Authenticity (in life, politics, and philosophy)

Scientific American brings us a column by Jennifer Beer on The Inconvenient Truth about Your “Authentic” Self 03/05/2020. Pointing out that authenticity is not only considered desirable but that "feelings of authenticity" have been shown to have demonstrable benefits to individuals, she writes:

... authenticity is a slippery thing. Although most people would define authenticity as acting in accordance with your idiosyncratic set of values and qualities, research has shown that people feel most authentic when they conform to a particular set of socially approved qualities, such as being extroverted, emotionally stable, conscientious, intellectual and agreeable.

This is the paradox of authenticity: In order to reap the many of the benefits of feeling authentic, you may have to betray your true nature. [my emphasis]

Authenticity is perceived as being true to one's convictions and values for example, but that is not the same as being perceived by others as "authentic" or feeling oneself to be authentic.

She is working with an understanding of authenticity that is consistent with the sense of internal consistency, honesty and genuineness, as opposed to hypocrisy, deviousness, pretentiousness, or phoniness:

From a psychological science standpoint, a person is considered authentic if she meets certain criteria. Authentic people have considerable self-knowledge and are motivated to learn more about themselves. They are equally interested in understanding their strengths and weaknesses, and they are willing to honestly reflect on feedback regardless of whether it is flattering or unflattering.

Most important, authentic people behave in line with their unique values and qualities even if those idiosyncrasies may conflict with social conventions or other external influences. [my emphasis]

And there is the catch. Because people are social animals and the daily-life concepts of authenticity are produced by social discourse, the feeling of authenticity is defined by individuals to a major degree by whether they are conforming to the expectations in their social environment of what is right and important and therefore genuine.

We could take that to mean that for a person to be "authentic" in situations where they are defying the immediate social consensus, they have to be willing to feel "inauthentic" in those situations.

I tend to think that "authenticity" in politics is greatly overrated. Whether a politician is sincere in wanting to enact a policy I think is good is considerably less important than whether they get it passed. In any case, what most elected officials have to decide most of the time is not especially ideological. If we think of a planning commission in a large city, for instance, development decision can be very important and consequential. Especially if they involve critical infrastructure, like the water supply or schools. But if we looked a list of the thousands of proposals the planning commission have to make in a year, we would be hard-pressed to decide for most of them which decision was liberal or conservative, left or right, more or less environmentally sound. Whether a strip-mall should be slightly bigger or a little smaller is hard to treat as a clear ideological matter. Even if we took the time to dig into the details, which basically only the developer proposing it and the city staff reviewing it actually know.

In the current Presidential campaign, we've have some examples of more or less "authenticity" in style from candidates. Pete "Mayor Winecave" Buttigieg sounds like a perky android who bounces from one position to another with every shift in the big-donor winds. That tends to be coded as "inauthentic". Bernie Sanders is on the other end of that spectrum with his gruff but engaging Tio Bernie presentation of himself, boosted by his long-term consistency on major issues.

Status Quo Joe Biden is very much part of the corporate-donor wing of the party like Buttigieg. But he actually does have an old-fashioned glad-handing, back-slapping politician's style that also can come off as "authentic" because it seems friendly and familiar. Even his gaffes can sound "authentic", when they don't come in the form of garbled sentences or weird expressions like "lyin' dog face pony-soldier". Also, hair-sniffing tends to come off as more creepy than "authentic".

But politics is politics. If members of Congress vote for good policies not because they personally much care about them but because of political pressure from their voters, that's a good outcome. The "authenticity" of the intent doesn't matter. And if they approve a bad policy that corporate donors want while personally sincerely favoring that policy, their "authenticity" doesn't improve the outcome a bit.

The concept of authenticity is also an important one in the philosophy of existentialism. I wrote about his in Theodor Adorno's "Jargon of Authenticity" and Adorno's criticism of existentialism 03/10/2013. In philosophical terms, Adorno saw the jargon of existentialism, of which the notion of authenticity has been central, is to humanize the specialization of knowledge that is so much a part of our daily lives in the present-day world. But he also saw it as part of the way that individualism valued abstractly in nominal disregard of its social content, a feature which he found particularly problematic in Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers.