When your authenticity is an act, something’s gone wrong
Authenticity, a virtue often praised, can paradoxically become a performance. When genuine self-expression morphs into a rehearsed act, it's a sign that something has gone awry. Let's delve into the complexities of authenticity and its potential pitfalls.
Authenticity is changing
Today, there is little premium placed on being authentic
- As an ethical ideal – as a standard of what it is good to be, both in the way that we relate to ourselves and others – authenticity means more than self-consistency or a lack of pretentiousness
- It also concerns features of the inner life that define us
- Society erects barriers that the authentic person must break through
- Finding your true self means self-reflection, engaging in candid self-appraisal and seeking ‘genuine self-knowledge’
- Authenticity in this ethical sense had a critical edge, standing against and challenging the utilitarian practices and conformist tendencies of the conventional social and economic order
Performing your difference isn’t a zero-sum game
It is a competition for scarce attention that requires continuous assessment and feedback
In his powerful critique The Ethics of Authenticity (1991), Taylor argues that our contemporary culture of self-fulfilment and unfettered choice is built, in part, on “trivialized” and “self-centred modes of authenticity.”
“Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self” – demands of society, nature, tradition, God or the bonds of solidarity.
- To bracket them off, he continues, “would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters”.
- The performative mode is a further flight into atomism and away from stable frameworks and sources of meaning.
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