My post last month focused on a post from another Substack publication — Both/And — written by scholar Tabitha Kirkland. Her post’s title is “Why We’re Drawn to Authentic People (and How to Be One).” As noted last month, I’m going to use Kirkland’s post as a jumping off point more than once because it is so dense with interesting ideas and observations about authenticity. This month, I’m going to focus on her claim that authenticity is situational — i.e., we are more or less authentic depending on the situation, whether the situation is defined as a setting (e.g., doctor’s office, dormitory room, classroom, etc.) or the people/roles in it (doctor/patient, roommates, friends, student/instructor, etc.).

I believe that Kirkland’s claim accurately reflects our common understanding of authenticity. I believe this based on my experiences assigning a paper in the interpersonal communication courses I used to teach not so very long ago. I had my students write a paper in which they used Goffmanian theory to analyze two different fronts they produced and presented to and for others. According to Goffman, we are always presenting a front — a self or identity constructed of clothes, hairstyle, piercings and the like, as well as accents, dialect, etc. Thus, the assignment was to specify all of the clothes, piercings, etc. that my students used to create two very different selves in their everyday lives. And because Goffman says that we produce different selves in different situations with different people, the assignment also required students to describe the two situations in which they presented their very different selves.

I also specified that neither of the selves they described could be their “true” self, because, at least as I read him, Goffman doesn’t believe we have a true, unconstructed self. Nevertheless, a fair number of students could not refrain from writing about their “true” selves, which all these students said they exhibited (rather than constructed) in “private” situations peopled with close family, friends, lovers, and the like. These students also contrasted this self with a “professional” self, which they mostly associated with work situations peopled by work colleagues, bosses and the like. That is, many of my students couldn’t rid themselves of the common notion that we are more or less authentic depending on the situation even when they were required to. I believe this shows the extent to which members of American society have bought into the notion that authenticity is normally situational.

Of course, this phenomenon is less remarkable if it truly is the case that we are our true, unique, unconstructed selves in private situations. However, it is entirely possible to analyze such private selves in Goffmanian terms. For instance, it is entirely possible to characterize the sloppy clothing people seem to universally don in entirely private encounters — stained t-shirts, sweats, etc. — as a kind of uniform for people wanting to project — to construct — their appearance of being authentic.

Further, it is entirely possible to describe behaviors that seem unique in an authentic situations as behaviors that universally and uniformly construct a situation as an authentic one. For instance, in situations we wish to mark as private, we may belch, fart, pick at our teeth or nose, lick our plate clean and the like — embarrassing behaviors that we would never produce in public situations in which we might fear being ostracized. Of course, if such behaviors are uniformly produced in private situations, they are not unique and spontaneous and thereby authentic, but rather behaviors produced to mark the situation as family events, friendship situations, and the like.

If such is the case, then we are never in authentic situations; rather we are always in situations in which we produce a constructed self of some kind. That is, we do not exude spontaneous, unique, true, authentic selves regardless of situation. This is not to say that there is no difference between private and public situations. However, that difference, as Goffman seems to state, is a difference of consciousness. We are conscious of our construction of our selves in public situations and less so, if at all, in private situations. This is perhaps because we seem to be less concerned about creating a strategically advantageous self in private situations than in public ones. Perhaps we just know we’re less likely to be judged negatively in private situations.

Does all the above mean that, from a Goffmanian perspective, we can dispense with the notion of authentic behaviors and authentic situations? I don’t think so if for no other reason than that whatever we treat as real is real in its consequences. That’s a paraphrase of W. I. Thomas, which means that if we perceive something as real, even if it isn’t objectively real, that thing will have a real effect on us. For instance, if we perceive that demons exist, we will be lead to fear them, exorcise them, protect against them and the like. So, even if authenticity isn’t real, our belief in it will cause us to at least speak about it as if it does exist, at least in certain situations. That is, we may advocate for it, label some specific behaviors as authentic, regard certain situations as more than likely authentic, etc.

The analysis above indicates that authenticity exists, but not in the way it is popularly conceived, if we take social psychologists research to heart. It also indicates that authenticity is situational, just not in the same way as is currently understood. So, while the popular understanding of authenticity may be problematic, it is still a very important phenomenon.

Most of my posts here are reflections on news articles. However, my post for this month will focus on a post from another Substack publication — Both/And — written by scholar Tabitha Kirkland. Its title is “Why We’re Drawn to Authentic People (and How to Be One).” I’m going to write about Kirkland’s post over the course of at least two of my own posts because Kirkland’s is so dense with interesting ideas and observations about authenticity.

Kirkland begins her post by articulating an understanding of authenticity that matches the understanding I’ve been pointing out in American culture. Specifically, she writes:

A person who acts authentically feels, to me, like someone who is not as easily buffeted by peer pressure and group influence. Someone who says what they mean. Someone whose actions you can expect to align with their values. Someone who will tell you how they’re actually doing.

Further, she writes, “Authenticity means honesty. We crave realness.” Further still, she writes,

Authentic people can be a little grumpy or disillusioned. They aren’t perfect. They can be anxious or self-conscious — but they are honest about that. They won’t pretend to be okay if they’re not. . . .What matters most is this quality of realness, of unfiltered honesty.

All of this is in line with the common American conception of personal authenticity as covered here.

But Kirkland also states something about authenticity that initially struck me as unusual. Very early in her essay, she says that an authentic person is “someone who genuinely cares (for others).” Initially, this didn’t seem to square with the American notion of authenticity explicated here because it seemed that authentic people did things that were true to their self, regardless of the consequences to others. To me, that doesn’t fit with caring for others because I see caring as softening or relieving any pain a person might feel and definitely not adding to it, regardless of intention.

