Last week I realized that today’s rapid cultural evolution, mediated greatly by youth movements, seems encouraged by the common modern norm favoring “authenticity”.
Authenticity is very much like diversity - It's commendable when you disagree with uncool people, but all the cool people still manage to agree about all the important things!
Authenticity seems to be a kind of reflection of subjectivity - the idea that whatever is going on inside yourself (attitudes, beliefs, feelings, personality structures) are of utmost importance and necessarily valid.
I see this trend as connected to the erosion of norms. Norms are social standards. Authenticity/subjectivity are purely internal. Where the two come into conflict, it seems that norms are losing more and more.
I first detected this about 2 years ago. I wrote this brief exploration of our cultural obsession with subjectivity (below), which is more extreme (and pathological) than any kind of civilizational individualism that has probably ever existed. Can we even have a society in which a large number of people are so focused on themselves? It's an open question. I suppose we will find out. I suspect it will leave us increasingly weak and barren and flailing, until we're overtaken by more vigorous (and harmonious) cultures. I hope that's not the case.
I wonder if it’s emerged from increasing individualism, which is seen as important in modern culture because the innovations that produced the modern world came from non-conformists who did their own thing (not caring that it was new and different). Inventors and entrepreneurs being obvious examples, but also scientists, artists, politicians, etc
The crackpot inventor, zany artist, fearless activist/leader, and maverick entrepreneur, who end up changing the world, are modern stereotypes of the benefits of non-conformist authenticity.
Also, wealth enables people to be more authentic, as it makes them less dependent on others, so less needing to conform. Hence the modern world enables authenticity.
Conversely, behaving authentically is a way of signaling wealth, and more broadly status (not needing to care what others think because you’re better than them and don’t need their approval)
According to Skinner, there is no such thing as authenticity as all behavior is reaction to external stimuli. According to Freud, there is only authenticity as all behavior is driven by our depraved sex drive. In the age of Tic Tok and influencers and AI images, authenticity - in the sense of what’s real and what’s not - has been at last mass commercialized. Who says capitalism is not great!
It seems there are two somewhat different senses of the word "authentic".
There is authenticity in terms of products or services we buy or promote. I.e. you prefer organic food, or craft beer, or indie rock as "authentic" compared to their mass produced alternatives. It seems to me this is status signaling more than anything. Now that everyone can afford relatively good food, the status-seekers moved on to *organic* food to set themselves apart. The foodies are at least as conforming as the non-foodies.
Then there is authenticity as in conveying ones true opinions, the "authentic voice". Being authentic tends to benefit others more than it does the individual in question. When you are authentic -- good for you! -- I get better information while you bear any cost of not conforming. This may be one of those areas where we benefit by giving one another bad advice.
Hm. I think Charles Taylor would agree. From what I remember of reading it a 3 years ago, the whole point is to rescue a debased 'you do you' shallow authenticity.
And we're heavily mimetic, Girard's theories are in many ways obviously highly predictive. But there is obviously non trivial mutation or progression amongst culture. This capacity to wrestle with ideas and come out with truth and growth doesn't seem to reduce to internalised conformity performed gracefully.
He tried very hard to make seperate authenticity from a debased 'authenticity'. He was pro authenticty, but anti debased 'authenticity'. The description you give in your post is that of debased 'authenticity'.
It's not the same as weighing up good and bad authenticity and being pro on the whole. Its more like carving out certain parts and being anti and pro. And more importantly, anti debased mimetic self centric authenticity that is described in your post. As opposed to a more helpful authenticity as I point out doesn't seem to just reduced to gracefully performed conformity.
Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D'Ambrosio write about authenticity here: https://philpapers.org/rec/MOESAA (and in a book), suggesting it provided people with the ability to create a stable identity after "sincerity" became untenable. That is, previous to 16-18th centuries, people had a role and could play it sincerely (Smith, Cobbler, etc.) in public. After specialization took off, they argue, people move between more disconnected spheres (medicine, law, work, home, etc.) as well as moving between careers and geographic locations, and the stress of presenting a different self in all of these became too much. So "authenticity" arose as a way of generating an identity from within that can be stable, rather than an identity generated externally by public role. They also argue that authenticity is now breaking down and can / is / should be replaced by "profilicity", or a return to identity defined externally, but now the external definition is driven by the curated profile one creates and maintains online.
If your behavior is impressive and admired, it's even cooler if that behavior "authentic to your true self." You're awesome, naturally, without needing to constrain yourself.
If your behavior is off-putting or despicable (making crude jokes, or pulling the wings of insects), people don't care much about whether it's "authentic" or not. They judge it for being bad.
