Daily Archives: August 19, 2014

What is authenticity?

Posted on by
Reply

And why do we seek it?

Throughout the modern world, consumers seek authenticity. They look for genuine experiences, authentic cuisine, handmade fashions, and organic food.

A deep sense of falseness runs through the collective unconscious of the modern world. We seem to think that our normal lives are somehow unreal and inauthentic, and that genuineness can only be found by introducing something external into our lives.

The signs of this are everywhere. Young people move into an ethnic neighborhood because it seems more “authentic”. Products are marketed as “organic” or “genuine”. Ethnic cuisine restaurants tout their “authentic” cuisine. [1]

But what is this mysterious “something” that we seek? What exactly are we looking for when we seek authenticity? And what is it that we lack in the first place?

One possible definition of authenticity is that it is a form of supra-normalcy. We are seeking something more normal than normal life. Normal life is quite stressful for us upright hominids. We seek the normalcy of a previous era.

Because if there is one thing we all know about authenticity, it is that it cannot be found in the future or the present. It can only be found in the past.

Another possible definition of authenticity is the “natural”. [2] Modern life alienates us from the forests, plains, and beaches of our ancestors, and this creates a deep sense of dislocation in people. Every animal must have a sense of where it belongs in order to keep it in the environment to which it is adapted.

And we homo sapiens have not lived in cities and towns nearly long enough to have adapted to them.

Hence, we need parks and gardens and wilderness preserves in order to maintain our sanity. Even the most dedicated urbanite who would never dream of going camping appreciates the soothing, friendly qualities of a tree-lined street.

Yet another potential definition of “authentic” is “simple”. In purely mathematical terms, the complexity of our world is increasing. People invent things that other people can use to invent things. The nodes of human consciousness that are our minds are increasingly interconnected. The technologies of five years ago already seem quaint and antique.

So we seek in authenticity a version of the world that seems simpler and more innocent than our own. We buy things not simply for their basic utility (what you actually use it for) but for the feelings they evoke in us due to the associations we have in our minds about them.

So when a person buys an antique chest of drawers, or travels across town to buy organic vegetables at a farmer’s market, or listens to legendary jazz performances on the original vinyl, they are activating a whole complex array of positive associations in their minds. These associations form a (probably not very realistic) picture of the past in their minds and it is connection with this picture that we seek when we seek authenticity.

There is a sense that when something is authentic, it is closer to its source and thus somehow cleaner and clearer and hence more “real” than something that comes from the vast interconnected web of industrialization and commerce.

Hence the appeal of farmer’s markets and “artisnal” products. The young people of today express their alienation from nature and distrust of corporate capitalism by buying products made by the person who is selling them to you, from ingredients that were still in the ground yesterday.

To them, this is a guarantee not just of quality, but of that elusive quality of authenticity. It is more real to them because it is knowable. You know where it grew, who grew it, what it was fed, and there are no frightening chemical names on the ingredient list.

Whether or not this makes the product actually better in any measurable way is beside the point. They buy this product because they trust it. That makes it seem “authentic” to them. And that connection to their ideal of authenticity is the true purpose of the product.

Another source of the feeling of inauthenticity is the modern disconnection from community and cultural heritage. At some point in their lives, most people will seek a source of identity outside their families and friends. Modern society is uniquely unqualified at providing it.

We have severed ties with religion, extended family, even active democracy and the interplay of ideas. Humanity has never been more safe, prosperous, and prolific, but it has also never been so disconnected, disaffected, and depressed.

So much of modern life is virtual that it is no wonder that a sense of unreality pervades the modern zeitgeist. In the ideal of authenticity we seek some kind of reality, something solid and reliable in a sea of virtuality.

Whether we seek it in nature, ethnicity, or the past, we are seeking a connection to something greater than our self-oriented individualist consumer culture can provide. The quest for authenticity is, at its core, a quest for reality. Something that stands out from the cultural background noise of our daily lives and appeals not just to our civilized minds but to the deep longings of our primitive hearts.

Modern life is very good at meeting our basic needs.

Let’s hope that in the future, it can do more.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. This is, of course, a lie. If they served us their real authentic cuisine, we would probably hate it. The palate of one region is quite unlike that of another. Thus, these restaurants have to make you think you are getting something genuine while feeding you food that is anything but. Luckily, most of us don’t know the difference, so all they really have to do is put “authentic” on the sign.↵
  2. That word is in quotes because while we speak of natural products and nature a great deal, we are not truly talking about nature. Everything that happens is natural. That’s the thing about the actual laws of nature. They can’t be broken. We humans with our technologies are just as natural as a beaver building a dam.↵

Last in line

Posted on by
2

(EDITOR’s NOTE : No video in this entry because I haven’t made one yet. What can I say, it’s been a weird day. )

Tonight, I am going to talk about what it’s like to be the youngest of four.

