The Problem with Self-Help | The Authenticity Scam"

Self-Help and the True Self

it feels like self-help books are going through a bit of a boom at the moment and I have read a surprising amount of

them like anyone I go through difficult periods and at one point I thought that these books might contain the answers

that I sought some of them were genuinely helpful and although I don't revisit them that often now a few hold a

special place in my heart however one particular idea just kept cropping up

many of these books would reference a nebulous idea of living authentically they seems to treat the human being as

composed of two parts there is the outer shell a superficial layer that keeps us

all unhappy but underneath that there is a golden core and if we could just

discover this core then we would finally find peace and also somehow achieve

extreme worldly success I've seen this concept become even more influential over the last few years and it does

often crop up on social media where various influencers will teach you how to become your true self often for a

handy fee this whole idea struck me as quite suspect and so this video is

something of a pmic I want to drag what I think is a crude and potentially destructive concept out into the sun in

order to examine how it has become so unhelpful and how we might be able to

rescue it also I want to give a huge shout out to the book authenticity as an

ethical ideal by Simi varaga as it was immensely helpful when writing this video and has fundamentally shaped my

own ideas about authenticity in countless ways I won't be able to go too far into the specifics of his ideas here

but I do highly encourage you to give him a read for yourself but what do these self-help authors tend to mean

when they say authentic and how does this differ from how the concept has been used elsewhere my name is Joe Folly

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anyway back to the video One authenticity initial

Authenticity: Initial Conceptions

conceptions historically being auth authentic has meant a variety of different things many Christian thinkers

like St Augustine or kard considered authenticity to be very closely linked to a relationship with God and that it

was found partly within but also with this connection to a higher power someone like diogenes the cynic thought

that authentic Behavior was closely aligned with what he considered natural for humans to do as well as abiding by a

certain set of ethical and aesthetic principles in his book Vara notes that

most modern ideas about authenticity fall into roughly two camps the inner

sense camp and the productionist camp we'll definitely be visiting the productionist later in the video but

most forms of authenticity in self-help literature and in popular discourse fall into this inner sense cap very broadly

inner sense authenticity defines being authentic as being aligned with some

deep inner you that you can commune with purely by reflecting on yourself or or

looking inward hence in a sense varer traces this idea back at least as far as

rouso and it is very much in line with how many people use the term today in will store's book selfie he says the

following about the ideal put forward by authenticity focused self-help culture

the ideal self enjoys thinking it's in some way unique that it's trying to make

the world a better place and one of the traits it'll value highly is that of personal authenticity or being real

it'll preach that in order to find happiness and success you must be true to yourself and follow your dreams he

later expands upon this with ideas from various influential Originators of the modern self-help movement principally

authenticity is intended to borrow through to each other's perfect core

leading to breakthrough and transformation the idea here is pretty simple a real self is posited that

represents the true us this is what all of our Quests for authenticity are aiming at crucially this is not about

crafting a self or developing a particular character out of choice it is about Discovery we find this discovery

based language all through popular culture it has even become cliche that a young person embarking on a traveling

adventure will say that they are going to find themselves on this picture the authentic self is meant to already be

inside you just waiting for you to uncover it as we will see this is pretty

different to the way many philosophers like haiger or satra tended to talk about authenticity but I'm getting ahead

of myself here it's also worth noting that this image of authenticity is often

not explicitly argue for but is instead working in the background to a greater

or lesser extent it's more of an underlying assumption than a definite conclusion or a thesis another important

component to our popular conception of authenticity is that it's an ethical goal to strive

for we are told that being authentic is better than being inauthentic both in

the sense that we will be happier and healthier but also that it is more honest to call someone fake or

inauthentic is not just telling them that their way of life will not make them fulfilled in the long term it is to

say that they are in some sense bad this does not always stretch as far as calling them evil or anything like that

but it does seow some suspicion on their character this is again very different

to how inauthenticity has been portrayed elsewhere in Leo tolstoy's classic Nolla