However, I’m not sure that my conception of caring is widely shared. I’m beginning to realize that quite a large number of people in American society believe that telling harsh truths to someone is a way of showing you care for them. Indeed, there seems to be a popular belief that you are doing someone a favor by being honest with them, even if that honesty hurts. So, being brutally honest about your view of another’s clothing choices and hairstyle all the way to their political opinions are seen as helpful, given that they reveal what others might be thinking of them.

What is the import of these observations about truth-telling, about authenticity, in American culture? It is only that authenticity, as popularly conceived, is a gift of almost inestimable value for many in American society. For many, honesty is an unmitigated good regardless of its consequences, and should be regarded as such even by persons stung by it.

*BTW, that is indeed Melania Trump pictured above in her infamous jacket.

Many of us have said, “I couldn’t care less” at some point in our life. Or, using more salty language, some have said, “I don’t give a f*ck.” Often, these phrases are used to indicate a rejection of what society dictates. Thus, we get more extended phrases like, “I couldn’t care less what they say,” “I couldn’t care less what others say,” or “I couldn’t care less what society says.” Of course, these phrases are associated with authenticity because they indicate a rejection of social dictates in favor of what the speaker genuinely wishes to say or do.

According to Ellen Sherr, in her web post, “Aging out of F*cks,” some of us are more likely to say something like, “I couldn’t care less what society says” than others of us are. Specifically, she says that older people are more likely than younger people to unmask, or be authentic by not giving a f*ck. This claim seems to be backed up both by the research literature and by popular culture. Examples of the latter, include those captured by the “grumpy old men” trope and Estelle Getty’s character, Sophia Petrillo, in Golden Girls.

Sherr says the correlation between age and authenticity is due to sociobiological reasons. How so? Because as we age, our brain (specifically, our prefrontal cortex) starts something called “synaptic pruning.” According to Sherr, synaptic pruning involves cutting away parts of the brain that no longer serve a useful or, so it would seem, non-taxing function. Specifically, she says that “often first on the chopping block” of neural pruning are “those neural pathways dedicated to hypervigilant people-pleasing.”

Because I consider myself a social psychologist rather than a sociobiologist, I believe the reason why people “age out of f*cks” is not because of their biological makeup but because of their social makeup. Specifically, I think it has something to do with the personal power people accumulate over their lifespan. Due to that accumulation, people are increasingly able to rebel against social dictates. And why not rebel? After all, as noted above, American culture puts a high value on authenticity, which is most thoroughly demonstrated by social rebellion.

This social psychological explanation for what seems to be an aging out of politeness also explains another phenomenon Sherr claims to exist — the predominantly female opting out of politeness. According to Sherr, women’s aging out of politeness is more pronounced both because they are required to be more polite in society and because of their brain makeup.

I will not argue here against Sherr’s claim that females’ rebellion against society is more pronounced. Instead, I will argue against Sherr’s sociobiological explanation for it. Or rather, I will argue instead for an explanation with a sociological orientation. As before, I will argue that this explanation specifically relies on the concept of power. Briefly, it is obviously the case that women have less power in society. Thus, they are more polite than men. (A quick search with Google Scholar will back up these claims.) So, if women renounce their commitment to social dictates — if they zero out their concern with politeness — it will be more obvious and pronounced than if a man does so.

In making the arguments above, I have suggested three possibilities regarding authenticity that are worth considering. The first possibility is that authenticity, or at least it high estimation, is more pronounced among different groups of people and specifically among older people, females and the less powerful. The second possibility, related to the first, is that authenticity is intimately related to, perhaps directly correlated with, the phenomenon of power. Specifically, people who are more powerful are more likely to display or at least valorize the phenomenon of authenticity. The third possibility, related to the second, is that authenticity is not about biological phenomena, even when it appears to be related to gender, but about a social phenomenon.

These things are worth noting because Sherr is definitely not the only person to put forth the propositions she has. (Indeed, there is a cottage industry of people on the web repeating Scherr’s claims as if they were their own!) This may be due to a certain scientism in modern society which is particularly difficult to root out, though it should be. Otherwise, the social workings of politeness and the dynamics of authenticity are obscured. Making those workings and dynamics occult in this fashion means making them seem impossible to change, though it seems that they should be.

A notorious spy — a traitor to his homeland, the United States — recently passed away. Aldrich Ames, who gave away volumes of American secrets to the Soviet’s during the Cold War, passed on January 5th. Ames was the chief of the counterintelligence branch of the C.I.A.’s Soviet division and as such knew information — the identities of Soviet turncoats, the nature of secret operations behind the Iron Curtain — that the Soviet Union would and did pay for handsomely. The warning signs that Ames should not to be trusted with any US secrets, let alone ones of the sensitivity he had access to, seem obvious, as recounted in his NYTimes obituary. Ames was repeatedly cited as a drunk who did little work, yet he “failed upward” a number of times till he assumed his prominent position.

How could this have happened? How could an organization tasked in part with unmasking traitors fail to unmask one of them in a position of prominence? Malcolm Gladwell offers an explanation in his book Talking to Strangers. There, Gladwell indicates that such a thing could be explained with reference to Levine’s Truth Default Theory, which posits that we normally speak truthfully to others and think others are being truthful with us because conversation requires some minimal level of trust in the conversationalists’ truthfulness. This seems to explain the case of Aldrich Ames fairly well.

However, perhaps other factors were also involved in the CIA’s inability to root out someone as inauthentic as Ames. One wonders if Ames’s unmasking wasn’t also hindered by a belief that people are transparent (“I can see right through you”) as long as one knows what to look for (“tells”) and where to look (e.g., in their eyes). This belief, promoted by American cultural assumptions about the self and its communication, could easily have lead Ames’s CIA chiefs to believe they could unmask traitors without expending much if any effort.

