By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, May 13, 2026
In an exercise bordering on the sadomasochistic, I spent
20 minutes paging through a seemingly endless
stream of quotes about “authenticity” at Goodreads.
Unsurprisingly, given the state of our culture, the bulk
of them celebrate authenticity as the very definition of the good life, the
life well and properly lived.
I can forgive some of the authors because what they mean
by authenticity is really a hodge-podge of defensible sentiments, intuitions,
and cliches that are sufficiently devoid of context to seem true enough for the
people who want them to be true. Here are few examples:
“Confidence is knowing who you are and not changing it a
bit because of someone’s version of reality is not your reality,” the “inspirational author” Shannon L. Alder tells us.
Mandy Hale advises in The
Single Woman–Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass: Embracing Singleness with
Confidence: “Consider the fact that maybe … just maybe … beauty and
worth aren’t found in a makeup bottle, or a salon-fresh hairstyle, or a
fabulous outfit. Maybe our sparkle comes from somewhere deeper inside,
somewhere so pure and authentic and REAL, it doesn’t need gloss or polish or
glitter to shine.”
In another quote she says, “You’ll learn, as you get
older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your
terms, and never, ever apologize for it. Go against the grain, refuse to
conform, take the road less traveled instead of the well-beaten path. Laugh in
the face of adversity, and leap before you look. Dance as though EVERYBODY is
watching. March to the beat of your own drummer. And stubbornly refuse to fit
in.”
Meanwhile, Steve Maraboli assures us in Unapologetically
You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience that“A lot of the
conflict you have in your life exists simply because you’re not living in
alignment; you’re not be being true to yourself.”
The writer May Sarton seems to concur: “We have to dare
to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
Now, I have never heard of any of these authors. I choose
them not to single them out, but to illustrate how omnipresently ubiquitous
such insights are. There are thousands more like this on Goodreads. If you
directionally drill for this stuff in the broader culture—from fortune cookies,
motivational posters, PSAs by TV networks (“the more you know!”), university
orientation sessions and high school guidance counselor handbooks, family
sitcom sermons, and the collected oeuvres of self-help, pop psychology, business,
and life coach pabulum—you will realize that American culture sits atop a vast
Permian Basin of cliches and aphorisms about being true to yourself.
And like oil reserves, these cliches are a commodity,
fueling vast industrial complexes.
Hence the irony. The idea of defying conformity by being
“authentically you” is one of the defining features of intellectual,
psychological, and even spiritual conformity in modern life, punctuating
commencement speeches and self-help books without a shred of reflection or
awareness of the bullshitiosity of it all.
Don’t get me wrong. There is wisdom here, but it needs to
be imposed in context. By all means, if you are surrounded by horrible people,
don’t conform, don’t try to “fit in.” If you are a good and decent person, by
all means be true to yourself.
But what if the people surrounding you are good and
decent? Should you do everything you can not to fit in?
What if you’re a deceitful jackass? Should you still be
true to yourself?
If you’re a racist or rapist and the “reality” of those
around demands condemnation of such things, should you remain “confident” in
your authentic self in the face of their “reality”?
If you’re at a funeral for a beloved family member or,
say, a fallen fire fighter who lost his life to save a child, should you really
“dance like EVERYBODY is watching?”
If you want to murder your boss and wear his skin to the
supermarket, should you “dare to be” yourself, “however frightening or strange
that self may prove to be”?
If your answer to any or all of these questions is “Yes,
I’ve got to be me,” then you are a performative, childish jackass or simply an
evil person.
In his Notebooks, Albert Camus says, “But above
all, in order to be, never try to seem.”
This is rot, tosh, and folly. In order to be a
good person, one must first try to seem like a good person.
Resist the seductions of pure feeling, fight the laziness of finding your
unformed self as already perfect, and strive to fit an ideal outside yourself.
This is what we teach children, in the hope that in the trying, the habit will
take root, and with the habit will come the being.
The dross of transgression.
David Brooks, in his Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper
Class and How They Got There, wrote of how everything “transgressive” ends
up “digested by the mainstream bourgeois order, and all the cultural weapons
that once were used to undermine middle-class morality … are drained of their
subversive content.” There’s a lot of truth to this. But it’s not entirely
true. Some subversion remains. So much of this stuff is warmed-over Rousseau
and Nietzsche who, each in their own way, sought to undermine, overturn—to subvert—Christian
morality.
Say what you will about the old Christian dogmatists,
they understood that being “true to yourself” was the way of sin. Indeed,
giving in to human temptation was the very definition of sin, which is why so
many of the seven deadly sins are about going with your feelings, being true to
yourself, not conforming to the “reality” of others, never mind, you know, Scripture.
