Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is Robert Lamb. Today we have a vault episode for you. This is going to be Authenticity Part three, Part three of three. This originally published on three twenty eight, twenty twenty four.
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three of our series looking at the concept of authenticity. Now, we had a little break in the middle of our series there because on Tuesday of this week we had an interview that you recorded, Rob that was already scheduled to come out on that date. So there's a little bit of discontinuity here, but we are picking up where
we left off last Thursday, that's right. So in part one of this series, we started by trying to pick apart the different common usages of authenticity, and I explained why I became interested in the subject. It's one of those ideas that I think is very very good for exploration because it's like a commonly used concept that actually is very vague and there's a lot of equivocation and
using the idea in different ways. So we tried to pick apart some of these different usages of authenticity what people mean when they invoke the idea, and we looked at a study showing that we are not as good as we think we are at perceiving authenticity in others. In part two of the series, we talked about authenticity in art and entertainment, what it means to look for
authenticity and musical artists and other types of art. We talked about the Orson Wells movie F for Fake, and then we discussed a specialized idea of authenticity that was proposed by the art critic Walter Benjamin and how it relates to two changes in media technology over the centuries. And here we are once again to examine a couple other facets of authenticity. Now, the thing I wanted to talk about today was the interaction between and relationship between
honesty and authenticity. We talked about this a bit in part one of this series because we were alluding to the way that there is an apparent relationship between authenticity and honesty. You know, there is some overlap between the two ideas, but they are not usually understood to be the same thing, And an easy illustration of that is characters both real and fictional, who are known to tell
lies but are often thought of as authentic. And yet, despite this clear illustration that the two concepts are not exactly the same thing, we sometimes behave as if they're the same thing. We like forget that we use these ideas differently because we feel like if somebody is authentic, well,
that means we can trust them. So I ended up looking at a paper for a trying to find a careful analysis of the similarities and differences between honesty and authenticity, how these ideas are culturally understood, and in how they
manifest in behavior. So this paper is by Erica R. Bailey and Sena S. A Ingar, published in Current Opinion in Psychology called Yours Truly on the Complex Relationship between Authenticity and Honesty published in the year twenty twenty two, and Erica Bailey was also one of the authors of the study we looked at in part one, the one about how we're not as good as we think we
are at determining whether other people are being authentic. Now as a starting point, this paper gives essentially the same understanding of authenticity that we talked about in part one. This will be complicated when we start introducing survey responses and how people actually use the idea of authenticity and how it relates to honesty and so forth. But we start off with the idea that quote, a person is authentic when they genuinely express their true inner qualities and feelings.
In other words, the inside matches the outside. Our outward behavior is consistent with our private inner feelings, thoughts, and character. So by contrast, a person would usually be considered inauthentic if they say things they don't really feel or think, or if they act in ways that are inconsistent with who they are inside, or if they don't express their
inner self in the outside world. And the authors begin the paper by mentioning an episode in the life of the eighteenth century Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, where they write, quote, in order to be more authentic, he committed to expressing himself honestly in every single moment of his day, certain that this brutal truth telling, devoid of any cowing to the social context, would allow him to manifest his authentic self. And I gotta say that sounds absolute insufferable.
Yeah, who wants to hang out with this guy?
I mean, and I'm a big fan of being honest. I think honesty is a good virtue that people should have. You know, you should not tell lies to people. You should try to be honest with people generally. But this is actually describing something different than honesty. Saying every thought that pops into your head, telling friends and family everything they do that bothers. You be being honest, you know, quote honest in the most brutal way is always seems
like a kind of nasty way to live. It's going to cause other people grief and just alienate you from everyone and everything you care about.
Yeah, I mean this you're talking about a life without decorum, without patience, without you know, the limited capacity to be supportive of others, because sometimes and being supportive of people, you know, friends and family with their maybe sometimes half formed ideas in some cases, like you don't want to be brutally honest. You want to be supportive. You want to you want to maybe push them in the right direction, but being you know, completely brutally honest is maybe not the right approach.
I think that's right. I mean, I think there is a lot of middle ground between lying to people and or enabling delusions versus being brutally honest to people in a way that you know is liable to hurt them, and just like avoiding tact altogether.
Yeah, imagine just deciding all right, from here on now, I'm just going to be brutally truthful about everything. But then, like then we get into that other question like what is truth right?
Right? You may in fact be mistaken about some of the things that you think you think are brutally true when you say them, in which case it would turn
out that it was really unproductive. Yeah, So this like raises the question of whether it would even really be possible, Like is this kind of radical authentic truth telling even self consistent because there are momentary thoughts we have but don't express, and are those actually truer reflections of our inner selves then what we would say if we thought about it some more before we talked m Yeah so?
Or also is it are those more are like expressions of momentary opinions or thoughts truer reflections of our inner selves even than the choice not to speak in a certain situation, wouldn't that choice also flow from the self yeah.
Yeah, it reminds me of something I've mentioned before on the show, the medieval doodle of a christ like bird or a bird like Christ, if you rather, in the in the margins of various manuscripts, and the idea it seems, based on what I've read, is that thoughts rise from the heart, they travel up through a very long neck before they reach the lips, and therefore, like it's about deciding whether you actually want those feelings to come out.
That is why the neck of the christ like individual, the christ like bird here is very long, because there's plenty of time to reflect on set thoughts and perhaps decide not to say them yeah.
Or even decide whether you genuinely feel them exactly. Yeah. I think we've probably all had the experience of feeling like we wanted to express something, only to think about it for a minute and think, that's not really what I feel.
