The Long Con is the sting we pull on ourselves, where we become our own mark which might be why we are able to get others to play along: the self-con generates profound belief by others because we are so trapped in our own pseudo-authenticity. That is, con = confidence: we are so confident in what we have accomplished, how could most not believe what we believe about ourselves.

Nonetheless, as Robert Paul Wolff puts it on his blog the Philosopher’s Stone, “It cannot be repeated too often that no one, absolutely no one, is self-made in any plausible sense of that expression.  For the past million years or more, pre-hominids, hominids, and humans have been coming into a world they did not make and relying for life itself on the accumulated knowledge and material culture produced by their predecessors…”

The idea that some-one is self-made has a lot of legs in the United States. Every person proves his/her worth by what he/she accomplishes on his/her own. A real fidelity to being both a particular self and a partner with others is finding the boundary where singularity & plurality co-constitute each other.

For this reason, I refer to the myth of the self-made person as pseudo-authentic rather than inauthentic. The latter is a positive constitutive factor of how each of us belongs to the plurality. Yes, it is a kind of sleepiness, but it is not the sleep-walking & thinking you are awake that denotes the former state. The person who comes to believe this particular long-con portrays a kind of “knowing,” a particularly gnostic variety of “I know,” that per force sets him/her apart from the crowd as a measure for all. The pseudo-authentic is both an unfaithful ownership of self and a false-owning-up to the plurality.

What’s so strange about the Romney myth is that its grip hasn’t weakened even as it has become less true. The affluence Mitt was born into paid for his elite education and financed his first home. The wealth Tagg stands to inherit has given him the freedom to pursue any career and take any professional risk he wants.

via Mitt, Tagg, And The Romney Family’s Myth Of Self-Reliance | The New Republic.