Whatever the explanation for Ames’s success, his case demonstrates that unmasking people when they present completely inauthentic and illegitimate identities is, for various psychological and cultural reasons, difficult .

This is to inform you that I will be changing my publication schedule. For the foreseeable future I will be publishing only once per month so that I can devote more time to the writing of a book on authenticity. This publication will be published on the first Friday of every month.

Best Regards,

Christian Nelson

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, it was advantageous in academe to be a diversity candidate — that is, someone of minority status seeking a position. As it was explained to me, a minority candidate for any position should get the nod if they were as qualified as a cis-male seeking the same job. Thus, it could be advantageous to pretend that one was a minority of some kind to get even a slight leg up on the competition. Further, Indigenous North Americans’s writings about indigenous culture enjoy a special status as authentic works. Enter the “pretendian” (or, pretend Indian) — the academic or writer pretending to be an Indigenous North American. A number of scholars in and out of academia have been outed as pretendians, the most recent of whom is Thomas King.

King, who has held a number of academic positions, is also a very prolific and prominent writer of both fiction and nonfiction centered on the experiences of First Nation people. Indeed, he has won multiple awards for his works. Moreover, King was made a Companion of the Order of Canada — a high civil honor. (For more on this, see this Wikipedia entry.)

However, as just recently announced, King is not an Indigenous North American in any sense of the term. An investigation conducted by the Tribal Alliance Against Fraud found that King has no Indigenous blood anywhere in his family tree. As a shocked King put it, there are “no Indians anywhere to be found.” In short, King is not an authentic Indigenous person. But has King been a masker — the opposite of an authentic person? As we have described them, maskers are people who pretend to be someone other than who they really are — they are people who create their appearance in a calculated manner to come off as some other type of person. Has King, then, operated in a conscious, strategic manner to be someone else? If he is to be believed, King says that he has not acted in such a fashion — i.e., he is no masker. Rather, he was misled into believing he was an Indigenous person either by his mother or absent father.

If King is not authentic or a masker, then what is he? We have seen in a previous post that is also possible, from an American cultural perspective, to be a person who wishes to be authentic but has not yet discovered their true self. But King doesn’t really fit into this category, either. He hasn’t been seeking a true self throughout his life because, ostensibly, he thought he knew what that true self was. No, King is, from a cult of authenticity perspective, a person who discovers that their true self is not what they thought it was. Such a person can be found throughout American cultural works. Consider, for instance, Luke Skywalker, who is told by Darth Vader that he is actually his son.

So, in sorting out King’s nature relative to the concepts of authenticity and masking, we have seen that there is yet a fourth category of person who can be accounted for. This fact adds something unique to our discussion of authenticity. But a consideration of King’s case adds at least one more lesson regarding the true self and masking.

Again, according to King, he was told that he was Cherokee. If this was true, King could have verified his identity simply by tracing his lineage to a person listed on the Dawes census, as the Cherokee require. One would think that he would have learned this quite early in his long academic career and particularly after researching and writing about means for claiming Indigenous identity. Given people’s drive to understand their true self, and King’s decision to base his career on his supposed Cherokee identity, one would think that King would have been keen to trace his lineage. Indeed, one would think King would have felt a responsibility to verify his identity given his decision to speak for all Indigenous people. Thus, King’s case raises the question of whether or not a person has a responsibility to determine their true self, at least in certain circumstances. This adds quite a bit to our overall discussion of the true self.

*Many of the facts reported in this post come from the November 25, 2025 article by Qasim Nauman in the NYTimes, titled “Acclaimed Writer of Indigenous Stories Says He is not Indian.”

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As noted in a previous post, there is, according to American culture, a close connection between art and authenticity. That post centered on a letter that Kurt Vonnegut wrote to a group of students. This post similarly centers on a letter to a student — a letter from poet e.e. cummings to a high school editor seeking advice on how to become a poet. In this letter, whether intentionally so or not, I think that cummings is saying that to be a poet one must be authentic as that is understood in American culture. This is actually quite easy to see if one re-reads my document “Definitions [of Authenticity and Masking],” and then reads cummings’ letter below. So, I’ll proceed by just printing the letter and then pointing out the parallels to the American cultural understanding of authenticity.

A Poet’s Advice to Students

e.e. cummings

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.

It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

As stated in “Definitions,” American culture sees authenticity as something that must be achieved through the spontaneous expression of emotion rather than thought. Thought about oneself and how others see one’s self is a part of the process of masking — there is no need to think of one’s self and how it appears unless one is considering how to mask one’s true self. Thus, cummings’s emphasis on being emotional rather than rational fits right in with the American understanding being authentic.

As also stated in “Definitions,” being authentic means being unique and being unique is precisely what cummings says a poet must be. As he says, a poet must “be nobody-but-yourself.” According to American culture, being authentic also means rebelling against society, which seeks to make one conform. This directly connects with cummings’s statement, “To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” Given these connections between the American concept of the authentic person and cummings concept of the poet, what cummings says about poets is tantamount to saying that to be a poet one must be an authentic person.

What is to be made of this connection between authenticity and poetry? First, if this connection truly exists, it should be the case that poetry is highly valued, as are poets. This might not seem to be the case; a 2022 national survey of public participation in the arts conducted by the NEA (Survey of Popular Participation in the Arts) found that only 9.2% of US adults had read poetry in the last year. However, the 2006 national survey of poetry use conducted by the Poetry Foundation (Poetry in America) found that roughly 3/4 of the populace respected poets and poetry readers. These findings are consistent with findings or beliefs about authenticity: while studies find that an overwhelming percentage of the population views authenticity as valuable (e.g., this study), it is commonplace to complain that people find it difficult to act authentically (see, e.g., this essay and this one). Of course, the findings noted above also show that authenticity and poetry are connected in that they are far more respected than they are pursued.