Giving in to desires of the flesh, indulging laziness or sloth, thinking
yourself better than you are, envying the good fortune of others: These are all
natural, authentic, temptations.
Humans, according to Christian doctrine, are inherently
sinful. But that does not necessarily mean, as I see it, that we are inherently
or irredeemably evil. But what is required to avoid becoming—or doing—evil?
Moral teaching. Rightly formed conscience. Instruction to know when your
feelings are misleading you. Why shouldn’t you steal, if stealing feels good
and delivers what your heart desires? Because, absent some very unusual and
extreme circumstances, stealing is wrong. And every parent and grade school
teacher is morally obliged to teach children this.
This argument doesn’t necessarily require personal faith
in Scripture, Christian or otherwise. But it does require thinking. Why
do newspapers hire (often ridiculous) ethicists? Because figuring out ethical
conduct requires consulting authoritative sources, facts, rules, lessons, and
arguments that cannot be provided simply by rummaging through your own
feelings. The most secular, atheistic, religion-shunning people in the world
know this when it comes to questions about what kind of tuna to buy or whether
it’s okay to keep a Tesla now that Elon Musk has become red-pilled. Tell one of
these ethicists that you want to eat the most dolphin-unsafe tuna because it
“feels good,” and they will tell you how morally disordered you are. Tell them
you want to leave your wife and kids, you’ll likely be told to be true to
yourself, because the heart wants what the heart wants.
Lionel Trilling, in his Sincerity and Authenticity,
traces how “authenticity” came to supplant “sincerity” as a kind of cultural
lodestar. Sincerity once meant something like authentic, as in pure,
unadulterated. Sincere wine had not been watered down. It came to mean
“honesty” first metaphorically. Sincere talk was unadulterated or diluted by
guile or artifice. By the time Shakespeare used “sincere,” the metaphorical
connotation was gone. It just meant from the heart, without pretense or
ulterior motive.
But in the modern era, “sincere” was demoted. “In its
commonest employment it has sunk to the level of a mere intensive, in which
capacity it has an effect that negates its literal intention—‘I sincerely
believe’ has less weight than ‘I believe,’” Trilling writes. In “the
subscription of a letter, ‘Yours sincerely’ means virtually the opposite of
‘Yours’. To praise a work of literature by calling it sincere is now at best a
way of saying that although it need be given no aesthetic or intellectual
admiration, it was at least conceived in innocence of heart.”
A sincere effort means trying your best, usually as
consolation because your best wasn’t good enough.
Trilling writes that “before authenticity had come along
to suggest the deficiencies of sincerity and to usurp its place in our esteem,
sincerity stood high in the cultural firmament and had dominion over men’s
imagination of how they ought to be.”
And that’s the heart of it. Sincerity requires effort, it
implies—or at least can imply—some level of thinking, of
consideration and contemplation. Authenticity is laziness because it requires
nothing more than grabbing the nearest feeling off your own personal shelf of
emotions and passions. Sincerity means truth, authenticity means “true for me.”
But it’s worse than that, because the vast bulk of
authenticity-mongering in our culture is not only inauthentic, it’s insincere.
René Girard is profoundly useful on this point. What started in Rousseau as an
(allegedly) sincere argument about authenticity being a rebellion against the
false pieties of the church, or what was later dubbed “the system”—by a
sprawling variety of nihilists, existentialists, Marxists, radicals, bohemians,
hipsters, populists, and poseurs—became its own conformity. The tech
billionaire who wears a hoodie and sneakers to seem authentic is just wearing
the uniform of the authenticity industrial complex. The $100 (or $10,000) T-shirt is a conformist accessory for the
well-dressed “rebel.”
The tradwife influencers, the professional rebels, the
“true-to-themselves” “just asking questions” table pounders work tirelessly to
seem effortlessly authentic, because that’s what sells in this capitalist
system—that so many “authentic” radicals get rich by denouncing. How many hours
at the gym, how many Botox injections, how many expensive unguents does one
have to endure in order to seem authentically natural? How much prep time is
required to look unconcerned with how you look? How many viral videos do you
need to film inside your car in order to “keep it real”? How hard do you have
to work to claim you’ve been censored?
The French poet Gérard de Nerval famously walked his pet
lobster in public, telling people, “It does not bark and it knows the secrets
of the deep.” That kind of shock-the-bourgeois nonsense is at least funny. But
it wasn’t and isn’t authentic, nor is it even sincere. It’s a performance.