Yeah, write out that angry email, but don't send it today, set it aside for tomorrow, and then a lot of the times you'll realize, you know, that's not exactly what I meant to say.
So anyway, to come back to this relationship between authenticity and honesty, from this example, of Rousseau. You know, we see someone at least partially equating authenticity and honesty, assuming that to be authentic is the most honest way to live, and that authenticity entails NonStop, moment to moment displays of quote,
fearless honesty, or brutal truth telling. And the authors also quote another another writer in this paper named Valor, who makes a similar equivalence, saying that honesty is defined as quote a willingness to put one's authentic self in play. But the authors actually propose a counter hypothesis in this paper. They write that quote honesty is one of many tools in the pursuit of authenticity, and that people will disregard
or discount honesty as authentic under specific conditions. And I want to be clear that they're not making a normative argument like about how people should use the concepts of honesty or authenticity. They're just trying to be descriptive and discover how people actually do already use these concepts in their day to day lives and in their self image.
So the authors investigate this idea of the relationship between authenticity and honesty in several ways, and one thing they do is a simple, small survey with an open ended question. They asked participants if they could describe a time in their life when they quote lied or did not tell the truth in a way that was authentic or true
to themselves at the time. And the results of this were that quote authentic dishonesty really did not generally seem to people like an impossible situation or an incoherent concept. People generated autobiographical examples of when they were dishonest in
a way they thought was authentic to themselves. Furthermore, and here's the interesting part, the authors say that the examples people gave of their own authentic dishonesty fell into basically four categories, and I'll list these and describe them as I go. So the first example is when the subject was dishonest with other people in a way that they were also not honest with themselves. So this category might not be immediately intuitive, but I think it makes sense
if you see examples. So the stories people tell seem to be about lying to others about some objective situation, for example, about a worrying health prognosis or bad outcomes at work or school, or mental health struggles or something like that. At the same time, that they themselves were in some way deluded or quote lying to themselves about
the situation. So, for example, you know, I'm telling my parents that I'm doing fine at college, but in reality, I am failing my classes and I'm going through a mental health crisis. And the person who says this might say, even though I was lying to my parents about well how I was doing, I was being authentic because I was also lying to myself. Essentially, I managed to truly convince myself of the false things I was telling them.
Yeah, to borrow the catchphrase from stand up comedian Dusty Sligh, we're having a good time Like that can essentially be dishonest, but you can believe in it, and other people can believe in it even if it's not true in the moment.
Yeah. And actually, that raises an interesting facet of this, because it raises the question of what exactly it means to quote lie to yourself. This is a common enough concept that we've all heard of it, and probably you have used it ourselves to describe something we've done, and it seems to not be the same thing as simply being convinced of a delusion. There's some overlap, but being delusional can be entirely involuntary, you know, like you don't you're not you don't feel like you are in any
way the cause of being deluded about something. But when people say I was lying to myself, I think they usually mean there is some element, even if just a small element of willfulness in believing in the delusion, Like some part of them knows better, but they are they are purposely disregarding or ignoring that knowledge.
Yeah, Like I mean, one easy example of this is, like you that thinking back to like the old days of of buying CDs, especially as a young person with money's a lot tighter, Like you spend your money, you cannot you can buy no other album this week, maybe this month, And afterwards you're you're maybe a little less one over by the album than you'd hoped, but you're kind of like fooling yourself and like, no, this is good.
I'm getting this, I'm jamming to this. This was worth my money, this is worth my time.
It's even got the bonus tracks.
Yeah, it's got the bonus tracks. It's like I thought it was ten tracks, No, it's twelve tracks. I'd be losing money if I didn't buy it.
Yeah. So However, despite this element of wilfulness, it seems to at least in some cases, not rule out seeing yourself as authentic when you represent that same misunderstanding of reality to other people. So, like you take that CD that you're talking yourself into thinking is so great, and you show it to your friend and say it's so great. You might not think you were being inauthentic there, because you really worked yourself up to convince yourself it was great.
Yeah, I was authentically delusional about the quality of this record, And honestly, if you know me, you should have seen that in me. You should have seen that in my eyes and known to approach this recommendation with caution.
Okay. Other examples of quote authentic dishonesty that people gave. There were some examples that were when being honest would have threatened the subjects basic needs survival or employment. This is the self protection category. A lot of these seem to seem to have to do with employment, which I think is kind of revealing, but things like lying at work to avoid revealing a mistake that could have cost
the subject their job. Another one that somebody gives is lying about former job experience in order to get a new position, and the subject in this example specifically says they feel it was a good thing to do because they ended up doing exceedingly well at the new job that they lied in order to get fake it.
Do you make it right? I mean, that's basically what we're alluding to.
That's what they're claiming. I mean, we can't evaluate if it's true that they did exceedingly well, but you know, for the sake of argument, we'll take it. Another one was, and you understand this, somebody lying about psychiatric symptoms in order to get admitted to a psych ward to avoid being homeless. The subject says that this was authentic because they were trying to escape living on the streets during winter, which was extremely hard. So that is a lie. It's
hard to blame somebody for that. But in this case, the subject not only saw that as justified, but they said for that reason it was authentic that they did that.
Yeah, I mean, they're talking about survival here right.
At the same time, it does raise questions about what authenticity means in this case. But we can come back to that third question. When honesty would harm an important relationship protecting a relationship, This is probably people can think of examples like this, A close friend says, does my new haircut look good? And maybe you find nice things to say about it, even if you don't actually love it.