The second and final observation I’ll make about the connection between authenticity and poetry is that it suggests being a poet requires being authentic. Is this the case? There is no research study, regardless of angle, that examines this question, but there are some interesting schools of thought about poetry that suggest answers to the question. For instance, there is the school of “pure poetry” which argues that poems should not be judged by their truth to an external object or internal feeling but rather to the structural features of the poem — its meter, rhyme structure, etc. In the words of Archibald MacLeish, “Poems should not mean but be.” Thus, being authentic is perhaps a hinderance to being a poet. However, there is also the popular school of Romanticism and its progeny that argues a poem must express an internal truth. As such, Romanticism suggests that one must be in touch with one’s true self to be a poet and thus a poet might be more apt to act true to their self, but this is by no means necessarily the case.

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*Photo by Noah Wulf

Teapot Dome, Watergate, Iran-Contra: those and other political scandals are similar in at least one respect — those involved in them tried to hide their wrongdoing. However, this universal practice does not apply in the Trump administration, according to David French in “Why Trump Can Do No Wrong” (NYT, 11/2/2025). French states that Trump has been absolutely “brazen” in the way he has engaged in acts of self-dealing. And these are not the only brazenly committed acts by the current administration. For instance, French states that Trump openly requires the Justice Department to do his personal bidding: “He freed even the most violent rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 and then forced out a U.S. attorney who refused to prosecute James Comey or Letitia James.” The list goes on.

Nevertheless, Trump has remained untouched by scandal. This is because his “scandals” are not scandals — his once-scandalous actions are not seen in a negative light by many Americans, and certainly certainly not by his MAGA base. Why is this so? French says they are not seen this way because of their very brazenness — because they are done “transparently.” Hiding things is, concomitantly, a sign of wrongdoing. So, Speaker Johnson states, “Whatever President Trump is doing is out in the open. They’re not trying to conceal anything.” At the same time, he states “The reason many people refer to the Bidens as the Biden crime family is because they were doing all this stuff behind curtains.”

This reasoning seems crazy to French. He states that it is like “arguing that a bank robbery is only a crime if the assailant wears a mask.” How can MAGA folks think this way? French says this is the result of a desperate attempt to rationalize wrong behavior and a lack of knowledge of the law. I’d like to suggest that there is another possible reason for believing that what is in the open is okay, no matter how wrong it is: the overwhelming American desire for authenticity.

As we have seen before, people who are unembarrassed by their words and actions, and are therefore purely transparent, are deemed authentic — true to even embarrassing aspects of themselves. Given the overriding American desire for authenticity, it matters not what a person says or does as long as it is authentic. (This might even include murder — as Trump has said and some of his followers have affirmed, he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Ave. and not suffer any consequences.) To put it differently, the perceivable authenticity of Trump trumps anything else.

This reminds me of a former student I taught at an institution of higher learning. Over the course of two class periods, this student managed to slur both an entire ethnic group and an entire gender. Of course, I demanded that this student meet me during office hours before he attended another class. In that meeting, the student told me that his slurs were okay because his friends, at least, knew who he really was and thus allowed for his degradation of others. I think he was truly surprised that I could not see what he “transparently” was — someone who liked everyone and who everyone liked. This example shows once again that people who are perceived as authentic can do almost anything without facing repercussions.

Sydney’s TikTok posts portray her as a cancer patient who is trying to grab what she can out of life while dealing with her cancer treatments and travails. For instance, in one post, Sydney dances to a favorite song while being hooked up to an IV on an IV pole. In other posts she shows herself deep sea diving and dancing in the streets of New York City. Her posts are clearly compelling —- she has roughly 850,000 followers, which translates into roughly $20,000 due to TikTok’s Creator Rewards program. (She already had a very sizable following prior to her cancer diagnosis.)

Sydney’s detractors have claimed that her condition is fake and her videos meant to raise money. As evidence of her fakery, detractors have complained that she is too positive to be a cancer patient. Others, have said such things as that a cancer patient could not possibly go scuba diving or have long hair as Sydney has. Sometimes backed only by knowledge gained from the internet, still others claim that she doesn’t act or appear like someone with stage 4 cancer. (These complaints have been made despite the fact that Sydney’s oncologist has confirmed her condition.) As for the claim that Sydney is doing this for the money, some point to the estimated $20,000 she is earning from TikTok mentioned above. Some have pointed to Sydney’s likely deals with companies whose products are placed conspicuously in her videos. Sydney also created a GoFundMe site with a small monetary goal to raise money for a vacation with her mother.

Sydney’s case has turned into a bit of a war. On the one hand are Sydney’s detractors, who present the “facts” mentioned above on a very active snark subreddit dedicated to destroying Sydney’s reputation in extremely vituperative terms. Further, Sydney reports she’s received comments on TikTok like ‘You will burn in hell. You are lying’ and even death threats. On the other hand, Sydney has a good number of supporters who not only cheer her on but also take on her doubters. Beside making complaints to TikTok about the abusiveness of her opposition’s comments, some of Sydney’s supporters have gone to the trouble of tracking down the actual identities of Sydney’s antagonists, apparently with the goal of exposing them.

