Love Outside The Public Domain

"In community groups, for instance, people feel they need to get to know each other as persons in order to act together; they then get caught up in immobilizing processes of revealing themselves to each other as persons, and gradually lose desire to act together.
The desire to reveal one's personality in social dealings, and to measure social action itself in terms of what it shows of the personalities of others, can be labeled in two ways, It is first a desire to authenticate oneself as a social actor through display of one;s personal qualities. What makes an action good (that is authetic) is the character of those who engage in it , not the action itself. When some one person is judged to be authentic or when society as a whole is described as creating problems of human authenticity, the language reveals one way in which social action is being devaluated in the process of placing more weight on psychological matters. As a matter of common sense we know that good men perform bad act, but this language of authenticity makes it hard for us to use common sense." p.11