Becker, drawing on Kierkegaard, argues that "character" is a defensive structure the child builds before he has the freedom or self-knowledge to choose it. Because it forms unconsciously, in response to the parents and to existential dread, the child ends up encased in his own armor — unable to see past it, into himself, or into the possibilities of his own life.
The result is the "inauthentic" man: someone who lives by imitation, recognizes himself only through externals, and never becomes a self at all. Kierkegaard's portrait of the "immediate man" follows.
Kierkegaard understood that the lie of character is built up because the child needs to adjust to the world, to the parents, and to his own existential dilemmas. It is built up before the child has a chance to learn about himself in an open or free way, and thus character defenses are automatic and unconscious. The problem is that the child becomes dependent on them and comes to be encased in his own character armor, unable to see freely beyond his own prison or into himself, into the defenses he is using, the things that are determining his unfreedom.
The best that the child can hope is that his shut-upness will not be of the "mistaken" or massive kind, in which his character is too fearful of the world to be able to open itself to the possibilities of experience. But that depends largely on the parents, on accidents of the environment, as Kierkegaard knew. Most people have parents who have "incurred a great accountability," and so they are obliged to shut themselves off from possibility.
Kierkegaard gives us some portrait sketches of the styles of denying possibility, or the lies of character — which is the same thing. He is intent on describing what we today call "inauthentic" men, men who avoid developing their own uniqueness; they follow out the styles of automatic and uncritical living in which they were conditioned as children. They are "inauthentic" in that they do not belong to themselves, are not "their own" person, do not act from their own center, do not see reality on its terms; they are the one-dimensional men totally immersed in the fictional games being played in their society, unable to transcend their social conditioning: the corporation men in the West, the bureaucrats in the East, the tribal men locked up in tradition — man everywhere who doesn't understand what it means to think for himself and who, if he did, would shrink back at the idea of such audacity and exposure. Kierkegaard gives us a description of
the immediate man … his self or he himself is a something included along with "the other" in the compass of the temporal and the worldly. … Thus the self coheres immediately with "the other," wishing, desiring, enjoying, etc., but passively; … he manages to imitate the other men, noting how they manage to live, and so he too lives after a sort. In Christendom he too is a Christian, goes to church every Sunday, hears and understands the parson, yea, they understand one another; he dies; the parson introduces him into eternity for the price of $10 — but a self he was not, and a self he did not become… . For the immediate man does not recognize his self, he recognizes himself only by his dress, … he recognizes that he has a self only by externals.