The Death of Ivan ilich the anonomous lead wastes his entire life just

following societal expectations until he realizes that he will die having never

asked what he wanted but Tolstoy doesn't say that Ivan ilich is a bad person he

is a tragic figure we mourn for him we don't condemn him our modern concept of

inauthenticity has advanced from being an unfortunate personal blind spot to a

downright moral failing this is pretty noteworthy and we'll be revisiting it later in the video when we examine the

pressures to be authentic in the modern world as Vara points out the true self

is also often associated with being uncorrupted by interaction with others or with society as a whole it is

sometimes identified with an infant or a child a singular individual who has not yet

taken up any role in constructing or maintaining a social web or a network of

relationships there is this implicit assumption that what is within is the true you and that this personal truth

can be defined separate to any participation in a social system the true self is broadly seen as unchanging

and is thought to reflect a permanent core around which the more ephemeral parts of you are wrapped and of course

being aligned with this inner self is supposed to Grant you great peace it is

sometimes pitched as a sort of psychological Panacea getting in touch with the real you is the thing that will

finally solve all your problems by contrast being out of line with the true

self is sure to bring you misery and suffering I also want to point out that

this veneration of authenticity is not based on nothing it has been repeatedly shown that when people behave

authentically they report higher levels of happiness or well-being however things get complicated because the

definitions of authenticity used in many empirical studies is often much more subtle than this inner sense View and

tends to instead refer to the consistency of values with behavior or something like that this is very

different to the idea that we have a true self that we must discover within

us also generally having looked through a lot of Empirical research papers for

this video there is some disagreement between the definitions used in each study which can make it difficult to see

exactly what is being studied and to draw conclusions between different studies sometimes the congruence of

authenticity is between inner feelings and outer Behavior sometimes it's more values based and sometimes a wider idea

of self-enhancement is used this makes it difficult to confidently put forward a single unified definition for

authenticity in empirical psychology but in almost all cases the definition is

far more complex than just coherence with a true inner self working behind the scenes for example Corey Gunther

links authenticity to a sense of self-development that is self-perceived

authenticness is not just a matter of reflecting something within but improving oneself as well overall it is

the simplistic inner sense idea of authenticity that I want to criticize in

short this is the theory that there's a permanent underlying self behind all of our actions and that if we align

ourselves with this self it will necessarily have a large part in solving our psychological problems moreover this

true self is formed in isolation is broadly unchanging and is set apart from

social fabrics and being true to it is a moral imperative and an ethical goal so

I'm going to start by critiquing the actual tenability of this picture of the human mind and then move on to disputing

its ethical value and this will involve stepping outside merely Western philosophy and looking at one of the

most influential thinkers to have ever lived two the myth of the true self of

The Myth of the True Self

all the beliefs of early Buddhism there is one that stands out for its philosophical Innovation and precise

analytic structure the idea that there is no permanent self and that it is at

best a pragmatic falsehood and at worst a dangerous illusion in various

different sutas or sutras the Buddha goes through the different aspects of what we call ourselves and demonstrates

how none of them are permanent and so cannot be identified with this single unchanging eye or ego take our feelings

for example they are in constant flux and so they can't be the true permanent

us the same goes for our body since it to develops and changes our perceptions

can't be us nor can our desires be since they too morph and fade and reemerge

lastly even our base level awareness or Consciousness can't be us since things

flit in and out of that awareness all the time even if we say that there is some permanent thing that is

experiencing the awareness this is such a minimal notion of the self that we can't really hang anything on it the

Buddha thus argues that searching for a permanent inner self is a lost cause

something like this simply does not exist our perceptions desires feelings

and thoughts are no more this permanent inner core than the trees outside or the

clouds above over 2,000 years later the empiricist philosopher David Hume would

come up with quite a similar idea called bundle Theory this is the notion that what we call us is not one enduring

thing but an everchanging Mass or bundle of experiences memories and perceptions

varer himself also critiques inner sense views of authenticity but from a slightly different angle he does not

want to claim that an inner self is incoherent but he points out that the components of our minds can either be

identified with or not identified with based on someone's personal values and

that this seems like an extremely relevant Factor if we're going to Define an authentic self an extreme example of

this is the phenomenon of intrusive thoughts when someone has an intrusive thought it is often rather disturbing

and it's one that they don't explicitly identify with like the urge to Hur yourself off a ledge or to do someone

extreme harm to use another example when I'm angry I might get the urge to hit

someone but I deliberately seize control of that desire and quell it rejecting it

from whatever I call I there is clearly something that separates what we consider authentically us from the rest

of our mental architecture and it seems like establishing this distinction will involve the endorsement or rejection of

