> Oh darn...I am not being authentic, just
> reacting...and that's the problem. Now where can I
> learn about being authentic??????????????? Is there a
> class I can take on that?
Classes (very easy to find in contemporary North America) that treat Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault as gospel might be to your taste. I've pointed to what Nietzsche and Foucault regard as "authenticity." You can find Heidegger's version of this spelled out in his "reading" of a brief passage from Antigone. (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 158-76) Here's a sample:
"Humanity is violence-doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the overwhelming. Because it is doubly _deinon_ in an originally united sense, it is _to deinotaton_, the most violent: violence doing in the midst of the overwhelming." p. 160
This, I take it, is "the inner truth and greatness" of National Socialism (p. 213).
Neitzsche and Foucault claim that radical skepticism including the treatment of values as wholly subjective is the product of the working of this "authenticity." They also claim (inconsistently as Heidegger points out in the case of Nietzsche (pp. 213-4)) that this (radical skepticism) frees us for guilt free enjoyment of this "authenticity" - "the primordial pleasure to be found in causing pain."
Ted