What does all of this have to do with a Substack publication about authenticity? Clearly, in the eye’s of her opposition, Sydney’s case provides one more example of a masker — someone lacking in authenticity. Indeed, her opponents see this as a case of a masker whose inauthenticity needs to be exposed. At the same time, to Sydney’s supporters, this is an example of an authentic person whose reputation is being quite wrongly smeared by a supposed unmasking. The latter phenomenon is rarer to find in the media; It seems that people crave a good old unmasking more than a feel-good story.

This case is unique to my Substack publication so far because it also shows that people will go to war with each other over the perceived authenticity or inauthenticity of a particular person.

To me this indicates that a person’s authenticity is sacred. It also shows that people don’t just entertain opinions about a person’s identity, but they also act on those opinions. Indeed, they act quite vigorously.

*A photo of the ‘Hawk Tua’ girl, who has become an influencer

A recent survey found that only 35% of Gen Z members believe authenticity is an important quality for influencers. (The survey was reported in the article “Influencers sway consumers but authenticity loses some clout, study says,” by Aaron Barr as found in Marketing Dive on April 25, 2024.) The survey researchers’ conclusion? Authenticity is losing its importance in American culture overall. But another survey finds that 91% of Gen Zers believe authenticity is a crucial personal characteristic. (This survey is reported in the 2023 study, “How can understanding the influence of Gen Z today empower your tomorrow?” by Ernst and Young.) What gives? My conclusion is that while a very large number of people see authenticity as important, a fair number of folks also don’t expect influencers in particular to be authentic; indeed, I suspect that a fair number of people expect influencers to be quite inauthentic.

What is it about being an influencer that makes a person suspect with respect to authenticity, according to the cult of authenticity? The proximate reason is that influencers engage in influencing. That is, the act of influencing itself makes a person inauthentic. To support this, I’d like to point out that there are other groups of influence artists — e.g., used car salespersons and politicians — are also considered inauthentic. Thus, it seems that engaging in influence, regardless of what social class you might be in, makes you inauthentic according to the cult of authenticity.

But what is it about influencing itself that makes an influencer suspect? I’d like to suggest that successful influencing requires a strategic presentation of oneself as a credible person, whether this presentation is well-founded or not. However, according to the cult of authenticity, there is nothing strategic about authenticity; authenticity is all about one’s heart, not one’s head — it can only be shown spontaneously, not through calculation. Knowing this, even if only subconsciously, a fair number of influencer followers will become jaded with influencers in general, even though they may still follow a specific influencer.

Whatever the case, I want to focus on the cult of authenticity’s belief that whole classes of people who centrally engage in persuasion and social influence can be deemed inauthentic. I find this problematic in part because it leads us to cast a cynical eye on individual members of those classes who aren’t necessarily mendacious. This viewpoint also suggests that there are classes of people whom we assume are likely to be truthful, some of whom we should actually be wary of. An example of this is the category of friends.

Do we really need to worry about friends calculating their presentation of their selves to us? Such worrying might be warranted given that we may have friends who are being paid to promote products surreptitiously. Such is the case with people who have signed up with outfits like BzzAgent, Influenster and PINCHme. These companies pay people (or give them free merch) to surreptitiously mention their products and sing their praises to friends and acquaintances, knowing that such groups of people are unlikely to be suspected of trying to influence us, underhandedly or not.

Okay, okay, the number of friends who become agents of such outfits may be very small; however, there are other examples of friends whose presentation of self might be calculated rather than spontaneous. Take the more common, and more interesting, example of friends who host Avon parties. (Other direct selling companies include Amway and Tupperware.) Folks who host such parties invite their friends to them in part so that they will rack up Avon product sales for which they will receive a kickback. This is successful, despite involving obvious selling, because of the host’s identity as a friend.

In light of the preceding observations, it is clear that treating the class of inauthentic influence peddlers and the class of authentic friends as mutually exclusive categories is not just simplistic but also misrepresentative of reality. Further, this misrepresentation of reality makes those who hold to it treat those who influence peddlers and friends in sometimes unfair and unwise ways. It is yet another part of the belief system of the cult of authenticity that proves to be problematic.

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Here’s a case of (alleged) masking with an interesting twist: Des Moines law enforcement has charged the Superintendent of Schools, Ian Roberts, with masking — specifically, masking his identity as a currently undocumented immigrant. Yes, you read that correctly, a person no less lofty in the community as the leader of the entire school system for a sizable American city appears to have secured his position without the immigration papers needed to work in any job in the U.S.

What makes this even more interesting is that Roberts had secured jobs as a Principal or Superintendent at a number of jobs prior to securing the one in Des Moines and had been vetted by a consulting firm hired by the Des Moines school board. How could this have happened? Perhaps it happened due to shoddy work by human resource consultants but a 10/5/2025 article in the NYTimes (“The Superintendent’s Bio Seemed Too Good to Be True. It Was,” by Smith, Londono and Goldstein) suggests another (or additional) possibility:

the notion that someone of Dr. Roberts’s stature might be in the country illegally was counter to the image many have of undocumented immigrants. This was not someone living under the radar, toiling in a low-wage job; in fact, he had undergone what had seemed like an elaborate vetting process and was regularly in the public eye.

That is, Roberts may have illegally secured a position because of the stereotype of the undocumented worker as someone more likely to be a school janitor than its leader.

What is there to say of this phenomenon? This particular case of masking provides an interesting case illustrating the power of stereotypes. Simultaneously, it provides an interesting case of how other people can be recruited to participate in their own duping. Most cases of masking occur because of the maskers own efforts to dupe their audience, and certainly Roberts actively masked in this case through his own efforts to look the part and provide a stellar, though far from accurate, resume. However, Roberts’ ability to mask (and paper over inaccuracies in his resumes) also depended on his audience duping itself and that’s what Roberts’ audience did by supplying the stereotype in question.