certain inner properties based on the agent's values put a pin in this idea of values as we will definitely be coming

back to it later even by itself this already complicates the inner sense view

that we discussed in the previous section because whether or not you indorse a particular aspect of your

inner world seems to at least partly be a matter of choice in the case of me wanting to hit someone I can either

choose to identify that urge with me and either say I will hit this person or I

really ought to hit this person or I can re the desire in there is at least part of my self that I don't discover but

create this is a very different view of authenticity that varaga calls the

productionist account in its most extreme form a productionist claims that we don't find ourselves at all but we

create our eles in practice there aren't many total productionist but some

thinkers at least along productionist lines are Fric nich and Jean Paul satra

much of n's philosophical project involves crafting your life until it is a work of art and creating your own

values in a vital active way he did not think that you discovered who you were

but became who you were by acting and creating in the world he encouraged

outright experimentation with the self and the gradual alignment of the different aspects of our Wills until

they are all pointed broadly in a single Direction sra's existential authenticity

is perhaps even more explicit it involves recognizing the radical freedom

in your choices that in any situation you are not technically Bound by your

social roles or your past or anything else really you could choose to act

however you want and it is in the choices that you make that you craft the

project of your life again here authenticity is not finding a self

within but making a self by acting and deciding for satra how you choose to act

in full consciousness of your extreme Freedom just is authentically you he was

very skeptical at using an inner sense to detect some kind of true self separate from this since he thought that

the human capacity for self-deception was just incred large to quote him

directly feelings are developed from the actions we take I shouldn't seek Within

Myself some authentic state that will compel me to act when most existential

philosophers speak of authenticity they often mean something much closer to this than the popular idea of authenticity

that we discussed earlier in fact satra would condemn that version of authenticity as acting in bad faith to

say that you behave in a certain way because that's just who I am or to say that you have an Inner Essence that you

are bound to is effectively denying freedom and responsibility and playing a

predefined part it just so happens that the part you are playing is some strange perception you have of yourself and that

makes it a bit harder to spot however I do think there is a danger in a purely

productionist model of authenticity as well for example as SRA points out it

seems like we can be deeply wrong about who we are if the past hundred or so

years of psychotherapy and psychology have taught us anything it's that we can form images of ourselves that simply

don't reflect how our minds actually function I might fool myself into thinking that I'm courageous when I'm

actually rather cowardly or I might think that I'm considerate of others where I am actually quite selfish I

cannot count the number of self-professed people Pleasers that I've met who seem anything but as I said

satra also recognized this since he devotes an awful lot of his existentialist project to parts of

ourselves that are defined through our relationship with other people in his play No Exit he explores the torment

that is caused by our need for our self-perception to be agreed upon by our

peers it's very difficult to see yourself as Brave or attractive or lovable if these are not affirmed by the

people around you that you respect this suggests that the self cannot purely be produced by us in the same way that I

produced this script it is not just the product of our decisions but also the social fabric that we are in meshed in

and thus it is not just defined by us but by those around us as well it's

worth noting that this same critique also attacks the pure inner sense idea from the previous section far from there

being this semi innate true self that is corrupted by our interactions with other

people and with Society some parts of us do seem to be inexorably linked with our

cultural and social backdrop at some level we are likely already aware of this while most people don't want to say

an explicit social role like their job is their authentic self we do tend to

admit that even at our deepest levels we are still somewhat shaped by our environment and that includes our social

and cultural context but where you hold the extreme view that there just is no

real inner self or some variant of the productionist framework or just accept

the influence of our social environment this all throws significant doubt onto the standard picture of authenticity

that we use in popular discourse where there is a neat division between an unchanging inner core and one's outer

Behavior or social interactions with any discrepancy between the two immediately being labeled as harmful in authenticity

but beyond these questions about the coherence of our popular view of authenticity we can also evaluate it

from an ethical and a practical perspective because when it's pushed to

its extreme it can encourage a borderline narcissistic view of reality

where the whole world must bow down to your true inner self no matter the cost

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to occasional exclusive content including most recently my full interview with Alex okon three the

