Moxie girls

Dalrock has a post about a brand of dolls called Moxie girls that are marketed with slogans like these:

Playful, silly, and creative, Lexa thinks life is meant to be fun, which means being yourself no matter what!

Every girl has the strength to do something amazing. Anything is possible as long as you stay true to yourself & never give up on your dreams.

I'm going to read some political philosophy into these affirmations. The assumption behind the slogans is that we each have a true self which is fulfilled through some definite end. We do, it seems, have a telos after all.

I have a theory about this, one which I have to admit is untested and highly speculative. If you go back far enough, to the time of philosophical realism, it was thought that there were essences to forms of life. Each form of life would imperfectly fulfil its given essence. That was its telos - its proper end.

Liberals hate - utterly hate - this kind of philosophical realism. They see it as limiting individual autonomy by defining individuals in terms of the unchosen categories they belong to.

And so liberals want individuals to be self-defined through the choices they make. But there's a major problem. If I can choose to define myself equally in any direction, then what I choose will seem subjective and arbitrary and therefore meaningless. What is the benefit of such free choice, if it makes no difference what I choose? It's all very disenchanting.

How can liberals get around this problem? Well, they can claim that one choice is better than another if it makes us happy. Or if it is in line with our self-interest (which injects a certain rationality into our decisions). Or if it is pleasurable (hedonism). Or if it helps perpetuate our genes (again, this gives the appearance of rationality).

But none of this is all that persuasive. It all seems superficial, particularly compared to the more traditional belief that there is a proper end to our being, a realisation of self that fulfils who we are.

So my theory is this. A certain strand in modern thought contains a hidden, modified form of philosophical realism. Yes, the idea that forms of life have an essence has been rejected. But what remains is the idea that individuals (rather than forms of life) have their own unique essence. Essences have been individualised.

So there does exist an "essential self" for our Moxie girls to be true to - one which brings them to some proper end to their lives: their "dream" which is conceived of as a career achievement in a high status creative field such as being a film director, a fashion designer or a song writer.

One problem with this solution to merely arbitrary and subjective choice is that the annointed end has to be both mundane but not mundane. Your proper end cannot be sorting the mail, it has to be something that is notably self-expressive - it has to be "amazing". But that is unavailable to 99% of people.

If you think that I'm reading too much into some feminist inspired dolls, well - you might be right. But even in serious works of liberal philosophy there is a vague assumption at work that self-directed choice has as its ultimate end the realisation of self in a certain kind of career - such as being a violinist, or an aid doctor in Africa.

Anyway, the philosophical problem remains. You cannot impress upon people that they must be authentically themselves, if at the same time you also hold that the self is something that we define or create by ourselves. How can there be an authentic self, if my self is something that I can define however I want?