People thought this was still authentic behavior. And then there are much more serious examples, such as like within family and marital relationships, like protecting loved ones from negative judgments that you or others would have made about them.
Yeah, yeah, I think both these are very understandable. I mean, the haircut is probably the best example because there is a line. There is a line at which your close friend's haircut has become so bad that you do have to say something. You have to say, actually, this doesn't look good. Come with me, we're going to go get this fixed right now. You have a job interview tomorrow or something. You know, I'm a good enough friend to let you know that we have to go fix this.
But there's a lot of room on that spectrum for just saying yeah, it looks great, and that's what you're expected to do as a friend.
Or in fact, in the haircut example, in this paper, they're like the person describes things they found to say about the haircut that were true even though overall, they did not actually think it was good.
Yeah, because I mean bad, bad haircuts happen, and you'll grow out of them. You know, it's going to be pretty bad to take it to that next level, say we've got to go fix this. Yeah.
Yeah. I think the example was like, yeah, this will really stand out, you know, putting a positive sounding tone on them.
That'll grow in nicely.
Yeah. And then fourth final category, this one you can very much understand. Again, it's hard to blame people for this when honesty would threaten the survival or well being of someone else, dishonesty in the protection of other people.
So examples would include like lying to protect people from physical danger, maybe like a counselor lying to potentially abusive family members that you don't know about somebody's whereabouts, or maybe to protect someone from information that would be devastating to them.
Yeah.
So it's interesting that some of these versions of authenticity do sort of go along with the inside matches the outside definition, but some do not. Some of these are simply cases of people lying or misrepresenting themselves in a situation where they believe in some way it was justified. So in those cases, authenticity would seem to mean something
different than than the way we've been using it. It would seem to mean morally justified, regardless of whether you were expressing your true feelings on the outside or not. And these examples just seem to reinforce to me how
fluid our concept of authenticity is. Once again, despite how important it is in these day to day judgments we make about people and about ourselves, it seems to have ill defined boundaries, and the authors review some other findings that further illuminate and complicate the relationship between honesty and authenticity.
For example, and this came up in Part one, in order to evaluate whether your external behavior is consistent with your true self, you have to both know what your true self is and be able to objectively observe and analyze your external behavior, and both of those tasks are non trivial. The authors point out that that both of them are problematic even given what we know from other psychology studies, because studies show systematic biases in how we
perceive ourselves. People tend to see themselves as morally better than the average person, and experiments show that people have selective memories of events end of information that help bolster a positive self image. So this can make research about honesty and authenticity rather difficult because both honesty and authenticity people take to have moral implications, so people are motivated to exaggerate the extent to which they are both in
self reports. Though the authors do point to one pretty interesting study from twenty twenty that used a bit of trickery to look into whether self reported and even test evaluated authenticity might be biased or strategic self presentation. So this other paper I went and looked at was by William hart at All, published in Personality and Individual Differences in twenty twenty, called to be or to appear to be evidence that authentic people seek to appear authentic rather
than be authentic. So the authors in their abstract right quote participants numbering two hundred and forty completed a bogus color gazing task under the presumption that authentic people see colors become more or less intense while gazing at them. And these are the two conditions, the more intense condition and the less intense condition. And they say that quote participants reported perceiving color as more intense in the more
intense condition. But this biased responding consistent with appearing authentic was enhanced by trait authenticity indicators. So to paraphrase there, participants were told that, you know, other studies have found that more authentic people will see the color of this block either intensify or d intensify, and in reality the
colors did not change at all. And then the experiment found that on average, people who rated themselves as more authentic on a self assessment test were more likely to claim they saw the color change in line with whatever they thought an authentic person was supposed to see. So, in other words, there was some amount of interest in either lying or in perceiving reality differently in order to
protect the idea of an authentic self. So this is a piece of evidence that maybe not all the time, but probably some of the time, maybe a lot of the time, authenticity itself is a strategic performance e g. Inauthentic behavior in service of appearing to be authentic. So it's interesting to pair this with that study that finding from part one about how people are not good at judging who is authentic and who is not, at least when compared with self assessments, which of course are themselves
possibly misleading. So I want to pause briefly here before you lose all hope, Because remember that studies like this are observing trends and tendencies on average and behavior, not like totalizing realities about all people all the time. So I would not walk away from these kinds of findings thinking, oh my god, life is a lie, nobody is ever
being genuine. I don't think that's the takeaway personally. I would think about it more like these types of studies offer limited individual pieces of evidence that often the social impressions of authenticity that we form are misleading, that social impressions of authenticity are often not what they seem, and we should be careful about placing too much weight on the authenticity assessments of people that we form, especially after
superficial interactions. So in other words, you know, I'd say it's probably not a good strategy to decide whether you trust someone with something important on the basis of whether they give off an authentic vibe or not. It might be better to look at like an objective track record of their behavior in the past or something like that.
Yeah. But though, of course, the conundrum is we do this all the time, right, Yeah, And a great deal goes into making sure that individuals put forward that vibe that we trust, be that individual salesperson, a company spokesman, a politician, a newscaster, I mean, you name it. We're supposed to to instantly feel like, yeah, I trust this person. This person seems to know what they're talking about. They seem authentic. I don't need to look at a track record. I don't need to see any papers.
Yeah. And again, you know, it's not that nobody is trustworthy or nobody is authentic. I think it's just more that, like you know, more caution and careful analysis is required, maybe sometimes we are a bit naive in trusting how good we are at judging the authenticity of others.
