The (Great) Authenticity Myth, Pt. 4 – It might be the opposite of what you’ve accepted

Authenticity is the finding and actualisation of a real you, an inner you, your identity… we are told by the great murmuration of populist opinion. I’m referring to recent ‘Western’ populism here. Remember the ‘bring your whole self to work’ thing, before COVID threw a bag of spanners in the works? It’s the base marketing message of many self-help/ coach gurus, and often involves a lot of jet fuel being burned in the pursuit of ‘you’.

The cult of authenticity usually comes with the nebulous mantra of ‘change’, or some kind of development or journey. It assumes that that one isn’t already being authentic. I say that what one begins to sense is that life, work, and the pursuit of the buying of things to demonstrate ‘success’ is what’s actually happening. That’s not a lack of authenticity, it’s a realisation that you’ve been had, and so has everyone else.

We are all authentic, all the time, no matter what we’re doing or how we’re being. I’ve made this statement often. You are you, authentically. You might be doing things and living in a way that you’ve glimpsed are not as under your own control as you’d been conditioned to believe, but there you are, you, authentic you. We are thrown into the world, into a situation we did not choose, and we learn to navigate it according to the norms and customs that prevail in our short and narrow biological existence. We have small genetic differences that can have a large effect on our experience of being alive. ?The structures (social norms, culture, social strata, wealth, nationality, time and place, etc.) into which we are thrown, and live, will have a big say in what those effects are (part of the field of epigenetics).

Our time alive looms extremely large upon the importance, and apparent permanence of the phenomena we encounter. We are understandably prone to presentism. This presentism is largely a generational, and regional, experience of the structures already in place. Technology has a lot to do with paradigm shifts in these structures. Farming, smelting, literacy, seafaring, swords, building technologies, guns, bombs, drones, and the internet, for example. There are social shifts in how we make sense of natural and social phenomena: animism, Gods, God, reason and enlightenment, science, etc. As a person living in a particular time and place, however, one ‘more or less’ is going to experience a feeling of ‘this is just the way it is; always was, always will be – only the foolish try to swim against the tide.

Thus, apart from some forms of a priori (already there) sensory encoding (which can also be altered by the structures in which we live), we are being authentically us if we mostly acquiesce to the status quo of our social norms. These are what make us us. The spasms of cults like “authenticity” and “individualism” are at best a reminder that we are overwhelmed by our social and structural norms. At worst, they are ways in which the antibodies of monopoly consumerist capitalism identify those who are silly enough to believe that being ‘different’ is a good idea. Being different, and it working for you, requires a bit of chutzpah and some panache, it must become comfortably embedded and needs an attitude of ‘so what’, that one maintains naturally. It won’t save you when the chips are down, it will make you a target, but hey.

Our presentism is now entangled with a few competing ideologies spread across the world by our technologically enabled interconnectedness. American monopoly consumerist capitalism is the most pernicious as it has the best weaponry and control of mass media. It has also co-opted, and hideously corrupted, Christianity. European forms of capitalism were pretty much the same but lacked the reach that technology has given this latest incarnation.? So, what does this mean for our authenticity – this inner thing that we’re all supposed to have and is different from every other individual that ever was, is, and will be? What does this mean for our various identification with different groups of so-called unique individuals?

I’ll fess up. I’m problematising for my current thesis. I mentioned it before recently: a philosophy master's degree, by thesis. This newsletter is a great way to get my thinking organised without constant interruptions of citations and formal academic writing style. I can get my thoughts out in a way that reacts to what I’ve heard (mostly heard) and read, around my interest in Distantiality (abst?ndigkeit), authenticity, and Das Man (the ‘Them’), which were important in my last thesis for my psychology master’s degree in psychology, a couple of years ago. I love being free of the overbearing slavishness of positivist leaning Cartesian dualist, enlightenment-drenched, medicalised ‘scienceisation’ that is psychology…

So, I travel from Kant, through Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, through but not out of existentialism, and into structuralism. I’m wandering about between the early 20th century and the present. I’ve lingered with the Frankfurt School and the revision of Marx into something that considers the stickiness of the presentism of large generational and situational cohorts. I’m currently with Herbert Marcuse and The Great Refusal. Do I have an inkling that intersubjectivity is going to play a role? Maybe, it’s a bit categorising for me. I realise that I’m making what could be, fairly construed as a structuralist argument here, but I think that’s valid in the context of explicating the idea of authenticity in relation to the action of social norms on lived experience and agency (put very clumsily, but hopefully it’s OK).

The Great Refusal, Herbert Marcuse. This is where I’m getting to with this one. It’s one of the ways individuals can react well, once they come to realise how they are living, and what they’ve accepted as “what is”. It also contains, as an idea, a warning not to become a new version of the thing one would react against. Not to become an oppressed (of the structure), turned oppressor (of those still in its thrall).

The Great Refusal is not a refusal to engage with our thrownness and the structures that have made us, it is a call, at an individual level, to constantly re-assess the level of assimilation and usurpation we accept. How much of what we do, and will say, with certainty, is “Das Man” (the ‘Them’, of ‘as they say’). The ‘way of the world, as proliferated by The Culture Industry, is the acceptance that life is birth, procreation, work, and consumption. The buying of things is the means of both leisure and display of success within the capitalist structure. The role of The Culture Industry in this is to supply the repeated messages that pacify us, sedate us, and allow us to accept the adult situation of the cycle of work, and consumption – repeat. Procreation is required to pay for the continuous growth inherent in capitalism, and fear of death props up large parts of it.

Authenticity is probably the opposite of what you have been persuaded it is. It is the acceptance of the present situation and a sinking, gravity-like, toward the centre of whatever is being fed to you by the multi-media machine you have programmed with your own data. Authenticity is what you are, right now, and at every moment. It can also be you realising what’s happening, and deciding to decide on what is more useful, meaningful, and less a display at winning a particular heat of the rat race.

Authenticity is you, in each moment. The structures in which you learned to navigate life are you. Perhaps we need another word… that is not ‘woke’… Perhaps it’s something like decerning, or just ‘thoughtful’?

As I say, I’m problematising. I haven’t intended to reach a great crescendo of wisdom and arrive at a pinnacle of clear and certain advice. The journey continues. I hope I’ve caused you to have your own thoughts about how much you are authentically subsumed into the world you were, and continue to be, to be thrown into, and how much of what you think and/ or say, is an automatic acceptance of “what is”.