“Technology has wrought a radical transformation in the day-by-day existence of man in his environment; it has forced his mode of work and his society into entirely new channels: the channels of mass-production, the metamorphosis of his whole existence into a technically perfect piece of machinery and of the planet into a single great factory. In the process man has been and is being deprived of all roots. He is becoming a dweller on the earth with no home. He is losing the continuity of tradition. The spirit is being reduced to the learning of facts and training for utilitarian functions.
In its first effects this age of metamorphosis is disastrous. We are living today in the impossibility of finding a legitimate form of life. Little that is true and trustworthy and that could sustain the individual in his self-consciousness comes to us out of the contemporary world.
Hence the individual is either overcome by a profound dissatisfaction with himself, or he delivers himself up in self-oblivion to become a functional component of the machine, to abandon himself unthinking to his vital existence, which has become impersonal, to lose the horizon of past and future and shrink into a narrow present, untrue to himself, barterable and available for any purpose asked of him, under the evil spell of unquestioned, untested, static, undialectic and easily interchangeable pseudo-certainties.
But whoever retains in himself the troubled mind that comes from dissatisfaction becomes perpetually false to himself. He is compelled to live in masks and to change the masks according to the situation and the people with whom he is dealing. He speaks entirely in terms of the ‘as if’ and does not gain himself, because in the end, thanks to all the masks, he does not know who he really is.”
authenticity