All my life, I have had a feeling of being fucked over by fate. There I was with three siblings who had come before me in a tight cluster, relationships already well formed, and then there was me, the straggler, who had nobody even close to his age to relate to and who had to compete with three older, smarter, and in their intellectual own way more aggressive siblings.

I never stood a chance.

They got new things. I got hand-me-downs. They got our parents’ attention (both positive and negative) and I got ignored. They got tons of pictures taken of them at all ages, and I barely existed in the family picture album.

In fact, if it wasn’t for school pictures and occasionally ending up in the local paper, there would be almost no record of my existence at all.

This lead to a lifelong pattern of feeling like I am just barely tolerated. Like I am not inherently acceptable or even permitted to exist. I was not even invited into this world.

I was unplanned. An accident.

So I have lived life feeling like I have to apologize for being alive. An unwelcome guest, an unloved pet one regrets acquiring, an unwanted competitor for parents attention to be squashed and held firmly down.

And then I had to go and turn out to be a little genius, and suddenly, innocently, I became a potential target for jealousy as well.

And so, in a million little ways, a dozen times a day, I was given the message that I did not count. My best course of action was to blend in with the wallpaper so that everybody could forget I exist. And be grateful for whatever I got, because I was lucky to get anything.

In a sense, I was the Ringo of the family. I was just happy to be there.

So I grew up pathetically eager to please. I developed a skill set entirely designed to extend those moments when someone was paying attention to me. Picture a neglected dog who wags like crazy any time someone comes near. I was desperate for some kind of validation.

I still am.

None of this was done with malice aforethought. Nobody planned it. My family never got together and decided to neglect me. Most of what they did was completely subconscious, at least to them.

But my siblings took their cues from my parents, and my parents treated me like they were embarrassed that I had even been born and that on the whole, they preferred to just forget I was around and not have to think about me, justifying this in their minds as teaching me self-reliance.

It did not work.

I mean, they made me do my own clothes shopping when I was still in elementary school. My own laundry too. I was more or less left to raise myself.

And children are simply not qualified to do that, especially us youngest types. We are never given responsibility so we never learn responsibility. People would rather just do it themselves every single time than take the time to teach me to do it. They would rather give me no responsibilities than let me make my own mistakes and learn from them, just like they had done when they were that age.

And then they wonder why I grew up irresponsible and incompetent. I don’t volunteer to do work and/or take on various chores because I honestly believe myself to be incapable of doing them, ergo volunteering can only lead to disaster.

And the thing is, science backs me up on this. There is now hard scientific data establishing that the further down you are in the birth order of your family, the less parental investment you get, both in terms of positive attention and actual financial investment in your care.

Example : our family dentist told my parents straight out, in my presence, that I needed braces. They said “Oh, we can’t afford that!”

So I just… never got them.

When my sisters needed braces, they got them. But not me. Because I came last, I was lowest priority, and therefore my needs came last. There was never any question in my parents’ minds about whether they were willing to take money out of something else in order to pay for my medically necessary braces.

That would suggest I actually had a non-zero priority. That there was something in this universe that I am more important than. That I was somehow valuable enough to spend actual family money on.

That was clearly unthinkable.

So I grew up with low self-esteem. Both my school life and my home life told me what an embarrassing burden I was. My teachers never really liked me but that didn’t stop me from being desperately dependent on their approval. My fellow students put me at the bottom of the totem pole and then stomped on my to make sure I stayed there, or just for fun.

Even at school, as bright as I was, I was a zero priority person. Nobody knew what to do with a bag of awkwardness and ability like me, so they didn’t do much. I got tested up the ying-yang (not literally) when I was in grade 1, but they must not have known what to do with my results because nothing ever came of it.

So they gave up on me, just like everyone else.

So that is what it is like to be last in line. Older siblings always think the youngest has it easy, but I would trade the childhood I had for one where I had responsibility and parental attention any day.

And if any of my siblings read this, please know that I do not intend this as an attack on anybody. I am just getting all this negative stuff out of my system.

That’s all for tonight, folks. I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.