My solution to what authenticity is good for. Here goes.
I appreciate the questions being discussed here: Is authenticity good? What is it good for? The commentators continually mention that authenticity grows out of individualism. One can then understand authenticity as reifying and confirming individualism. Individualism celebrates values like self-reliance, individual achievement, and, as people here have noted, nonconformity and resisting group norms. So we can ask: what is individualism good for? I can explain how individualism arose in America from 3 sources. This is a well-known account, and I can fill in many more details if anyone is interested.
(1) Individualism was higher in England than in other European cultures during the colonial period. The reason was economic/political considerations that allowed high mobility; entrepreneurship, family farms and local land ownership rather than serfdom and rather than consolidated widespread agriculture.
America was established by migrants from England. People desiring to migrate are already more likely to have the genes that support individualism. Consequently, Americans have more genes related to individualism than China (more L-allele of the serotonin transporter gene; more 7R allele of the dopamine DRD4 gene).
Individualism was then culturally promoted during frontier times as follows:
(2) High mobility due to continued immigration and the need to settle a relatively empty frontier. Here is how individualism was necessary to settle a frontier. You aren't depending on the approval of the village fathers when you set out with your family in a covered wagon. When you enter a frontier village to stock up on supplies, you are interacting with strangers. Your language must be direct, transparent, and you must practice self-promotion; you have hours to establish that you will be a good trading partner, not the years of living with people who have known you your whole life.
Then, in the last century:
(3) Consumerism and capitalism benefit from individualism. Consumerism: buy things to assert your individuality. Andrew Potter discusses this in his book, The Authenticity Hoax, linked in the comments here.
Big businesses in the 20th century, like IBM ("I've been moved") needed high residential mobility to create a hyper-efficient workforce. High residential mobility decimates family relations and rootedness. Result: American-born youth readily move 1000+ miles, while immigrant children stay close to their hometown. American-born youth are several times more likely to be estranged from their parents than youth born outside of America.
The above is a super-short version of why America is so over-the-top individualistic. Once a value rises to prominence, it is hard to dislodge even if it is no longer solving adaptive problems..... but we stil haven't explained authenticity, other than noting that it reifies and promotes individualism. Is authenticity working to promote individualism?
I suggest that Potter is correct that authenticity is a coded message to promote consumerism. But authenticity is also used to encourage people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get over their problems; we use it as an encouraging phrase when people suffer setbacks, but we also promote it to youth when they face setbacks in achieving goals.
Is this what is happening: Individualism is now such a cultural norm that we must promote it to our youth with slogans like "Believe in yourself."?
No, I suggest the reverse direction...Here is the work being done by 'Believe in yourself" admonitions.
"Believe in yourself" is a coded phrase, consistent with the norm of individualism, for the achievement orientation that many cultures strive to instill in youth. Work hard, be agentic, exert effort, all of which serve the individualistic credo: "Achieve!"
But other cultures have their own variation on the need for achievement.
Chinese parents don't tell their children 'Believe in yourself", because they instill "Achieve!" orders via their cultural values of obedience to family, tradition, and paying back the hard work of parents by their own hard work of achieving in school.
American uses "Believe in yourself" as the culturally acceptable instruction to guard against slacking off and low-effort life choices.
But... Cultural forces within China are adopting 'Believe in yourself'; this is one of the themes in the massively successful Chinese movie Ne Zha 2.... globalization of values.]
I haven’t read much on authenticity but it always seemed, at least in current culture, that everything one does is authentic. It’s easier not to conform today compared to previous peasant culture, possibly because there are more cultures/subcultures to gravitate too. But an individual can’t act differently than their biology and neurology so one’s action is exactly who they are.
“Just as the most impressive dancers make their dancing look “effortless”, maybe the most impressive social displays are those that seem to come naturally, with little noticeable effort.”
The concept of ‘sprezzatura’ is useful here - 16th century Spanish courtiers would practice hard to be skilled at fencing, music, dancing etc but also to perform them nonchalantly & effortlessly as if they were natural talents which they hadn’t practiced at all.
The inner-outer metaphor has been popular in psychology for a long time, despite some conceptual problems with distinguishing internally generated (authentic) behavior from externally influenced (inauthentic behavior). One problem, mentioned in the current article, concerns the origins of the inner (authentic) person. Part of the inner person is surely built on genetics, but as Robin notes, some of our internal realities were shaped by the external environment. In The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman describes the Other-Directed person as someone who constantly adapts to the social environment, exhibiting no stable, inner core. He says that the Inner-Directed person, who seems independent and resists peer influence, is someone who was molded strongly by his or her parents. Thus, the strongest environmental influence came at an earlier age. Riesman's Autonomous person, on the other hand, has somehow transcended both early parental influence and peer influence, although Riesman doesn't explain very well how this happens and is even possible. If autonomy exists, maybe that is where authenticity resides.