Yeah, I mean sometimes it comes down to the fact that, yes, more homework would be required to make a really accurate judgment, but we also often don't have time to make do that homework, you know. Like I'm thinking particularly about local elections, looking back now on a local election, maybe like a couple of cycles ago, there are a lot of local candidates going for this one position, and we were getting
a lot of information about these candidates. Nice, you know, big sheets put in your mailbox, and sometimes they drop by the house, and I had one interaction with one of the candidates who dropped by the house, and then afterwards I was like, oh, yeah, she's the one. Yeah. It was just it was totally a vibe thing. It was just like, she seems nice, and I've seen that literature is coming through the mail about this candidate. They're definitely on the ballot. I got a good vibe off
of them. They're the one. But I did not do the homework. I think later on I did do a little bit more homework and I realized, Okay, I need to be more informed about this. But at least for a while there, I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's the candidate I'm voting for.
I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, it's in that specific example, but in many things in life, you just feel like it's it is. It would be a prohibitive investment of time to try to get as much information as you feel like you would actually need. So it's just like how are you supposed to live?
Yeah, but I guess the challenge is just sort of to have some level of self awareness when we're doing that, so that we can we can avoid making the wrong choices in life.
Yeah, yeah, or at least I don't know, be conscious of ways that we are vulnerable to being swayed.
Yeah, because of course you also don't have to. You just don't have time to be like, prove it faker everybody that comes at you, you know.
But even then, I mean, like another question is is imagine somebody is actually being quote authentic, they are truly representing their inner thoughts and feelings versus somebody else who is not. Is that necessarily actually a better a better leader, or a better officeholder? Not necessarily Yeah. This paper looked at several other studies in various domains about the relationship
between honesty and authenticity. One was cultural variation in how seemingly honest expressions of internal states relate to perceptions of authenticity. They look at a study from twenty fourteen that compared perceptions of authenticity among both German and Chinese participants, and this experiment found that you take a fictional character and you have them list either their likes and their dislikes
or just their likes. And this experiment found that the character was judged to be more authentic by German participants if they listed both their likes and dislikes, but judged as more authentic by the Chinese participants if they listed
just their likes and not their dislikes. Now, in both cases, the likes and dislikes were presented as honest expressions, but there were apparently some likely cultural differences in what types of honest expression were thought of as displaying authentic behavior.
That's interesting.
There were also some studies in the political context, and some of these findings can be a little bit unsettling. The authors mentioned a twenty eighteen study by Hall at All which found that in the case of a hypothetical political demagogue who told flagrant and provable lies, people could still believe the lying demagogue to be authentic, and that mere partisan affiliation was not sufficient to achieve this view
of the flagrantly lying demagogue is authentic. The other condition that was necessary was that the participant viewed the political system as illegitimate, so kind of interesting finding like lies, flagrant lies can be perceived as authentic if you think the norms of the system under which you live is not legitimate. In a way kind of the flagrant lying, the violation of those norms comes to be perceived as
some sort of righteous rebuke. In a similar domain, experiments have found a tendency for people to view expressions of prejudice and politically offensive language as authentic as long as they held the same prejudiced views as the person making the expression.
That's a weird one to unwrap, because I feel like you can judge someone's offensive language and expressions of prejudice as being authentic even if you don't share them. Yeah, but this is saying that there's a tendency for people to view expressions of prejudice and politically offensive language as authentic as long as they hold those same views, right, Okay.
Right, or maybe just to judge the trait authenticity in the person making the expression, rather than evaluating the expressions themselves.
Okay, so this is kind of a someone's finally saying. It's sort of a oh thinking with the language, gotcha exactly.
Yeah. So, given that whole blizzard of different findings in the seemingly paradoxical relationship between honesty and authenticity, the authors propose a model of how these two concepts actually interact, and they call it a coherence model. So, to use their own words here, quote, A coherence perspective stresses the importance of how much new information makes sense in light of what is already known or believed to be true.
And then later, a little later, they say, quote, we propose that the more coherent the mental image of a target person is, the more authentic they will seem. Similarly, the more coherent a mental version of oneself is, the more authentic they will report being. So does that make sense? It's about like the idea of having a consistent mental picture of the person, whether that's yourself or of another person, that you feel like you fully understand and all the
information you have checks out with that image. So, under this model, in both the self perception and in perception by others, if behaving honestly in a given situation will help increase the coherence of that self image, of that image of the person, honesty will be perceived as authentic. And if honest behavior would be inconsistent with that self image or helps that image of the person make less sense, then it will be perceived as authentic to behave dishonestly.
So the question is what makes sense given the image you have of the person in question? And I think this goes a long way to explain a lot of these so called authentic lies, which are either rationalized as authentic to the self because they serve a higher moral good and the protection of others, or because they are justified in some way in self preservation or in the protection of an important relationship, or because at the time the person told them they were also quote lying to themselves.
In any case, they could be framed as making sense based on the image of the self or the image of the person in operation at the time. So I think the lies that people might see as inauthentic to themselves would be ones that sort of undermine the self image, that seem out of character or don't make sense within
the coherent view of the person. So, according to this model, people perceive authenticity as not the unvarnished expression of people's true inner feelings, but rather acting in a way that is predictable and consistent based on the image of that person that they already have in their head. Okay, and
this makes a lot of sense to me. I think this is a good model of how people most often use the idea of authenticity, but there's still so much variation in how it's applied, and I think plenty of reason that we should be cautious about relying too much on our heuristic judgments of authenticity and others.
