Craving Authenticity in a Flood of Lies
How pop culture buries the sublime
How do hypersensitive, conscientious souls endure the torrent of deception in popular culture and daily life in liberal, technologically-advanced societies?
Indeed, there’s a prior question, which is how these societies have managed not to have stamped out such saints in the first place. How, then, can a taste for authenticity survive the onslaught of its antithesis?
The answer to the latter question is that our appetite for truthfulness can replace our obsolete search for God. The old gods have passed away, but we’re still tantalized by hints of sacredness, by rare moments of “transcendence” when we escape our mundane routines and conventional charades, and discover something worth living for.
The Profusion of Dishonesty
Our deceptions are legion, since telling the complete truth as we see it is as rare as diamond. We lie to others and to ourselves. To paraphrase the Radiohead song, we lock up our spirits and live for our secrets.
Although we crave the truth as a condition of supernatural salvation, we’re infatuated with our fictions. We identify with our narrative in which we play the starring role, and we protect our fantasies by spinning the facts to suit them. The cultures that emerge from our self-deceptions are naturally far from realistic.
To be sure, the modern monoculture began as a correction of the previous delusions of theism that propped up theocracy, patriarchy, slavery, and feudalism. Secular humanists told the truths that we’re on our own and that there’s no salvation from above and no immortal spirit. But those harsh truths aren’t for everyone; thus, to sustain the march of civilized progress, we had to retreat to more timely frauds and mass hallucinations.
We tell ourselves that social progress is possible without divine guidance, even as science shows that we’re mammals that eagerly submit to depraved masters. We believe our privileged “First World” is advanced, even as we ravage the planet that supports us, as we outsource production of cheap goods to foreign labourers in impoverished dictatorships whose tyrants we prop up with our military-industrial complexes, and as we fall for the shallowest flattery and fallacies from corporate advertising.
Beyond the big lies of our ideologies, there’s the petty dishonesty in our daily attitudes and mannerisms. We flee from truth whenever we engage in small talk or follow a script as professionals who act as functionaries in patronizing each other and overlooking our common existential situation. We depersonalize others in business and in politics, but also in our romantic entanglements when we presume that love and sex have spiritual value even though we proceed to focus on our body parts.
This sensitivity to hypocrisy is at least as old as Holden Caulfield’s resentment towards adult phoniness, in The Catcher in the Rye, and there were similar critiques of culture in The Little Prince and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. But of course the dynamic is far older, since we find it in the Jewish prophets, in Jesus’s diatribes against the Pharisees, and in the Greek philosophers’ sneering at the Sophists.
Compared to rare moments of numinous or sublime experience, all behaviour governed by social conventions and all our profane interactions seem irrelevant and wrongheaded. As Georges Bataille suspected, the whole point of such mundaneness may be to douse the flames that would otherwise rise from our encounter with the sacred. Authentic religious experiences are ruinous as often as they’re productive: they inspire zealots to tear down unholy social structures and to persecute the blasphemers and infidels who betray the deeper reality.
Glowing Embers of Authenticity on Social Media
If we could be wholly fooled or if there were no contrary attraction to honesty and personal authenticity, we wouldn’t have the subcultures that feature refreshing and surprising instances of truth-telling.
Take, for example podcasting, a new, radio-like, but often filmed form of broadcasting which largely eliminates advertising and features one-on-one, long-form conversations. Here as elsewhere the internet bypasses middlemen and gatekeepers, since anyone with a camera and an internet connection can upload their conversations and interviews.
What’s revelatory about podcasts is that they remind us it’s possible not to speak in dishonest talking points. We’re often so bored and jaded from listening to political bullshit and to the professional sowing of confusion from the talking heads promoted on corporate media that listening to a real dialogue can be bewildering.
Can two people really just sit down and have a heart-to-heart conversation, demonstrating they’re interested in what the other person has to say, so that they listen and follow up with relevant, thoughtful feedback? You wouldn’t know it from old-school mainstream broadcasting. But podcasting emerged nonetheless, giving the lie to any presumption that the rampant political forms of cynicism and dishonesty are necessary.