The Idolized Self

idolized self along with the idea that the self is something purely internal

comes this further moral division between our true selves and the outside world the world and Society more

generally are seen as inherently oppositional forces to who we are making

the true self inside us good and anything that threatens s it bad again

there is a nugget of truth to this idea it is true that in a lot of social

environments many of us have to stifle our internal feelings thoughts and values to fit in with a wider group the

term emotional labor was coined by Arley Hawk child to describe how service workers have to hide how they are truly

feeling and put on a smile in order to please their customers and how this can be exhausting and alienating over time

there is something about having to consciously hide a mental state that is genuinely unpleasant likewise modern

psychological theories of cognitive dissonance point out that it is painful to have your behavior feelings and

values caught up in webs of contradictions nonetheless the simplified picture of authenticity that

has come to dominate public discourse on the topic can have downright dangerous

consequences here it is clear that being internally out of sync can be be uncomfortable but a dogged pursuit of

this crude sense of authenticity can be just as destructive firstly the

behavioral consequences of acting authentically are going to vary wildly depending on which part of the psyche is

most closely identified with this true self as already discussed a lot of

empirical work in this area is about someone acting in accordance with their values which is a fundamentally ethical

concept and also doesn't seem to be inherently conflicting with any kind of social role or social Duty someone's

Behavior not matching their ethics can happen through a lack of personal self-control or through Temptation

rather than simply due to social pressures if I act outside my values and hurt someone that will make me feel bad

and that unpleasant feeling is not necessarily undesirable but this is very different to someone identifying their

momentto moment feelings or momentto moment desires with their true self or as necessarily stemming from a true self

and this distinction is often sidelined in much of popular discourse feelings are incredibly changeable and acting on

every single one of them is borderline impossible moreover we can have impulses

that are self-destructive or fool ourselves into thinking that we desire something that we actually do not our

immediate desires are not necessarily in our long-term best interests and may even be mimicking what the people around

us desire this is not always always a bad thing but it does muddy the waters when we talk about our true desire or

our heart's desire as these are inseparable from our cultural context and the notion of self-destructive

desires cast out on the idea that being authentically true to our desires is

always going to lead to this psychological Panacea or sense of inner fulfillment it's also worth noting that

feelings and desires are also pretty amoral some of the time as we've already

said you can desire to hit someone or hurt someone or cheat on your partner

infidelity is actually a pretty good example here you can feel attracted to someone else and yet we would say that

expressing or acting on that attraction is a violation of your duties towards your partner and over time will prevent

you from having long-term fulfilling relationships but observations like this become incredibly significant if we're

going to treat this vague inner sense authenticity as a straightfor W moral

goal if we adopt as an axiom that to live authentically is simply better than

to live inauthentically and then begin to identify the true self with our feelings and our desires then this can

very quickly lead to a rather self-centered ethical system if everything is a means to the end of this

inner true self then we essentially have a soft form of egoism you may care about

other people but this is only ever because that reflects the the desires of your true self and since desires can

change those people can be dropped as soon as they lose this utility they have

to your personal Journey or your experience of the world just take a moment to think what a society governed

by this kind of ethical system might look like it would be a sort of allout War where everyone is attempting to

fulfill their own desires bolstered by the idea that this is not just their preference but actively makes them a

better person this is in pretty stark contrast to most philosophical ethical systems which tend

to at least take other people into a c and furthermore just empirically I don't

think that a rugged individualist pursuit of your own goals to the exclusion of all others is a very good

recipe for happiness even if it's wrapped up in this language of authenticity repeated studies and

metaanalyses of psychological literature around happiness and well-being show that caring personal relationships are

an enormous part of a fulfilling life and that acting in service to others often brings Great Joy by contrast an

over fixation on the self is often associated with unpleasant mental States

and sometimes even depression and anxiety this is perhaps unsurprising

almost every ancient spiritual or philosophical system emphasize the importance of service to other people

from the Buddha's metas sua to Christ's position to love one another to Plato's

emphasis on our Collective duties to Doo's later observation that hell is the

inability to love we have always known that serving others is deeply important

for our long-term happiness and to be fair very few of the self-help books

that emphasize authenticity will explicitly talk about breaking agreed upon uncontroversial moral rules in the

pursuit of that authenticity and I'm sure that authors probably do think that the inner self is subject to ethical

laws however these nuances often get lost when the concept seeps into popular

discourse and it is still a straightforward natural consequence of making authenticity a primary ethical

goal it is incredibly easy to just take the rule that being your authentic self

justifies most behaviors and go no further than this also this is just anecdotal but I actually quite regularly