Yeah, absolutely, because Yeah, like we've been saying on one love, you can't go through life accusing everyone of being a faker and assuming that no one is being genuine, that no one is authentic. But on the other hand, you know, the reverse is true as well, Like it pays to have some level of self analysis about to what extent we're just you know, having these gut impulses and believing
this person or believing that person. We should be able to take it apart to some degree, though as we've looked at though, that can be difficult given all that's going on.
Yeah, just to I would say my own thoughts here, this is not necessarily based on anything we've read in this research that I think with like interpersonal relationships, friendships and stuff like that, it's good to be more generous, at least at first, like unless you've been seriously betrayed in some way, to be more generous and awarding of
trust to people. And if it's ambiguous, I guess the situation in which you want to be careful is like if there is something like a big material question on the line, and you're you're trying to decide whether or not to trust somebody, and they just give you an authentic vibe, you know, Or are you looking to invest a lot of money? Are you looking to like make somebody, put somebody an important leadership position or something like that,
and you're just going on an authenticity vibe. I think that's a good time to put the brakes on and say, wait a minute, is there another way for me to look at this? Can I be more objective?
Yeah, but like your favorite musical artists, just switch genres a little bit, you know, give it the benefit of the doubt. Let's tell me the worst thing that could happen.
Right, Okay, That's what I've got for today. But Rob, I think you wanted to talk about authenticity and religion, right.
Yeah, Now, this is this is a big, big topic to sort of dip our toes in a little bit here, Authenticity of religion, authenticity in religion. I mean, we've already discussed how difficult it is to frame all this up in terms of the self, you know, and the mysterious nature of our own self and other selves, other individuals that we just have to form mental models sometimes very inform mental models, but still mental models of what their
internal life is like. Is what is truly authentic for that individual, where we have to form a model of that in our own minds, But then getting into the realm of religion, Yeah, that's obviously a whole different kettle of fish totally. So yeah, how broadly are we supposed to think about authenticity in religion? You know, there's a lot to unpact there, you know, as we've already discussed multiple ways to think about the concept of authenticity in
this series. And on top of that, there are various ways to think about religion. You know, especially on this show, we tend to dismiss the idea of just like, okay, religion is that? Is that fake? Or is that real? You know, like there's there's a lot of space between those two extremes, you know, you know, you could you can think about religion in terms of whether it is one hundred percent accurate. Is it a one hundred percent
accurate understanding of reality? Is it a legitimate cultural tradition? Is it are we talking more about the realm of mythology? Are we talking more about a particular worldview? In many cases, we may get into like religion as literature, Like there's just so many different ways to look at a given faith as opposed to just you know, saying like is this a real story or is this a fake story? Like, no, there's a lot of room between there, just in terms of stories.
Well, yeah, I mean, I would say, specifically for our audience, I think one thing that that did a lot of damage was, like in the two thousands in the United States context, there were there was a lot of like evolution versus creationism debates and stuff that really forced people to think about religion primarily in terms of whether the claims of its founding myths are literally descriptive of facts
that took place in history. And I mean, obviously that is a question you can ask, and it's fine to ask that question, but I think that it caused a lot of people to see questions of religion only on those terms like is the Bible literally true or something in the US context, which I think is a sort of deranging lens of focus that really causes people to miss a lot of what religion means to people and the role it plays in their lives.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, So before we even get into it, just know that likes. That's largely I think where we're coming from. It's largely where I think a lot of the sources that I was looking at are coming from. And this is a topic concerning authenticity and religion that a lot of people have written on. So I'm not going to be able to provide like a huge overview
of everything has been thought or sad about this. But I was looking in one particular paper, this is a fake Religion or Deals of Authenticity in the Study of Religion by David Chidester. At the top of this paper, he points to a quote from Thomas Edison, who apparently said, I think this was maybe in some letters, said, so far as religion of the day is concerned, it is
a damned fake. Okay, And so on one level, okay, if we just go with this view, all right, if Edison is correct here, if all religion is fake, then no auth then no religion is authentic. Nothing can be authentic. Everything is just a story created by human beings, and we can just simply pack it up right there, right.
Well, I mean that would raise questions about what he meant by a fake, like does that mean that it is that like the founding myths are not literally true, in which case, you know, I guess I'm more sympathetic to that idea. But if he means like it is all propagated from a place of inauthenticity, I don't think I would agree with that. So obviously the multiple meaning of authenticity and fakeness come into play here.
Yeah, even in a statement like this that would at least i'm a surface appear to be very you know, like firm and extreme. So, as Chinaster points out, yeah, it's it's not so simple to really weigh in on authenticity and religion because even if this is even even if we agree with this and say, all right, to some degree, all religions are fake, and yet some religions are definitely faker than others. That is to say, we have occasionally or even frequently, depending where you're looking, we
do contend with outright religious frauds. You can, you know, likely bust out some sliding scales on this idea as well, But there are clear cases of hoaxes, pyramid schemes, and cons that use the trappings of religion and are not engaging in what you might call good faith at any level of the operation.
Okay, Yeah, so I can definitely see the difference there. For example, faith healing, I might be skeptical of the literal efficacy of faith healing in any case, at least you know, by other than placebo mechanisms. But there are different types of faith healing. There are the kinds where people believe they are engaging in something that is really going to help people, and then there are people who are pulling hoaxes. There are people who are like you know, engaging in conscious fraud and fakery.