Such hagiography is, seen in one light, consistent with expressions of sorrow for the person killed and their family. Indeed, it is seen as necessary by some (see Madison Kircher’s 9/13/2025 NYTimes article, “What does posting about Charlie Kirk really say about you”). However, according to a powerful column by Jamelle Bouie (in the NYTimes, 9/13/2025) such hagiography grossly distorts Kirk’s rhetorical practices, which included damning and demonizing statements about vulnerable social groups. As seen through the lens of the American cult of authenticity, the unmerited adulation of Kirk by folks on the left is wildly inconsistent with their previous political statements and thus inauthentic.

So, at least for those on the left, reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death presents the opportunity to be seen as inauthentic no matter which choice you make to react to it. Thus, some have counseled famous persons from producing any statement at all about the killing (again, see Kircher’s article). This seems to be good advice for anyone, at least while memory of the killing is fresh. Thus, I will assiduously avoid making any direct comment for or against Kirk’s rhetorical practices here or elsewhere, at least for now, when expressions of sorrow for Kirk’s family are required.w

Much of the discourse on the internet this past two plus weeks or so has been about Charlie Kirk. This post will be no different. Not surprisingly, given the focus of this publication, it will be about Charlie Kirk’s (perceived) authenticity and how authenticity in general is communicated according to one of Kirk’s fans. With regard to Kirk’s authenticity, I suspect that people on the right and the left will, according to the dictates of American culture, find Kirk authentic. For those on either end of the political spectrum, Kirk was unique — a young conservative. Further, he was willing to say things few others would say — that is, he was non-conforming in his expression of his self and his opinions. That went a long way to establishing Kirk’s authenticity bona fides. For those on the left, Kirk’s willingness, even eagerness, to say things that they would find extremely embarrassing at best further established his authenticity.

There are other reasons why Kirk was widely perceived as authentic, but the above are probably the most obvious in light of past posts of this publication. What I wish to turn to now is how authenticity is communicated, according to American culture. To understand this, I will consider an Instagram post produced by one of Kirk’s admirers. In this post, the admirer states that we can know who Kirk was — we can know his “heart” — simply by looking at him. She says that you can just look at Kirk and know that the person he presents to one audience is the same one he presents to all other audiences. This suggests that a real self, a true self, an original self not only exists but clearly communicates itself to others without effort.

This notion that true selves effortlessly communicate themselves to others is connected to, and promoted by, a metaphor of the self held in Western, or at least American, culture. This is the metaphor of selves as lights. Though we are largely unaware of this, we speak of selves as things that shine like a lit candle. Thus, we have Elton John’s famous song “Goodbye, Norma Jean” and its rewrite as “Goodbye, England’s Rose,” which compares Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana, respectively, to a lit candle sputtering in the wind and their passing as the putting out of that candle. More popularly, we say things like, “rise and shine,” “she lit up the room,” “he was the light of her life,” “she was a leading light,” etc., etc. that participate in this metaphor. How does this relate to the effortless communication of the self? Clearly, candles and other lights shine without any obvious effort on their part.

In light of the above, I think it can be said that Charlie Kirk’s death was, besides being tragic for his family and for the spirit of democracy, an occasion which shows how the long tentacles of authenticity reach to every corner of American culture.

*Photo by Page Skidmore

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Most TV personalities are famous because they are notably authentic in some respect. This is true of the Kardashians/Jenners. At least, this seems to be the case given that they often offer unfiltered opinions, advice, etc. I believe this is what has made them famous, given that they have no talent or exploits that would otherwise merit their fame (cf., Boorstin, 1961). But they are also guilty of enhancing their looks through plastic surgery — an authenticity no-no. Now, they’ve found a way to make even their plastic surgery authentic. They have done so by admitting to their surgeries and even detailing them in public (“An Era of Authenticity” in NY Times by Jessica Roy, July 28th, 2025). Since honesty is bound up with authenticity, the Kardashian/Jenner’s recent honesty about the physical enhancement procedures they’ve undergone has, ironically, elevated their authenticity.

Interestingly, though 91% of American’s say that authenticity is important, a number have sought precisely the procedures the Kardashian/Jenners have undergone (see, again, Roy’s article). Perhaps they, too, think they can preserve their authenticity by being as honest in public. But I want to suggest that something else might also be in play here. That something has to do with current understandings of transgenderism.

According to some Americans, gender reassignment procedures are wrong, especially for children, because a person should be true to themselves, and peoples’s true gender is revealed by what they look like physically at birth. However, a significant number of Americans think the reverse — that a person’s authentic gender identity is inside them. According to this group, if a person’s gross anatomical features do not match what they feel they should be, gender reassignment procedures actually make the person more authentic. I suggest that people who believe gender identity is inside a person might also believe that a person’s correct body image is inside them, and thus they are more than justified in undergoing physical enhancement procedures to harmonize their gross anatomical features with their internal body image.

I’d like to make one thing clear here. I am not saying that transexuals seek to transition because they want to change their body to match their body image. These two phenomena — gender identity and physical identity/body image — are two different things. Nor am I saying that trans people are more likely to favor plastic surgery for beauty enhancement. I’m just saying that people with a positive view of gender transformation may be positively receptive to beauty enhancement surgery for similar reasons. Of course, one would have to engage in research to determine if this is the case. Hear that researchers? I think this is a hypothesis worth investigating.