Another problem with the inner-outer metaphor concerns the absurdity of thinking that any behavior could be strictly the product of either one's inner world or the outer environment. Imagine losing all of your sense organs that tell you what is going on in the environment. What would the inner, authentic self do?
Despite these conceptual problems we all have intuitions about some actions being authentic and others, inauthentic. The question is what authenticity means. I wrote a series of articles for Psychology Today on the inner-outer metaphor and autonomy, which may be relevant to this discussion. So here is my shameless self-promotion:
Good for what? As an ethical pragmatist, I do not describe anything as simply good. Only what things are good for bringing about. But before we can figure out what authenticity might be good for, we need a clear definition if of authenticity.
Maybe read Sartre? I believe he claimed something like 'authenticity is the only valid response to meaningless existence.' Don't remember why.
On the completely opposite foot, proponents of a certain modern spiritual bent define authenticity as that which comes from one's soul, rather than one's ego.
I used LLMs to do a dive on popular subculture terms going back as far as we have records for such sorts of things (seems to be mid to late 1800s) and the most common recurring subculture trope is 'authenticity/sincerity' arising as a trend every 10-20 years. My hypothesis is this has something to do with cycles of simulacra levels.
Time to think Heraclitus not Plato. The claims of authenticity are all based on an essential quiddity argument. There is no there, there. Here, the long history of rhetoric and a more modern example, Wittgenstein’s rejection, for good reasons, the private language argument can help. Note that claims about authenticity are also claims about some true “identity” and end up being both silly and useless.
I wrote this, pretty much as a response/corrective to Taylor and Trilling https://www.amazon.ca/Authenticity-Hoax-Lost-Finding-Ourselves/dp/006125133X
So is authenticity, to the extent it exists, good?
Nice!
Authenticity is very much like diversity - It's commendable when you disagree with uncool people, but all the cool people still manage to agree about all the important things!
Authenticity seems to be a kind of reflection of subjectivity - the idea that whatever is going on inside yourself (attitudes, beliefs, feelings, personality structures) are of utmost importance and necessarily valid.
I see this trend as connected to the erosion of norms. Norms are social standards. Authenticity/subjectivity are purely internal. Where the two come into conflict, it seems that norms are losing more and more.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-war-on-norms
I first detected this about 2 years ago. I wrote this brief exploration of our cultural obsession with subjectivity (below), which is more extreme (and pathological) than any kind of civilizational individualism that has probably ever existed. Can we even have a society in which a large number of people are so focused on themselves? It's an open question. I suppose we will find out. I suspect it will leave us increasingly weak and barren and flailing, until we're overtaken by more vigorous (and harmonious) cultures. I hope that's not the case.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-primacy-of-subjectivity
Yes, we can resist norms more easily when authenticity is prioritized.
I wonder if it’s emerged from increasing individualism, which is seen as important in modern culture because the innovations that produced the modern world came from non-conformists who did their own thing (not caring that it was new and different). Inventors and entrepreneurs being obvious examples, but also scientists, artists, politicians, etc
The crackpot inventor, zany artist, fearless activist/leader, and maverick entrepreneur, who end up changing the world, are modern stereotypes of the benefits of non-conformist authenticity.
Also, wealth enables people to be more authentic, as it makes them less dependent on others, so less needing to conform. Hence the modern world enables authenticity.
Conversely, behaving authentically is a way of signaling wealth, and more broadly status (not needing to care what others think because you’re better than them and don’t need their approval)
According to Skinner, there is no such thing as authenticity as all behavior is reaction to external stimuli. According to Freud, there is only authenticity as all behavior is driven by our depraved sex drive. In the age of Tic Tok and influencers and AI images, authenticity - in the sense of what’s real and what’s not - has been at last mass commercialized. Who says capitalism is not great!
It seems there are two somewhat different senses of the word "authentic".
There is authenticity in terms of products or services we buy or promote. I.e. you prefer organic food, or craft beer, or indie rock as "authentic" compared to their mass produced alternatives. It seems to me this is status signaling more than anything. Now that everyone can afford relatively good food, the status-seekers moved on to *organic* food to set themselves apart. The foodies are at least as conforming as the non-foodies.