Yeah, and obviously with various with large larger religious organizations and groups, and even like big churches or temples, there's room to have multiple things going on at once. You could have conceivably easily have a situation where you have some individuals in an operation that are very much believers and are being what you might call authentic, and then you might have say, like, I don't know, maybe the building department they're just bad, Like there's there's something very
suspicious about this botch. You know, you can have multiple energies going on within the same movement. Obviously, so anyway, there's sort of one way of thinking about it, But there have also been numerous inauthentic efforts or attempts to communicate, say,
indigenous religions to foreign audiences. So the author here, David Chidester, points to an extreme example of this again like getting into just straight up con artist here, and that would be eighteenth century French con artist George saul Manassar, who was who for years convinced many in Britain that he was a native of Formosa what we now know is Taiwan and shared all sorts of just completely fraudulent information about his supposed life there, shared an invented alphabet, uninvented
religion and saying, oh, yeah, this is the real Formosian religion right here, this is what I grew up on, and also making all sorts of crazy claims that okay, some of them protective of his con like saying, well, of course I have pale skin because upper class Formosians live underground obviously, and uh, and he was, and he
could he still had. There were plenty of skeptics that were like, this guy's not on the level, but they also included and they also included Jesuits who had actually visited Formosa, but they were largely apparently dismissed within Britain due to anti Catholic sentiments of the time, so still, and there were people saying, you're you know, you're, you're
full of it. This doesn't sound right. But he was good at at least fighting off these critiques, at least in the short term, and his reports of life over there contained all sorts of just you know, outrageous and
offensive concepts, including things like ritual cannibalism. But the thing is they felt exotic enough to capture the attention of his intended audience, like they they met expectations to some degree, like this is the kind of account that many in the population were hungry for, even if the experts were saying, I don't know if this is actually accurate. This doesn't match up with what I've heard from other individuals who have traveled either to this particular place or to places in the region.
Oh, that's interesting. It sounds almost like from his audience's perspective, he was presenting a coherent view of a person that made sense given their expectations of what someone from this place would be like. And thus like there, you know, yeah, he's being authentic.
Yeah, and essentially created inauthentic religion, a fake religion and presented it as if it were real. Again, this is an extreme example, and it's one that's grounded in outright fakery, But there are various levels of the problem, even in well meaning attempts to study in chronicle religion. Now he gets into another obvious reality about all of this. Among the faithful, the religion you practice is often talled is the authentic one, and of course it's the other religions
that are the fakes. Like, that's just how this sort of thing works, that's how you build your worldview, that's how you maintain the US versus of them.
Well, to be fair, I would say that there is actually variance among the religions in how they regard the other religions. So there are some religions that are outright like, yes, every other religion on earth except mine is a lie. It's a complete fraud. There are others that have kind of like yes, other people may have part of the truth or something like that.
Yeah, it definitely depends on the context and the exact arrangement in time period. You know, there there are cases where you have different Like you can look to some Protestant versus Catholic divisions. They have been rather extreme and heated obviously at different times and in different places, in ways that seem like more heated than would be the relationship between religions that were more different from each other.
Yeah, it's a part of that would be physical proximity and thus having to negotiate political spheres. But then on top of that you could also attribute some of it to what might be called the narcissism of small differences.
Yeah, And of course it's often the role of an orthodox fate faith to point out who the heretics are within their own faith or in the peripheries of that faith. And these efforts, I guess in some cases, you know, they may deal with identifying actual harmful splinter groups or extremists, but it can also simply involve the other ring and criticism of competition or you know, the endangerment of other practices of a mainstream and entrenched religion, if you will.
And of course this also includes the demonization of local religious traditions. We saw this, especially by European Christians, create an inauthentic interpretation of a traditional faith in order to prop up the authority and authenticity of one's own your gods. These old gods you believe in, well, those are actually demons. That's how we understand them. When are the truth?
Thing, So not just saying whatever you believe is wrong, but also saying, like, here is an alternate interpretation of whatever you believe, a very unflattering one.
Yeah, And the interesting double nature of this, this Chidester points out, is that on one hand you're saying a local shaman is a fraud who made all of this up, But on the other you're saying that he's totally not a fraud and is actually in league with demonic powers. So which is it? Sometimes both even at the same time.
Chidaster points to examples of this involving say, early nineteenth century missionaries in Africa, who at once would have been saying, oh, well, that guy, the shaman, he's a fraud, he's just making all this up. But also beware of him. He's in leak with the devil, which is we also see he points out the double standard regarding authentication via material objects. So relics were of course of great importance, especially to the early Roman Catholic Church and into the Middle Ages
and so forth. And you know, the tradition still holds to this day. You know, here is physical evidence that this saint existed, that this saint suffered. You know, here
this is our evidence, is this is authentic. In Chita's are points to accounts that stolen relics were sometimes thought to be even more valued because the saint it was associated with could have been viewed as implicit in the theft, you know, like they the saint willed that this item be taken so that it could be kept somewhere better, that sort of thing. But on the other hand, magical items from outside of the faith, well, these were deemed
as fetishes and idols. These were harmful things. These were not proof of anything, these were these were just these were harmful fixations.
It's interesting in that it frames like the artifacts used within one's own religion as like pieces of rational evidence, and the artifacts used within someone else's religion as objects of people's irrational emotional attachment.
Yeah. Now, eventually you get into the Enlightenment and the out there points out here that you have two sort of contrasting ideals that emerge to determine authenticity, particularly with Christians in Christianity and Christian thought. One is transparency, which seems to kind of center on kind of a gut feeling a Christian will have. He describes it as an illuminated capacity that would supposedly help you distinguish between genuine and the genuine and the fake, which is something that
we've been saying. This could surely never steer one wrong, you.
Know, right, No, this is you sometimes like you just you have a feeling in your heart that you know it's true.
