.

Fake it til you make it is good. But, better yet, we figured out you can just keep faking it until some other sucker wants to hold the bag.

The last psychiatrist talked about narcissism alot and his advice is that if you are a narcissist, the best thing you can do is to 'fake' being a good person. Just do and say the things you think a genuinely caring and sympathetic person would do and say. It won't change you deep down, but it will spare the people in the world around you.

"...a 2016 internal memo written by Facebook executive Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, leaked in 2018, which stated that the company's growth was paramount and that negative consequences, such as harm from bullying or terrorism, were acceptable collateral damage".

Don't submit stuff from this guy, he is an atrocious human being.

I'd say the modern American self is best defined by what you believe how other's perceive you and whether you are popular or not.