The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves

What does it mean to be authentic? For many, the search for the authentic provides a powerful source of meaning in a secular age, allowing a person a unique personal identity in a world that seems alienating and conformist. This demand for authenticity—the honest or the real—is one of the most powerful movements in contemporary life, influencing our moral outlook, political views, and consumer behavior.

Yet according to Andrew Potter, when examined closely, our fetish for authentic lifestyles or experiences—organic produce and ecotourism, bikram yoga and performance art, the cult of Oprah and the obsession with Obama—is actually a form of exclusionary status seeking. The result, he argues, is modernity's malaise: a competitive, self-absorbed individualism that creates a shallow consumerist society built on stratification and one-upmanship that ultimately erodes genuine relationships and true community.

Weaving together threads of pop culture, history, and philosophy, The Authenticity Hoax reveals how our misguided pursuit of the authentic exacerbates the artificiality of contemporary life that we decry. Potter traces the origins of the authenticity ideal from its roots in the eighteenth century through its adoption by the 1960s counterculture to its centrality in twenty-first-century moral life. He shows how this ideal is manifested through our culture, from the political fates of Sarah Palin and John Edwards to Damien Hirst and his role in contemporary art, from the phenomenon of retirement as a second adolescence to the indignation over James Frey's memoir. From this defiant, brilliant critique, Potter offers a way forward to a meaningful individualism that makes peace with the modern world.

The Barnes & Noble Review

In The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves, Canadian cultural critic Andrew Potter offers a brisk riposte to the ideology of the remix. Anchoring his argument in a critique of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's atavistic version of the modern self, which, he says, upends the Cartesian search for certainty, Potter sees our longing for authenticity as a persistently destructive feature of the modern condition. From lifestyle populist politicians like Sarah Palin, to chiliastic cults like Al Qaeda, to the marketing of coolness products like $400 working-class Prps denims, to the quirky aesthetic of Dave Eggers's hipstream McSweeney's publication, Potter sees the hoax of authenticity everywhere, seducing us with the possibility of impossibly true or meaningful experience.