And then the other idea is control. And this is interesting getting this idea that's it kind of gets back to what we were talking about in terms of like not not being the first to speak your mind and letting thoughts percolate, but it ends up ends up going
beyond that. So much of this is apparently based on the New Testament and then the Letters of James, and I think the two main bits from the scripture here are those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rain on their tongues deceive themselves and their religion is worthless. And then I think there's a later bit where it is but no human being contained the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.
And so it gets into like controlling the human voice, controlling what you say, and more importantly, what you don't say. But they didn't stop at the human voice. They also put a great deal of thought into how belching and farting impacted authenticity and religion. Apparently I'm not making this up. Like laughter, sneezing, these are also things that attracted the attention of the theologians of the day, though it really feels like they're in the weeds at this point.
I don't think this is what you're talking about at this point. But Martin Luther, that you know, who was responsible for the Protestant Reformation, was famously skatological I love talking about like farting and pooping.
Yeah, And it seems like he would be kind of in sharp contrast to what this line of thought is saying. You know that you know, absolutely shouldn't be belching and farting, You shouldn't be sneezing, you should be controlling. Laughter or any kind of physical outburst that is not tightly control
is somehow a danger to authenticity. So I don't know, I won't pretend to fully understand how this applies to being able to judge one's religion as being authentic and to rightfully judge other versions of the faith or other faiths as inauthentic. But I guess it shows like the level of sort of mental gymnastics and theological gymnastics you end up turning to when grasping, grappling with a question like this, like what how do you know what religion
is true? Like, because you know, outside of miracles occurring, what do you have? You know, just subjective experience, personal charisma, and other people weighted arguments for interpretations of natural phenomena that are better understood through science. That's what I see all the time. You know, where someone's like, you don't believe in God, Well have you looked at this cat? Right? Yeah? You know, on an emotional level, it's like cat is cute.
I don't know, you kind of got me there. But we have all these other ways of understanding why the cat looks like it looks and why we feel this way about said cat.
Oh yeah, yeah, I'm very much on that frequency. I don't begrudge anybody their religious beliefs, but you can't prove your religious beliefs by saying, look, observe the cat, look at the cat?
Yeah, I mean, in my own opinion, I mean it comes down to faith, right, And a lot of faith is believing in that which cannot be proven without without a shadow of a doubt, you know, that's what it's
about again without an outright miracle occurring. And even then you get into you know, we've discussed hallucinations and so forth on the show before, So even then you're still dealing with something that has tremendous subjective weight and tremendous emotional weight and personal weight, and is therefore not something that can be presented as like here we go, approove
of God confirmed right now. The author here also gets into what he calls virtual religions on the internet, but something that is elsewhere discussed in terms of hyper real religions. And I believe we've talked about the hyper real religions on the show.
Before, right, So religions that we've actually been able to see within human history. The arc from something that began as consciously inauthentic in some at least in one sense, like began maybe as a joke, or began as a sort of an art project or something like that, something that was not originally believed as a genuine religious movement that came to be believed as a genuine religious movement.
Yeah, Like it's the roots may be in fiction, they may be in activism, you know, or like you said, parody and so forth. But over time they may grow into something else. They may not they may not grow at all. They may just be you know, a quick laugh and then we're done with it. But you know, we have been able to observe some of these things growing taking on some of the the the aspects, the trappings, and sometimes even the legal protections of religion of quote unquote authentic religion.
And as with most things in authenticity, it's it's hard to look at somebody else and judge whether, wait, do you really believe in the Jedi religion? I mean, there's a there's a tendency to doubt people like that. But if someone professes that they do. I'm I am a true believing Jediist, what are you going to say to them You're not?
Yeah, yeah, Jediism is a good example. Well, there's Dudism. There are other examples like Church of the SubGenius and so forth, where Yeah, it's like it may start as a joke, it clearly has roots in fiction. But if it takes, if it truly takes on this light. If it becomes an important part of someone's life and their worldview, and and above all of it, if it improves their life and doesn't hurt anybody else, then you know what's
the beef right. And I think you can also throw in discussions of the likes of say Leveyan Satanism and also more recently the Satanic Temple, with the acknowledgment that there's often this kind of ambiguous space for any new religious movement, a kind of discussion of authenticity and even a change in mission for a given movement, because, as with any religion, things change over time and a central
body or central individual cannot always control it. Actually, this is something that Frank Herbert gets into a bit in the Doom novels. You know. Oh, it's like once a faith, once a following has built up, that doesn't mean the person at the center off it has full control over it anymore, you know. And just because you have the copyright for the name of the religion doesn't mean that you are its master.
And this doesn't apply only to religions, but I think there is a general tendency among people to, over time try to find meaning in whatever they have spent their time and effort doing, even if that thing started off as just fun, whatever, you have spent your time and effort on, even if it started just as a game
or a joke or whatever. I think there's just this inexorable pull over time to look back and want to feel like your time has been well spent and thus think that maybe there was more to what I was doing than I originally thought. And I can definitely see how this tendency like on one hand, this is the kind of thing that turns like jokes and memes over time into sincere political beliefs. You've probably seen this kind of arc of people who are like meming all the
time on the Internet. I think the same thing could happen with a joke religion. You spend enough time on the joke and you eventually decide like, actually, there's something going on here.