Then there is authenticity as in conveying ones true opinions, the "authentic voice". Being authentic tends to benefit others more than it does the individual in question. When you are authentic -- good for you! -- I get better information while you bear any cost of not conforming. This may be one of those areas where we benefit by giving one another bad advice.
Yes authenticity has a positive role in exploration and innovation. But it seems we celebrate it far more than can be explained by that.
Hm. I think Charles Taylor would agree. From what I remember of reading it a 3 years ago, the whole point is to rescue a debased 'you do you' shallow authenticity.
And we're heavily mimetic, Girard's theories are in many ways obviously highly predictive. But there is obviously non trivial mutation or progression amongst culture. This capacity to wrestle with ideas and come out with truth and growth doesn't seem to reduce to internalised conformity performed gracefully.
Taylor tried to distinguish a good from a bad authenticity, but was still pro authenticity.
He tried very hard to make seperate authenticity from a debased 'authenticity'. He was pro authenticty, but anti debased 'authenticity'. The description you give in your post is that of debased 'authenticity'.
It's not the same as weighing up good and bad authenticity and being pro on the whole. Its more like carving out certain parts and being anti and pro. And more importantly, anti debased mimetic self centric authenticity that is described in your post. As opposed to a more helpful authenticity as I point out doesn't seem to just reduced to gracefully performed conformity.
Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D'Ambrosio write about authenticity here: https://philpapers.org/rec/MOESAA (and in a book), suggesting it provided people with the ability to create a stable identity after "sincerity" became untenable. That is, previous to 16-18th centuries, people had a role and could play it sincerely (Smith, Cobbler, etc.) in public. After specialization took off, they argue, people move between more disconnected spheres (medicine, law, work, home, etc.) as well as moving between careers and geographic locations, and the stress of presenting a different self in all of these became too much. So "authenticity" arose as a way of generating an identity from within that can be stable, rather than an identity generated externally by public role. They also argue that authenticity is now breaking down and can / is / should be replaced by "profilicity", or a return to identity defined externally, but now the external definition is driven by the curated profile one creates and maintains online.
I think there's probably a double standard here.
If your behavior is impressive and admired, it's even cooler if that behavior "authentic to your true self." You're awesome, naturally, without needing to constrain yourself.
If your behavior is off-putting or despicable (making crude jokes, or pulling the wings of insects), people don't care much about whether it's "authentic" or not. They judge it for being bad.
My solution to what authenticity is good for. Here goes.
I appreciate the questions being discussed here: Is authenticity good? What is it good for? The commentators continually mention that authenticity grows out of individualism. One can then understand authenticity as reifying and confirming individualism. Individualism celebrates values like self-reliance, individual achievement, and, as people here have noted, nonconformity and resisting group norms. So we can ask: what is individualism good for? I can explain how individualism arose in America from 3 sources. This is a well-known account, and I can fill in many more details if anyone is interested.
(1) Individualism was higher in England than in other European cultures during the colonial period. The reason was economic/political considerations that allowed high mobility; entrepreneurship, family farms and local land ownership rather than serfdom and rather than consolidated widespread agriculture.
America was established by migrants from England. People desiring to migrate are already more likely to have the genes that support individualism. Consequently, Americans have more genes related to individualism than China (more L-allele of the serotonin transporter gene; more 7R allele of the dopamine DRD4 gene).
Individualism was then culturally promoted during frontier times as follows:
(2) High mobility due to continued immigration and the need to settle a relatively empty frontier. Here is how individualism was necessary to settle a frontier. You aren't depending on the approval of the village fathers when you set out with your family in a covered wagon. When you enter a frontier village to stock up on supplies, you are interacting with strangers. Your language must be direct, transparent, and you must practice self-promotion; you have hours to establish that you will be a good trading partner, not the years of living with people who have known you your whole life.
Then, in the last century:
(3) Consumerism and capitalism benefit from individualism. Consumerism: buy things to assert your individuality. Andrew Potter discusses this in his book, The Authenticity Hoax, linked in the comments here.
Big businesses in the 20th century, like IBM ("I've been moved") needed high residential mobility to create a hyper-efficient workforce. High residential mobility decimates family relations and rootedness. Result: American-born youth readily move 1000+ miles, while immigrant children stay close to their hometown. American-born youth are several times more likely to be estranged from their parents than youth born outside of America.
The above is a super-short version of why America is so over-the-top individualistic. Once a value rises to prominence, it is hard to dislodge even if it is no longer solving adaptive problems..... but we stil haven't explained authenticity, other than noting that it reifies and promotes individualism. Is authenticity working to promote individualism?
