From the Vault: Authenticity, Part 3
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Hey, 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 3. Part 3 of 3. This originally published on 3-28-2024. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

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 important.

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. And

In part two of the series, we talked about authenticity in art and entertainment, what it means to look for authenticity in musical artists and other types of art. We talked about the Orson Welles 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 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. Right.

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 Sheena S. Iyengar, published in Current Opinion in Psychology, called Yours Truly, What's

on the complex relationship between authenticity and honesty, published in the year 2022. 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 18th century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where they write, quote,

And I got to say, that sounds absolutely 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 honestly,

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, being honest, quote honest in the most brutal way as 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, you're talking about a life without decorum, without patience, with...

Without, you know, limited capacity to be supportive of others, because sometimes in being supportive of 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 but but being 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 and or enabling delusions versus being brutally honest to people in a way that, you know, is liable to hurt them. 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 but 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 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 about.

but don't express. And are those actually truer reflections of our inner selves than what we would say if we thought about it some more before we talked?

yeah uh so or also is it are those more uh are like expressions of momentary uh 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 um doodle of uh

of a Christ-like bird, or a bird-like Christ, if you rather, 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 Christlike individual, the Christlike bird here is very long because there's plenty of time to reflect on said thoughts and perhaps decide not to say them. Yeah. Or even decide whether you genuinely feel them. Exactly. Yeah. 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 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. Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

And the person who says this might say, even though I was lying to my parents about how 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 standup comedian Dusty Slate, we're having a good time.

Like that can 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 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.

Yeah. Like, I mean, one easy example of this is like you thinking back to like the old days of, uh, of, uh, buying CDs, uh, especially as a young person when money's a lot tighter, like you, you spend your money, you cannot, you can buy no other album this week, maybe this month.

And afterwards, you're maybe a little less won 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 it. I'm jamming to this. This was worth my money. This was worth my time. It's even got the bonus tracks. Yeah, it's got the bonus tracks. It was like, I thought it was 10 tracks. No, it's 12 tracks. I'd be losing money if I didn't buy it.

Yeah.

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. OK, other examples of, quote, authentic dishonesty that people gave. Yeah.

There were some examples that were when being honest would have threatened the subject's 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 till you make it, right? I mean, that's basically what we're alluding to. Yeah.

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 can 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, we'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 of 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, there are 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 and 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 that. 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, etc.

Or maybe to protect someone from information that would be devastating to them. 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 what we 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 techniques

tasks are non-trivial. The authors point out 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 and 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 2020 that used a bit of trickery to look into whether self-reported and even, you know, test-evaluated authenticity might be biased or strategic self-presentation.

So this other paper I went and looked at was by William Hart et al., published in Personality and Individual Differences in 2020, 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 write, quote, participants numbering 240 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 were 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, quote,

Participants were told that, you know, other studies have found that more authentic people will see the color of this block either intensify or de-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. Yeah.

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, you know, 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 are

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 in 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 of course, the conundrum is we do this all the time, right? Yeah. And a great deal goes into making sure that

that individuals put forward that vibe that we trust, be that individual a salesperson, a company spokesman, a politician, a newscaster. I mean, you name it.

We're supposed 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 necessarily.

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

Right. 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 were 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 she seems nice. And 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. I realized, OK, I need to be more informed about this. But at least for a while there was like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's 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 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? 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 avoid making the wrong choices in life. Yeah, yeah. Or at least to, 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, to everybody that comes at you, you know? But even then, I mean, like, another question 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 leader or a better office holder? Not necessarily. Yeah. There's nothing like sinking into luxury. Anabase sofas combine ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price. Yeah.

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Visit iBrands.com or call 1-844-9-iBrands for more information. 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 2014 that compared perceptions of authenticity among both German and Chinese participants. And this experiment found that you

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 2018 study by Hall et al., 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 political

partisan affiliation was not sufficient to achieve this view of the flagrantly lying demagogue as 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. And in a way, kind of the flagrant lying, the violation of those norms comes to be perceived as some sort of righteous rebuke. Hmm.

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 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. OK. Yeah.

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 someone's finally saying it sort of syncing up with the language. Gotcha. Exactly. Yeah. So given that whole blizzard of different findings in the seemingly paradoxical relationship between honesty and authenticity, the author's prologue

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 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. And so does that make sense? It's about like the idea of having people.

a, 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. Hmm.

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

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 inoperative.

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. Hmm. All right.

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 in others. Yeah, absolutely. Because, yeah, like we've been saying on one level, 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 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 say my own thoughts here, this is not necessarily based on anything we 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 and awarding of trust to people. And if it's ambiguous, yeah.

I guess the situation in which you want to be careful is like if there is something material, like a big material question on the line and you're trying to decide whether or not to trust somebody and they just give you an authentic vibe, you know, are you looking to invest a lot of money? Are you looking to like make somebody put somebody in an important leadership position or something like that? And you're just going on an authenticity vibe. I think that's a good thing.