see people use phrases like this is just me or I am just being authentic as moral

exonerator for rude or inconsiderate behavior and it's often only pushed back on when it defies moral Norms in a far

more substantial way again I think this partly stems from the overly simplistic

picture we have of authentic Behavior by treating the inner as necessarily truer

or superior to the alter or the social we can slip into privileging our own

feelings and desires far above other people there is nothing inherently wrong

with looking out for yourself but like many other potentially helpful Concepts

when it is stretched to its extreme it can become destructive both for the agent and for those around them I do

think there is this slightly disingenuous equivocation that sometimes goes on where people will point to the

empirical literature around the benefits of authenticity which are often about acting in accordance with your moral

values to AR you for this other kind of authenticity where the desires of our

true selves are seen as inherently justifying it's a classic case of conflating two terms that actually have

substantially different meanings this perception of the inner self as unchanging in nature also seriously

undermines our idea of personal responsibility for all that it forms the backdrop for a certain subsection of the

self-help Community this idea of the unchanging inner self actually robs us

of almost any power to shape who we are it turns us into this strange victim of

circumstance but not because we are shaped by our social environment or are psychologically predisposed to certain

behaviors but rather because who we truly are has already been defined at

some vague moment in the past and may have even been defined since our birth our job is not to think about who we

want to be since the perfect us already exists deep inside of us we must rather

rather blow off the dust and clear the dirt so that whatever Lies Beneath can shine through I don't think we often

acknowledge just how fundamentally disempowering this is as a picture and beyond that it makes it very difficult

to hold anyone as responsible for their actions provided that they were acting in accordance with this true self that

they cannot change it is an extreme view of our Natures whereby who we are is

essentially totally fixed and cannot be altered either by us or by external

factors this links quite closely with what we said in the last section about endorsement we don't tend to want who we

are to be defined totally separately to what we would endorse or agree with any

notion of authenticity that does not collapse into this kind of amoral egoism and robbing of responsibility must

involve some idea of what we value not just what we happen to desire so

considering all of these criticisms what can we do well constructing a whole new

conception of authenticity from the ground up is obviously beyond the scope of this video but I do want to perhaps

provide a starting point for your own thinking on the topic four Prelude to an

Prelude to an Authenticity of the Future

authenticity of the future so far we've said an awful lot about the harm

authenticity can do but it would also be far too hasty to dismiss the concept out

of hand clearly people do want to be aligned in some way and there are ideas

of authenticity that do not fall prey to the kind of critiques that we've given thus far so let's explore how we might

rescue and resuscitate authenticity firstly we can note that whatever the

authentic we is it will be partly down to us and partly down to our environment

the productionist model of authenticity probably does go too far in granting us the radical unrestrained freedom to

create who we are I cannot simply decide to Value certain things or to desire certain things the human mind is much

more complex than just an agent picking out identities like clothes on a rail

nonetheless The Other Extreme where we have no agency over who we are seems

just as untenable it opens the possibility that our true self just could fly in the face of everything we

value and be incredibly destructive to the people around us if so this is unlike to be a very productive ethical

goal so I would suggest a different approach I don't think we should think

of authenticity as something purely given or purely created but rather as an

aspiration within constraints that sounds a little bit abstract but I think the concept is actually quite intuitive

at one level the authentic self is now more a reflection of our values than who

we are at this very moment for a Christian this might involve a kind of connection with God like we discussed at

the beginning of the video for a stoic this might be imitating the figure of the sage and of stoic virtue for a

Buddhist it might be the aspiration of the Bodhi SATA this is the aspirational

component of authenticity at the same time we must also recognize our personal

limitations be they physical or psychological and whether they are temporary or permanent for example I

really value mathematical and Technical ability but I also recognize that I am no Terren towel and I also just don't

have the time to learn as much math as I would like my ideal is tempered by my awareness of my limits both in terms of

natural ability and also just time constraint this is where the Nugget of Truth in the inner sense model is

important we can look within to become aware of a what we value and B what our

limitations are even if introspection is still fallible it would be far too quick

to dismiss it as a data source this conception of authentic ticity keeps the underlying idea that we are being true

to ourselves when we're being authentic but now it's not because we are simply mirroring some underlying us that is

already there but rather because we are reflecting in the best way that we can

the values we have come to hold dear those values are going to be influenced by the culture and Society we've been

brought up in but we can also deliberate and challenge those influences they are thus partly inherited and partly created