Yeah. Yeah, And I was thinking about that a lot as I was looking at this other source two thousand and eight worked by Thomas Alberts titled Virtually Real Fake Religions and Problems of Authenticity and Religion, and he invokes three different principles, including Walter Benjamin's theory of the dialectical image and Peter Berger's theory of redeeming laughter. But I want to just briefly focus on the third, and that's
Australian anthropologist Michael Tausig's theory of defacement. So Tasig wrote, quote, defacement asks what happens when something precious is despoiled. It begins with the notion that such activity is attractive in its very repulsion, and that it creates something sacred, even in the most secular of societies and circumstances. So Tasa gets into the importance of like secrecy and both religion
and taboo and the interplay between the two. And I may not be grasping the full depth of this topic, but if I'm understanding it even halfway correctly, I think one possible use of defacement here is that anytime you despoil something that is held up as sacred, you can't help but potentially create something that is also sacred. So Alberts argues that quote, fake religions produce secruelty in there, connecting the body of the perceiver with the movements of concealment and revelation.
Well, I'm not sure I fully understand the concealment and revelation aspect of this. But I mean, I can certainly see how by simply engaging with the sacred at all, even to negate it, you implicitly assume some of the power and authority of the sacred dimension of life, because you're sort of showing that you yourself are on the level like the plane of authority with which you can interact with the sacred. And so by defacing the sacred or negating it in some way, you you assume a
mantle of cultural power. And people may well look to you then and say, well, are you the new Are you the new boss? You know, is what you're doing somehow supposed to replace what you destroyed?
Yeah, I mean I was thinking too about you know, like what you're just talking about with various memes and whatnot. And I'll see occasionally memes that are about propping up villains from popular franchises, you know, siding with the villain, be it the Empire in Star Wars or with Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic universe, you know. And on one level, it's like, yeah, it's fun. They're just movies, right, It's funny. Yeah, And Thanos is a great villain that the Empire. They're
they're cool villains. But I don't know, But what point you end up drawing the line and think like, wow, I'm you know, are we how much thought are we putting into this? Are we propping up, like, you know, some sort of like awful authoritarian figure, even in fiction that's gonna end up casting a shadow on our reality and the way we interact with risks in the real world.
Well, yeah, I would say, like, it's a it's funny to say, Okay, yes I'm with the Empire in Star Wars, because it's not a real it's not a real thing. That's like funny Initially, I would truly be careful about keeping up that joke for a long time. If you just keep doing that over time for years, I strongly suspect some people who do that would end up thinking that it's not just a joke and the Empire had some good points.
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
I think that's just how we are. It's like, you want to think that what you've spent your time on is time well spent, even if it's something you originally meant ironically. I think there's there's a pull to start saying, actually that is right.
Yeah, yeah, So this whole like defacement theory thing, I think it can. It seems to definitely get a bit heady, but I think we can easily take it and apply it to discussions of conspiracy thinking, fake news, misinformation, and more items that often twist authenticity and or reality into a form that is on some level more appealing to the individual, that is more infectious, it's more bombastic, and in some cases not without the trappings of religion in the end.
Oh, now that you get into like conspiracy theories and stuff. I've said this on the podcast before, but I will reiterate my personal belief that I think a whole lot of conspiracy theory ideation begins as entertainment. It's people not engaging with this subject like as a serious true believer. At first. It starts with people engaging with it because it's entertaining. It's just kind of like funny and interesting. Okay,
it's a meme whatever. But do you spend some time with it and it works its magic on you, You get adapted to it, and it starts to seem more and more legitimately authentically compelling. So I think it's it's a dangerous road. Things that start off as just just for a laugh end up being quite serious and meaning a lot to you.
Yeah, so think about that the next time you load up a particularly dank meme to share on social media.
I want to be I don't want to overstate that. I mean, I think it probably takes time and repeated engagement and stuff like that, but but I do think that tendency is there.
Yeah. So again, there's much there's much more that that can and could be said about the interplay of authenticity and religion because it's you, You're you're dealing with very, very complex topics when you're just asking what is religion? What is authenticity? What is truth? And religion? Uh, it's it's very gets, very subjective, open to a lot of different interpretations.
All right, does that do it for Part three on authenticity?
I believe that is authentically the end of the third episode on authenticity.
This is one of those subjects where I feel like we went kind of deep for three episodes and still there's like so much we didn't get into. So maybe we could come back in the future, who knows.
Yeah, I think and I think there's some sort of like splinter topics. Like, I was looking at some other sources regarding the topic of heresy, and I think there's a lot to discuss there that might be more deserving of its own episode or series of episodes on just the topic of heresy, you know, not just within like Christian traditions, but also like globally, you know, with accusations of heresy being thrown between different factions, different religions and so forth.
And what does it mean getting into the idea that a religion, which is in fact just like a set of related practices and beliefs held throughout a culture, that there is some correct, original version of that, there's the authentic version of it, and that at some point point, some practice that a person has is different enough that it's actually not the same thing anymore. Yeah, Like, yeah, where do you draw those boundaries and how does that emerge? That is an interesting question.
Yeah, what is the real Highlander too? Is it the theatrical cut, is it the director's renegade cut? Is it a fan edit that comes later on that is combining a portions for multiple versions of the film into a new model which is heresy, which is orthodoxy, which is authentic.
Fortunately, I am a geist Cut fundamentalist, so I can speak for the authentic version of the Highlander two religion. Anybody who's trying to get me to watch the Renegade Cut or whatever you blaspheme.
Well, fortunately we're aligned on that. All Right, We're gonna go and close it out, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there, because, again, everything we've been discussing in this series, there are so many applications for our daily life, for history, and just the entire human experience, So writ in, we would love to hear from you, just a reminder of that. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do listener mail, on Wednesdays we do a short form episode, and on Fridays we set as I had most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact Stuff. To Blow Your Mind dot.
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