Transgressiveness was a multibillion-dollar lifestyle
industry long before Columbia Records ran billboards vowing that “But the Man can’t bust our music.”
What is so infuriating and nauseating about so much of it
is that the consumers and manufactures of this fashionable gruel can’t even see
or acknowledge to themselves that they are high on their own supply. Universities teach protest
and radicalism
as a core value of a college education. They select applicants who fluently
parrot the luxury belief shibboleths of social justice and anti-bourgeois
rebellion, then pretend that campus protest is an authentic, spontaneous
“happening.”
Hollywood peddles the idea that a protagonist is a
hero—or at least a cool anti-hero—if he sticks to his code, even when his code
is objectively evil. Hannibal Lecter eats people, but we are supposed to pull
for him all the same. Breaking Bad’s Walter White is a murderer and meth dealer, but he tugs at
our hearts all the same. From the Corleones to the Sopranos, Frank Lucas to
Tony Montana, mobsters are glorified. Omar Little is an audience favorite in The
Wire, because even though he murders people, he follows his code—as does
Dexter, the serial killer who only deviates from his rule of murdering other
serial killers when there’s a chance he might get found out.
Politicians are lionized as saviors and redeemers on the
grounds that they are authentic, even if they are authentic liars or idiots.
Yes, President Donald Trump is authentic. He’s an authentic liar. He is sincere
in his belief that lying and bullying is fine if it yields the results he
wants. Say what you will about the man, he is true to himself. He dances like
everyone is watching. He refuses to bend to the reality of others. Would you
teach your children to be authentic like him?
Graham Platner, the Great Authentic Hope of Democrats and
anti-Trump partisans, is authentic in his sincere desire to seem “authentic.”
But which is the authentic Platner? The one who got the Nazi tattoo? The one
who lied about knowing it was Nazi tattoo? The one who erased it so he could
run for office?
Populism always and everywhere depends on the cult of
false authenticity. It elevates the heroic leader who defies the system, who
represents the “authentic” people and their grievances and desires to punish
the other people. As German political philosopher Jan-Werner Müller writes, “the core claim of populism: only some of the
people are really the people.” “We are the people. Who are you?” Turkish
strongman Recep Erdoğan says to his critics. The authentic will of “the people”
is legitimate and sacred, but “the people” is never defined as all of the
people, just the “right people,” the real people—the “true” Germans,
the authentic Hungarians, the denizens of “real America.” When Brexit passed,
Nigel Farage insisted that this was a “victory for real people,” leaving one to wonder what the
other 48 percent of Britons were. Mannequins? As Trump once said, “The only important thing is the unification of the
people—because the other people don’t mean anything.”
But not everything is merely lifestyle posing. Contra
Brooks, not everything transgressive is digested and made harmlessly bourgeois
by capitalism. Throughout history, the one surefire, undefeatable marker of
real authenticity, true sincere rebellion, against the establishment, the
system, the ruling edifice of hypocrisy and inauthenticity is violence, the “propaganda of the deed.” “It is to violence that Socialism
owes those high ethical values by means of which it brings salvation to the
modern world,” French political theorist Georges Sorel proclaimed. “From birth it is clear to him,” Frantz Fanon writes, “that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions,
can only be called in question by absolute violence.”
Cosplay is kayfabe until somebody gets killed.
Brooks is right that transgressiveness is a capitalist
product. Transgressive art, transgressive literature, poetry, film,
music, fashion, even transgressive education (see bell hooks’—she uses lowercase letters
because that’s so authentic—Teaching to Transgress, available in hardback at
Amazon for $31.76). Indeed, I doubt very many in the Transgression Industrial
Complex are even aware that the word originally meant “disobedience
to God’s law, sin.” Even fewer would care. Most would say, “That’s cool.”
The problem with transgressiveness for its own sake is
like the problem with heroin: One needs an ever-higher dose just to get the
same high. To be sure, most people can handle it, because most people don’t
actually want to be real rebels, they want to wear rebelliousness as a fashion
statement, to stand out at a meeting or when they drop their kids off at
school. But just as some wrestling fans refuse to admit the fakery of the
kayfabe, what some authenticity-addicts see in mere fashionable transgressiveness
is hypocrisy, which they have been taught is their enemy. And when they hear
the apologies for and celebrations of actual violence, whether by Luigi
Mangione—who murdered a healthcare executive—or Hamas—which proudly murders and
rapes on principle—they reach the logical-but-irrational conclusion that such
people are fulfilling the demands of authenticity, they’re keeping it real,
they’re denying the fake bourgeoise façade of normalcy, because they “know” who
they are—and are willing to prove it with blood.