I suggest that Potter is correct that authenticity is a coded message to promote consumerism. But authenticity is also used to encourage people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get over their problems; we use it as an encouraging phrase when people suffer setbacks, but we also promote it to youth when they face setbacks in achieving goals.
Is this what is happening: Individualism is now such a cultural norm that we must promote it to our youth with slogans like "Believe in yourself."?
No, I suggest the reverse direction...Here is the work being done by 'Believe in yourself" admonitions.
"Believe in yourself" is a coded phrase, consistent with the norm of individualism, for the achievement orientation that many cultures strive to instill in youth. Work hard, be agentic, exert effort, all of which serve the individualistic credo: "Achieve!"
But other cultures have their own variation on the need for achievement.
Chinese parents don't tell their children 'Believe in yourself", because they instill "Achieve!" orders via their cultural values of obedience to family, tradition, and paying back the hard work of parents by their own hard work of achieving in school.
American uses "Believe in yourself" as the culturally acceptable instruction to guard against slacking off and low-effort life choices.
But... Cultural forces within China are adopting 'Believe in yourself'; this is one of the themes in the massively successful Chinese movie Ne Zha 2.... globalization of values.]
I haven’t read much on authenticity but it always seemed, at least in current culture, that everything one does is authentic. It’s easier not to conform today compared to previous peasant culture, possibly because there are more cultures/subcultures to gravitate too. But an individual can’t act differently than their biology and neurology so one’s action is exactly who they are.
“Just as the most impressive dancers make their dancing look “effortless”, maybe the most impressive social displays are those that seem to come naturally, with little noticeable effort.”
The concept of ‘sprezzatura’ is useful here - 16th century Spanish courtiers would practice hard to be skilled at fencing, music, dancing etc but also to perform them nonchalantly & effortlessly as if they were natural talents which they hadn’t practiced at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprezzatura
The inner-outer metaphor has been popular in psychology for a long time, despite some conceptual problems with distinguishing internally generated (authentic) behavior from externally influenced (inauthentic behavior). One problem, mentioned in the current article, concerns the origins of the inner (authentic) person. Part of the inner person is surely built on genetics, but as Robin notes, some of our internal realities were shaped by the external environment. In The Lonely Crowd, David Riesman describes the Other-Directed person as someone who constantly adapts to the social environment, exhibiting no stable, inner core. He says that the Inner-Directed person, who seems independent and resists peer influence, is someone who was molded strongly by his or her parents. Thus, the strongest environmental influence came at an earlier age. Riesman's Autonomous person, on the other hand, has somehow transcended both early parental influence and peer influence, although Riesman doesn't explain very well how this happens and is even possible. If autonomy exists, maybe that is where authenticity resides.
Another problem with the inner-outer metaphor concerns the absurdity of thinking that any behavior could be strictly the product of either one's inner world or the outer environment. Imagine losing all of your sense organs that tell you what is going on in the environment. What would the inner, authentic self do?
Despite these conceptual problems we all have intuitions about some actions being authentic and others, inauthentic. The question is what authenticity means. I wrote a series of articles for Psychology Today on the inner-outer metaphor and autonomy, which may be relevant to this discussion. So here is my shameless self-promotion:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/202006/what-is-autonomy-and-why-is-it-so-difficult-to-achieve
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/202211/science-supports-the-usefulness-knowing-how-respond-expectations
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/202212/where-do-your-expectations-yourself-come
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/202301/the-development-of-responsiveness-to-outer-expectations
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/202304/the-role-of-autonomy-in-moral-behavior
So is authenticity good, and if so why?
Good for what? As an ethical pragmatist, I do not describe anything as simply good. Only what things are good for bringing about. But before we can figure out what authenticity might be good for, we need a clear definition if of authenticity.
Maybe read Sartre? I believe he claimed something like 'authenticity is the only valid response to meaningless existence.' Don't remember why.
On the completely opposite foot, proponents of a certain modern spiritual bent define authenticity as that which comes from one's soul, rather than one's ego.
I used LLMs to do a dive on popular subculture terms going back as far as we have records for such sorts of things (seems to be mid to late 1800s) and the most common recurring subculture trope is 'authenticity/sincerity' arising as a trend every 10-20 years. My hypothesis is this has something to do with cycles of simulacra levels.
Time to think Heraclitus not Plato. The claims of authenticity are all based on an essential quiddity argument. There is no there, there. Here, the long history of rhetoric and a more modern example, Wittgenstein’s rejection, for good reasons, the private language argument can help. Note that claims about authenticity are also claims about some true “identity” and end up being both silly and useless.