Sincerity and Authenticity

"This is a must read for anybody to break free of the chains with which we live in our obsession with sincerity and authenticity, which have unfortunately become enemies of prudence. Trilling shows where these notions come from and how we have been formed today by those origins. Another source for this idea of listening to your heart is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self Reliance . But life isn’t like that. What Trilling explores is the difficulty of that enterprise and the contradictions you fall into. For example, if you believe in the unconscious – Trilling was of course tied to Freud – then how do you trust your impulses when your impulses are creations of God knows what faulty process? So then what material, of what murky and suspicious provenance, are you being sincere and authentic about? Sincerity is simply that you mean what you say. It’s Cordelia again, making telling the truth and making sure you are seen to be a truth teller your most important priority. Authenticity is a more complex notion of being real with respect to who you are, or who you or others think you should be. But this leads to all kinds of difficulties. For example, authenticity is promoted in rap music, which is all about cred. You’re credible because you walk the talk and because of the life you live. You come from the streets and you represent the life of the streets. But there are dilemmas of authenticity within the black community, because the life and the style to which you’re being authentic came from a ghetto created to a large degree by white people – so to a very real degree you’re being authentic to a form of slavery. Then authenticity quickly becomes a style. Once authenticity is codified, and it always becomes codified, nothing becomes easier to counterfeit. The forms of life to which we conform by being authentic are too often not who we really are, and our subservience to them becomes an enemy of prudence – a codified, handed-down version of the self becomes our agenda, not what is actually prudent. To take another example, many women have hurt themselves by being enslaved to the need to be nice, partly in service of the idea that authenticity for a woman means being nice. Femininity has been perceived as being nurturing and nice and sweet and soft. Well it’s lovely to have nice people around, but that perception of niceness and cooperation as a hallmark of womanly authenticity was created by a patriarchy that wanted to disempower women. So the niceness which is seen by many women as a mark of their authenticity can just as easily be seen as a mark of their disempowerment. It’s a pretty cool trick when you can not only oppress someone and get them to use on themselves the tools of their own oppression, but to actually claim those tools as marks of their truest selves. The point is that when you start talking about authenticity you’re walking into a hall of mirrors. It’s terrible when you think that it’s easy – just a matter of following the promptings of the heart. It’s wonderful to stay true to yourself if you can do so without all of the crap – all the illusion, deception, self-deception, ignorance and other things that clutter up the self like a junk shop. Then of course you should be true to yourself. If you like chocolate, chocolate is what you like. There’s not a lot of opportunity for self-deception when it comes to what flavour of dessert you like. But there is when it comes to what wine you like, because we know from tests that people’s preference for the more expensive wine with the famous label is completely at odds with what they prefer in blind tastings. If people don’t even know what wine they like, how are they going to be true to themselves? This is a segue in a sense to my final book."