When watching pundits and politicians ignore the phony interviewer’s gotcha-questions to get across their canned message that skims the surface of the real issues at best, it’s wise to reflect on the fact that those professionals actually loathe each and every one of their viewers. The politicians’ and pundits’ loathing for Everyman is axiomatic, which is why they make a sport of bullshitting on live television. A useful rule of thumb is that the politicians who receive the most votes have the deepest contempt for all voters. The reason is that the politician holds the society at large responsible for the humiliation of having to undergo the democratic campaign process to attain his or her coveted power.
Another example is the genre of YouTube videos that focus on authentic reactions. These video have a television pedigree that stretches back some decades, to the shows “Punk’d,” “Just for Laughs: Gags,” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” which featured elaborate practical jokes or funny accidents that likewise compelled the “victim” to react honestly to a situation.
The most popular YouTuber, PewDiePie, became famous for filming himself react while he played videogames, the apparent attraction being the lack of filters and the immediacy and emotional heights of his reactions.
There’s a flourishing culture of debate on YouTube. Thanks to broadband networks, podcasting and streaming technologies such as Zoom, debates between, say, atheists and Christians or Democrats and Republicans can be streamed in real-time, complete with the peanut gallery of commenters. See, for example, the channel Modern-Day Debate.
Mind you, these are real, formal, albeit sometimes amateurish debates, not the wholly fake kind featured in American televised presidential “debates” and in the pundit noise on mainstream news, which was savaged years ago by Jon Stewart (in the case of the defunct show “Crossfire” on CNN).
A real debate depends on a structure that forces the truth to emerge. Each side operates in good faith, is given plenty of time to speak and to say whatever they want, and they converse and interrogate each other’s beliefs, letting the audience determine who has the better case.
A fake debate is designed to frustrate the audience and to obscure the truth by generating noisy, pointless conflict. In fake debates, the perpetrators only skim the surface of issues and run out the clock before ad breaks so they can stick to their shallow, disingenuous talking points and save face; that way, too, the interviewer or “moderator” can please the celebrity pundit or power player and retain access to that personage for future installments.
Or consider the virtuoso guitarist known as TheDooo who goes on Omegle to interact with strangers from around the world, and who pretends to be a novice player only to stun the stranger with his flawless, heavy-metal renditions of various songs.
See, for example, the beginning of this YouTube video of his in which a teenaged girl goes to some lengths to reassure the guitarist that he has nothing to be ashamed of for being “a starter” who can’t play so well yet, only to be embarrassed when he bursts into a virtuoso performance.
There’s an endearing moment at the 0:47 second mark, after she’s closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands and her cheeks have gone red, when her shoulders slowly rise as she attempts almost to make like a turtle and retract her head out of embarrassment or to sink into the ground to hide her shame, only to burst out and throw her head back in hearty laughter — because TheDooo has all the while played astonishing riffs, every perfectly-placed note of which forces an authentic emotional reaction from her.
And that’s the point. These new media make it harder to hide in a network of lies. It’s as though the amateurish parts of YouTube were our late-modern Mystery cults, akin to that movement in the ancient Greco-Roman world that catered to the empire’s spiritual (existential) longings that weren’t being met by the official roman religion. That religion told the masses how to perform certain rituals to honour the Roman Empire, but showed little interest in the quality of the populations’ inner life. The Mysteries were more authentic in dealing with the universal, existential plight of being an intelligent mortal that hopes, against all odds, for transcendence.
Likewise, the glimmers of honesty in our social media cut through the propaganda and platitudes, the condescension and tribal narrow-mindedness. We see in these brief flashes of heartfelt emotion and amateurishness what ordinary people are really like. Moreover, we catch glimpses of ecstasy, escapes from the matrix, as when TheDooo’s viewers recognize him and are bowled over by what they’re about to witness or when their jaws drop and they’re astonished and enraptured by the transition from his pretended humdrum lack of skill to when he plays as well as any guitarist in a famous rock band, transporting the ordinary viewers, as it were, backstage for a private performance.
Indeed, it’s tempting to see in the recordings of these shocked, euphoric facial expressions, hidden in the dross of popular culture so many signs of the great mystery that transcends the conceits of our going concerns. There’s no logic in saying that because life can strike us sometimes as sublime, therefore we’ll never understand everything, let alone that the cosmic mystery has a particular divine, typically reassuring character. But these embers of authenticity remind us at least of the cosmicist possibility that our human pursuits are necessarily vain in so far as they fall under the universe’s alien shadow.