There is one last thing I would like to note about the NY Times article I’ve relied on here. In the article, Khloé Kardashian is quoted as saying, “There was a time that I was around some people that would make me feel like I needed to [photoshop photos of myself].” I think this beautifully mirrors what I’ve said earlier. Here, Khloé is admitting to having her photos of herself photoshopped for press releases — an authenticity no-no — but adds that this is due to other peoples’s influence. She was forced to. So, her revelation that this had happened, but that she has now rebelled against this influence, increases her authenticity. As we have said over and over, the authentic person rebels against authority when it comes to expressing one’s true self.

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Why risk drowning in such a sea of words? Phelps suggests the risk is worth it because detailed journaling is a route, perhaps the route, to achieving authenticity: “I feel like when I don’t do it, I’m not giving myself the best chance to be me.” Phelps is not alone in thinking that writing, and particularly journaling, is a way to discover or unearth their true self. Why is this believed? I suspect it is in part due to the belief that writers are often thought of as cloistered individuals exploring their own ideas all by themselves. However, that is an image that has been roundly critiqued by writing scholars who argue that we are always writing for someone else or under other people’s watchful gaze. That is, we write for readers whose voices are in our heads. And, of course, we write in the context of populated social structures and events.

Whatever the case, who said being authentic was important? Well, Phelps does, for one. For instance, he says, “If you’re not doing these small things that make you the best version of you” . . . “then you’re skipping, you’re cheating big parts of life. You’re not being your authentic self.” Of course, Phelps is far from alone in believing authenticity is a “big part of life.” Most of the people I’ve written about in this Substack publication see it this way.

What is more interesting about the preceding quote is its promotion of the notion that we have various versions of our selves which (can) become progressively better as they come to the fore. It doesn’t exactly surprise me that this idea is floating around out there, even though most members of the cult of authenticity also believe that we have one, true, original identity. After all, how would the many self-help gurus touting authenticity earn a buck if people believed it was easy to know and display one’s true self?

Phelps also voices the common notion that authenticity is always a good thing: “And I know that when I’m just my authentic self, it’s a lot easier and a lot happier to live life.” Authenticity is thus a panacea for anything that might ail you. Here, I just wish to reiterate that I don’t think being authentic, as that is commonly conceived, is an unmitigated good. There are times when, if you are concerned with the feelings of others, you should be polite regardless of what you feel like inside. Authenticity is too often cited as an excuse for hurtful behavior.

There is one last thing I would like to comment on in Phelps’ rumination about authenticity. I’d like to comment on the following quote: “we’re supposed to be our authentic self and if we’re not doing that, then c’mon.” We’re supposed to be our authentic self? Yes, indeed, because the cult of authenticity is of such a size and has such clout that it can require authenticity of everyone. It’s because of this that I think it is worth examining the cult of authenticity in this Substack publication.

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What does this letter have to do with authenticity? I think it nicely articulates several features of the true self, or, as it calls it, the “soul.”

The first two features, which we have noted before, are the internal location of the true self and that it grows, or develops over time. Vonnegut indicates this when he suggests that it is desirable to let the soul that is inside of us grow. He says this when he urges students to engage in artistic expression: “to experience becoming, to find out what is inside you, to make your soul grow.” Another feature of the true self that is implied in this statement and throughout the letter is that it is highly desireable to let our true self develop. This letter is no dry treatise, after all; it is a paean to developing the soul.

Two other features of the true self that Vonnegut’s letter suggests is that the true self needs to be discovered — it is not obvious — and that it is discoverable through art. After all, Vonnegut says that the students should “find out what is inside of you” and he does so in a letter that advocates for producing art, and lots of it, to do that finding out. Why is that the case? Because the true self, being located in the heart and not the head, is an emotional entity and art is believed to be all about feelings and emotions.

So, in reading Vonnegut’s brief (and funny) letter we learn quite a bit about the true self — the basis of authenticity.

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“Huh?” I am referring to the kind of thing that is written about in a New York Times article by Jason Zinoman. In that article, titled “Anatomy of a Comedy Cliché,” Zinoman argues that, at least in films, having a character like a portrayed comedian “get real” while on-stage doing a comedy act is now a common way of advancing character development when the narrative is about a comedian. For instance, as Zinoman notes, in the movie “Punchline,” while acting as a comedian, Tom Hanks “gets real” with an audience by disclosing highly personal details of the comedian’s life. Specifically, Hanks’s character stops delivering jokes and tears up while telling the audience how disappointed his father was in his academic accomplishments and career choice. As part of the movie, this works to let the movie audience know things about the comedian that they couldn’t easily learn otherwise.

Of course, there are other examples of this. Indeed, Zinoman argues that movie producers’s use of this ploy for character development is increasing and he gives a number of recent examples to establish this. I would suggest that this is the case because authenticity itself has increasingly become an important element of or demand on people’s lives. I would suggest that use of this ploy in movies also indicates how far reaching the demand for authenticity is.

In The Salt Path, the authors lose their house through no fault of their own, the husband contracts a rare and devastating disease, and they are physically and psychologically restored by their hiking of the 630-mile South West Coast Path in England. But Jon Allsop’s CJR story — “Grains of Salt” — suggests that the major elements of The Salt Path are fabricated.

According to recent news reports, the authors used made-up names (they are legally named Sally and Tim Walker), fabricated the circumstances of losing their house and withheld Sally/Raynor’s embezzling the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars from a small firm where she worked. Further, it claimed that Tim/Moth miraculously recovered from what turns out to be a rare neurologic condition that is normally irreversible and untreatable. Moreover, Tim/Moth is claimed to have had the condition relatively symptom free even though he supposedly had the condition for quite some time.

