AUTHENTICITY
Why Are Great Things Authentic?
“Authentic” was named 2023 Word of the Year by the Merriam-Webster dictionary due to rising concerns over AI-generated content.
That stands to reason. I hear people complain all the time that the line between what’s real and what’s fake has become blurred. Just this afternoon, my daughter complained, “If I go online, I can’t tell what’s true anymore.”
AI has smudged the flow of information with a thick fog of uncertainty. We could fix it with a simple piece of legislation requiring any AI-produced content to be marked as such. If a universal database of human knowledge is to be compiled and distributed by machines, then we ought to know if something’s authentic, made-up, partially true, mostly false, or complete nonsense. If that’s obscured, we’re left dangling in doubt.
Why is that important? If you are a shopkeeper and someone hands you a $100 bill, you want to be sure it’s authentic. If you want to buy a piece of artwork, you want to know whether it’s a copy or an original created by the person whose name is on it. Who do you trust—someone whose word is her bond, or someone whose guarantee is worthless?
Ever since high school, I liked popular music that had that ring of authenticity. Many of my classmates liked singers like Gogi Grant, whose song The Wayward Wind topped the pop charts in 1956. But I liked Katerina Valente’s The Breeze and I, which sounded more authentic. Both songs were pop music of the day, but you’ll hear the difference if you enter them on YouTube. Then there was Pat Boone, a smirky smile with white bucks, who covered Little Richard’s rock ‘n roll but drained it of authenticity. Little Richard not only was the real deal, but he was also one of the founders of rock. As I grew older, I realized that the authenticity I admired in black blues was the sound of honesty.
When I was 28, I had a crisis that revealed how control of my life had been wrested from me since early childhood by institutions. Catholic elementary school until I was 14, then high school, then college, then into the Army, then marriage and house and car as a work-a-daddy in newspaper journalism. I had been scrubbed clean of any thought of becoming someone I wanted to be. I liked to draw, and while I had some skill in line and shading, there were no worthwhile “ideas” in my work because I didn’t have any worthwhile ideas. To have an idea, I had to think of one, make one up, invent something for a purpose. And even then, they didn’t have the sizzle of authenticity.
The problem was I hadn’t found my true self. But then on a cold night, March 15th, I was visiting a friend and while washing my hands in her upstairs bathroom, I fancied there was a three-year-old child in the room with me—a little boy I recognized as me at that age. I remembered what it was like being three, before society put its heartless patterns on my mind. I could see things with fresh eyes. I could explore things and create meanings for them. My thoughts were authentic. I didn’t need to think up ideas. They flowed naturally from me, or to me. They came freely, securely. And they were connected each to a thousand other things in my mind. That three-year-old was me before I became a piece of civilization’s statuary, scoured by its systems, the unique parts of me chipped away so I resembled the norm. I no longer explored and defined the world with wonder; I no longer fit the things of the world into who I truly was but rather fit my understandings into the social patterns that our civil life had set up for me. Those patterns were like cages that limited my field of play and action.
As a three-year-old, I was free to like what I liked, without reference to social or legal taboos. My life’s subsequent moral training was all about being presented with civilization’s defining cages, whose boundaries I was not to cross. Of course, some boundaries are necessary. One learns not to hurt others, and to avoid lying, stealing, and cheating. But these prohibitions are most effective when they arise from the heart of the person themselves. Our prisons are filled with people who saw those moral precepts as hindrances to fame and fortune, and who thought that it was worth the chance to violate them.
From that March 15th night onward, I never forgot that revelation. I remembered who I was and what it felt like to be free. Overnight I found myself able to draw pictures with ideas that authentically arose within me, not plastered onto me by my years of institutionalized training.
Not long after, my friend in whose bathroom I had my awakening saw me on the street and said, “What’s happened to you? You have soul in your eyes.” What happened was that I had touched base with who I really was instead of being the person I had been told and trained to be. That insight put me in touch with my authentic self and I internalized it.
This is not to be discounted. Life begins when you discover who you really are. Not who you’re supposed to be, or who others want you to be, but who you are.
Authenticity flows out of truth, which brings us back to the Great Wheel of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. As I’ve mentioned before, these are not inseparable qualities. Truth is beautiful and good. Beauty is good and true. Goodness is true and beautiful.
They are the three basic characteristics of reality. Truth is beautiful not because it’s pretty but because it’s real. Truth is good not because it gives us a beautiful feeling, but because it’s real.
Falsity is the devil’s realm. Reality is the realm of honest love and honest hate. A pretense of love is an abomination. Fake hate is engendered by ulterior motives, but it’s in ulterior motives where reality is found. In other words, to gin up hate in yourself or others to effect an end is a false front for a deeper, real reason.
If we try to escape the demands of reality, we are living a lie. One of the advantages of discovering who you really are—becoming authentic—is that you become sensitive to people who are operating behind a false front that they show to the world for whatever reason motivates them. Some folks are good at fooling others this way, but you are far less likely to fall for their performance if you are motivated by reality. This doesn’t mean that you are a realist. There’s nothing wrong with being a realist who tries to uncover reality so he can devise an appropriate reaction. But to be motivated by reality is the next step inward. It means you are already your authentic self, and that determines how you respond to life. You are not trying anything. You are simply real.
That can mean you are a truly kind person. Or it may mean you are a hard-nosed son-of-a-bitch. Reality comes in many shades, but they all have one thing in common.
They’re all real. That’s authenticity.
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