My Hope Is is that this does Justice to the strengths of both the inner sense View and the productionist model while

hopefully avoiding some of their pitfalls Vara goes into much more detail about being in meshed in a particular

social system but I don't necessarily think we need to go that far for our purposes by acknowledging authenticity

as involving personal values and then recognizing that those values are going to be partly inherited from cultural

influence some kind of social aspect is incorporated into the background of our account with the details to be hashed

out later I also want to clarify that when I say values here I mean what varaga would call strong evaluation that

is the belief that something is not just good for you but good in some higher sense whether that is cashed out meta

ethically as objective or not is entirely up to you we can think about it behaviorally as treating it more like a

prescriptive moral than a descriptive preference this values-based picture also more closely reflects the type of

authenticity that has empirically demonstrated positive effects in the psychological literature on the topic

since the definitions used in those papers often do involve heavy reference to values and since we are flawed human

beings muddling our way imperfectly through our mortal coil behaving in accordance with your values is always

going to be partly aspirational if it's taken in its total sense this picture

also dispenses with many of the critiques of the simplistic account of authenticity earlier in in the video for

example that's just who I am can no longer be a moral exonerator since who we currently are is no longer the goal

nor is it considered fixed and permanent instead the equivalent phrase would be I

am acting in accordance with my value system to the absolute best of my ability and of course value systems can

be challenged and debated thus behaving authentically becomes a kind of moral

defense but it's certainly not an impenetrable one and certainly does not alleviate the agent from responsibility

for their actions since value systems are also much more likely to reference other people this is also not as prone

to the more egoistic implications of the true self was inside us all along

picture most people do not think that values are innate but learned and developed over time regardless of

whether you think morality is objective subjective absolute or non-cognitive the

causes of our particular moral beliefs are not given to us from birth and do change with experience and exposure this

reestablishes that someone's authentic self evolves as they interact with the world and with other people it moves

authenticity from something purely within to something deeply connected with our actions in the world this also

rescues the idea that we have a certain amount of agency over who we are since our authentic identities are no longer

fixed but are partly the product of our actions you can Rec recognize this wherever you stand on Free Will and

determinism if you think of agency as just a causal chain that runs through our decision-making processes now you

are no longer stuck with who you are but you become a developing project that nonetheless Works within certain

recognized constraints it's like an artist stumbling across some charcoal and a canvas they can now create a

wonderful charcoal drawing but no matter how hard they tried or how gifted they

were they could not make an oil paint with the available tools we are not simply able to Value whatever we like or

become whoever we want but nor is there some ready-made inner self that we are

powerless to change it is like an Ever evolving dialogue between what is already there and what we would like to

be at The Sweet Spot of that dialogue where we are genuinely doing the best we can to honestly follow our values lies

what we can now call authenticity this idea makes the authentic something we

can strive after yet also something that will mostly be a little bit Out Of Reach I doubt that many of us will ever

perfectly mirror our values but at the same time we can get closer to them and

we can perform them to the best of our abilities this somewhat resembles the Aristotelian idea of personal

development where we work on becoming more virtuous over time rather than simply dividing the world into The unver

Virtuous and The Virtuous and being done with it I also think that that this functions more readily as an ethical

goal as Vara points out the modern concept of authenticity is often turned

into an external performance a similar argument is made by buun chelh Han who describes the pressure that we feel to

be totally authentic and totally transparent to forever be revealing our deepest inner core to the world but

under our new definition of authenticity this demands changes considerably rather

than insisting that people be true to s inner self we would instead be imploring

them to live by their own values this strikes me as a far less Insidious request and if we were to move to this

concept of authenticity then the pressure would only be that people become more true to their moral systems

and we probably want to do that anyway of course there is so much about a new concept of authenticity that I just

don't have the space to discuss here I could discuss the socio existential angles in varga's book or the the notion

of a wholehearted commitment put forward by Harry Frankford but I hope this can serve as a modest starting point for

your own thinking about authenticity and perhaps it can be a small antidote to

the crude way we view being authentic today but if you would like more on

Modern social issues viewed through a philosophical lens then check out my video on the aforementioned Buel Han's

devastating critique of social media and the pressure to be transparen