Corporate Smothering of the Embers
Alas, countervailing forces attempt to co-opt these refreshing subcultures and to tame the new technologies, to spare the herd any hint of truthfulness that puts our daily dishonesty to shame.
The YouTube channel “Bon Apetit” has recently collapsed under the weight of revelations of the racist corporate culture behind the channel’s popular food videos that used to promote authenticity in the kitchen. In line with the amateurishness of the rest of YouTube, the chefs would cook in the postmodern fashion, eliminating subterfuge and glitzy editing, pulling back the curtain on metanarratives, and showcasing the chefs’ banter so the audience would feel as though it were friends with the food stars. But the show turned out to be based on an appalling corporate lie, as explained by one YouTube critic.
A more familiar example is the phenomenon of reality TV. Hulk Hogan’s 2005 show, “Hogan Knows Best,” for instance, purported to depict the innocent reality of his family life. But this was revealed as a sham when Hogan’s son got in a car accident and was charged for reckless driving and underage drinking, while putting his friend and passenger on life support. Meanwhile, while filming the show, Hogan allegedly cheated on his wife with one of his daughter’s friends. Hogan’s wife filed for divorce and the show was cancelled.
By now there’s a reality TV version of practically every dimension of human life, but it’s also common knowledge that “reality TV” is an oxymoron. The difference between old-fashioned sitcoms and reality show has more to do with style than substance. Often, the “reality” shows are secretly scripted and the show is presented to the viewer as something like a documentary. Still, the illusion of authenticity is provided in such shows as “Pawn Stars,” “American Pickers,” and “Storage Wars.” Even when a show like “Survivor” isn’t entirely staged, the contestants can’t help but play to the cameras.
Of course, we can hide behind anonymity on the internet, which has fostered trolling, spamming, and cyberbullying. Some of these uses may be unpleasant forms of authenticity, as we inadvertently reveal our dark side; presumably, Twitter and chat rooms on the “intellectual dark web” have reflected our infantilized Id. Indeed, the dark power of anonymity was recognized as far back as Plato. He pointed out that a magic ring that renders the wearer invisible would tempt that person to commit crimes, raising the question of whether we follow the law only because we lack the opportunity to break it with impunity.
Twitter in particular, though, isn’t so much a channel of our inner demons as a device for submerging our individuality and whipping up frenzied mobs. Again, mob mentalities are hardly new. The maenads, female followers of Dionysus were infamous for their frenzies and were often portrayed as tearing people apart barehanded. Perhaps the Twitter mobs’ hunt for scapegoats for the sake of “social justice” are pale imitations of ancient frenzies that once served the religious purpose of providing an out-of-body experience.
In any case, Twitter is also part of the paradox of President Trump’s infamous “authenticity.” Here’s a man who’s such an astonishing salesman that he’s obviously been bullshitting his way through life every second of every day for many decades; meanwhile, as president he’s now regarded by many Americans as the only one in Washington who tells it like it is.
The fallacy here is just the confusion between honesty and having a lack of mental filters. Trump may not think before he speaks, but that doesn’t mean he’s being honest. On the contrary, if he’s lied with such abandon that he no longer cares about or understands the difference between fact and fantasy, the fact that he says whatever’s on his mind regardless of the circumstances would hardly mean he respects the listener enough to refrain from attempting to defraud her.
After all, telling the truth requires mental discipline, good faith, and self-awareness, none of which Trump has. You first have to understand the difference between truth and lies, honesty and deceit, and the greater your interest in that distinction, the more likely you’ll work hard at figuring out what the facts are in the first place. The “filters” that Trump lacks include the epistemic disciplines needed for responsible thinking, which is a precondition of knowing the truth to be able to tell it to others.
Trump’s “presidency,” then, is a glaring symbol of our ambivalence about authenticity. We crave the latter but we frequently succumb to deception because we’re barraged by the noise of corporate spin doctors and fraudsters who’ve been unleashed by free-falling capitalism.