If it is indeed the case that the Walker/Winn’s story is a fallacious one, it leads one to wonder, as Allsop does, why journalists who interviewed the couple were so hornswoggled. They are journalists, after all, and are supposed to be single-mindedly concerned about reporting only facts. I believe Dr. Timothy Levine has at least part of an explanation for this. Levine is the creator of Truth Default Theory, which posits that we normally speak truthfully to others and think others are being truthful with us. Further, it suggests that this is the case because conversation requires some minimal level of trust in the conversationalists’ truthfulness.

Levine’s theory squares with what journalist Nick Duerden states regarding his reason for failing to dig deeper into the unusual claims in the Winn/Walker’s book :

I trust in the words on the page. Yes, I know that it is human nature to exaggerate, and to colour in, and I know too that memoir requires a riveting and sustaining narrative. But I don’t expect blatant deception or wild embellishment.

Allsop immediately jumps to support this by saying, “Day-to-day journalism, ultimately, does operate on some minimum degree of trust.”

Of course, there are other factors that may have led many journalists to swallow the Winn/Walker’s story hook-line-and-sinker. Allsop raises the possibility that at least a contributing factor may have been journalists’ tendency to repeat common cultural narratives (see Gaye Tuchman’s work on this matter). Duerden also argues that the accumulation of other people's acceptance of the truthfulness of a mask creates a critical mass almost requiring that a mask be accepted by others: “Should I have instinctively presumed that the memoirist made it all up, and that her agent, her editor, and her publishing house, Penguin, were all in collusion?’

Whatever the case, our look into the hubbub surrounding The Salt Path has lead us to see that masking — presenting something other than one’s true self — is often successful. Further, it has explained this, at least partly if not in full, according to the theory that we do and must trust other people’s truthfulness. Should we then become suspicious of the self that other people present? Perhaps that is not possible for most of us, given Levine’s theory, but we do assume that journalists are expected to do this for their livelihood. These are, indeed, new and interesting wrinkles to our understanding of masking.

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Of course, education is not the only arena in which AI (artificial intelligence) is having a profound effect. Indeed, AI seems to be everywhere and influencing everything. Many are unsure if this is a good thing. Why the fear? For one thing, it seems possible that AI will be employed to think for us and thereby make us intellectually weak or even redundant. For another thing, researchers have found that it is even having an effect on everyday conversation, not just in terms of vocabulary but emotional tone as well. For AI favors certain terms, like “delve,” and tends to flatten the affect of utterances — effects that carry over into people’s everyday speech (see research cited by Sara Parker).

The AI effects on everyday conversation in turn have the significant effect of degrading the amount of (perceived) authenticity in interactants’s speech, according to Naaman (also cited in Parker; see also research cited by Gretchen Deutch). After all, AI is artificial and authentic behaviors and utterances are without artifice of any kind. According to research by Naaman and associates, a lack of perceived authenticity in another person’s utterances leads to a lack of trust in that person. Of course, this makes sense, for if one belongs to the American cult of authenticity, the loss of authenticity represents a loss of integrity, a deep moral flaw.

So, in American culture, AI has the potential to wreak havoc on the underpinnings of everyday conversation. How can legitimate conversation occur without trust? And perhaps AI will bring about the downfall of the cult of authenticity? It will be interesting to see how this all plays out!

Women are put in a similar position due to the opposing demands of beauty and authenticity. On the one hand, women are expected to be beautiful. Indeed, they are expected to live up to a certain ideal in Western culture that is perhaps best captured by Barbie — an ideal that is not really possible to attain or only possible to attain with a great deal of beauty work (work from putting on makeup to undergoing surgical procedures). On the other hand, women are supposed to be natural. That is, their looks are supposed to be authentic rather than artificial. Thus, aspersions are cast on women who use makeup (“painted ladies”), get Botox injections, undergo surgical procedures, etc. Clearly, then, a woman cannot be both beautiful and authentic, though society says they must. (I’ve written more about this in an academic article to be found in Qualitative Research Reports in Communication, Vol. 14, Issue 1.)

It is this double bind that informs the writing in the recent Allure magazine article “No 69-Year-Old Looks Like Kris Jenner IRL. Not Even Kris Jenner,” by Valerie Monroe. The article’s subtitle provides the gist of the article: “Is there any hope for a more reasonable, more human, and reality-based approach to beauty?” That is, Monroe complains throughout that Kris Jenner’s appearance of youthful beauty (is there any other kind by which women are judged?) is, to a substantial degree, created not just by a great deal of plastic surgery but also by publicist-doctored photos of her. Together, the title and subtitle of the article indicate that Monroe believes women should choose to be authentic over being beautiful according to an impossible standard, though this message is a bit muddy.

Whatever the case, the Western demand that women be both impossibly beautiful as well as physically authentic leads to some curious consequences. For instance, makeup, which is literally a mask and thus inauthentic, is sometimes marketed as “natural,” “no-makeup makeup,” etc. But the beauty/authenticity double-bind women are placed in has serious consequences for them, too. It causes them pain, and not just the physical pain of beauty work, but the psychological pain of being put in a position that is not just unwinnable but untenable.

It would seem, then, that one if not both societal standards for women — impossible beauty and authenticity— should be rejected. It is easy to say that women should not be held to the incredibly high beauty standard that exists today. (That’s what Monroe sort-of does.) However, I think it is also important to say that women should not have to be physically authentic, either. Women should be free to adorn themselves however they wish, based on whatever beauty standard they wish to adopt (including the unadorned look). In short, they should be able to pursue what Dove calls “real beauty.” (More on that in a later post.)

And that, dear Reader, is that. So endeth my pontificating about social standards and the double bind involving beauty and authenticity that women are placed into. I’m done, except to note that men are not burdened by such a double bind, for their authentic faces — the more rugged the better — are regarded as handsome.