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 artist just switched genres a little bit. You know, give it the benefit of the doubt. What's 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 a big topic.

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 informed mental models, but still mental models of

of what their internal life is like, what is truly authentic. For that individual, well, 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 unpack 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, OK, 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 100 percent accurate. Is it a 100 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 did a lot of damage was like in the 2000s in the United States context, 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. Yeah.

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 U.S. 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, yeah, absolutely. So before we even get into it, just know that that's largely, I think, where we're coming from. That'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 in a religion that a lot of people have written on. So I'm not going to be able to provide a huge overview of everything that's been thought or said about this.

But I was looking at one particular paper. This is a fake religion or deals of authenticity in the study of religion by David Chydester. 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 damn fake. OK. And so on one level, OK, if we if we just go with this view, if Edison is correct here,

If all religion is fake,

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 meanings of authenticity and fakeness come into play here. Yeah, even in a statement like this that would at least on the surface appear to be very, you know, like firm and extreme. So as Chidester points out, yeah, it's not so simple to really weigh in on authenticity and religion. Because even if this is, 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 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 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 billing department. They're just bad. There's something very suspicious about this bunch. You know, you can have multiple energies going on within the same movement, obviously.

So anyway, that'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. Hmm.

So the author here, David Chydester, points to an extreme example of this. Again, getting into just straight up con artist here. And that would be 18th century French con artist George Salmanazar, who for years convinced many in Britain that he was a native of Formosa, what we now know as Taiwan.

and shared all sorts of just completely fraudulent information about his supposed life there, shared an invented alphabet, an invented 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, OK, some of them protective of his con, like saying, well, of course I have pale skin because upper class Formosians live underground. Ah.

obviously um and uh and he was in and he still had there were plenty of skeptics that were like this guy's not on the level uh but they also include and they also included jesuits who had actually visited formosa uh but they were largely apparently dismissed within britain due to anti-catholic sentiments of the time um 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. Uh-huh.

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 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 they're, you know, yeah, he's being authentic. Yeah. And at

essentially created an 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 and chronicle religion. Hmm.

Now he gets into another obvious reality about all of this. Among the faithful, the religion you practice is often touted as 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 the 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's there are some religions that are outright like, yes, every other religion on Earth except mine is a lie. It's 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 context.

arrangement in time period. You know, 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 the

you know, more heated than would be the relationship between religions that were more different from each other. Yeah, I'd say part of that would be physical proximity and thus having to negotiate sharing 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 and of course, it's often the role of an orthodox faith to

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 othering 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 they are the true faith.

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, as 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. Chidester points to examples of this involving, say, early 19th 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 league with the devil, which is it.

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, that this saint suffered, you know, here, this, this is our evidence. This is, this is authentic.

And Chidester 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. Hmm.

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 just 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. There's nothing like sinking into luxury. Anabase sofas combine ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price. Yeah.

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Now, eventually you get into the Enlightenment and the author points out here that you have two sort of contrasting ideals that emerge to determine authenticity, particularly with Christians and 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 you just you have a feeling in your heart that, you know, it's true. Mm hmm.

And then the other idea is control. And this this is interesting, getting this idea that it'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 going beyond that. So much of this is apparently based on the New Testament and the letter letters of James, right?

And I think the two main bits from the scripture here are those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues, deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless. And then I think there's a later bit where it says, but no human being can tame 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 in 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, you know, who was responsible for the Protestant Reformation, was famously scatological. Loved 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. Um, so, um, I don't know. I can't, I won't pretend to fully understand, uh,

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 in 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 uh without you know without the shadow of a doubt you know um 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 and so forth on the show before so so even then you're still dealing with something that has tremendous uh subjective weight and tremendous emotional weight and personal weight and is therefore not something that can be presented as like a here we go proof 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 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 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 hard to look at somebody else and judge whether, wait, do you really believe in the Jedi religion? I mean, there's a tendency to doubt people like that. But if someone professes that they do, I am a true believing Jediist. What are you going to say to them? You're not? Yeah, yeah. Jediism is a good example of this. 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 truly takes on this light, if it becomes an important part of someone's life and their worldview, and above all, if it improves their life and doesn't hurt anybody else, then what's the beef, right? And I think you can also throw in discussions of the likes of, say, Levian Satanism and also more recently the Satanic Temple,

with the acknowledgement 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.

it. Actually, this is something that Frank Herbert gets into a bit in the Dune novels. You know, it's like once a faith, once a following has built up, that doesn't mean the person at the center of 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

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 before.

of people who are like memeing 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, 2008 work by Thomas Alberts titled Virtually Real, Fake Religions and Problems of Authenticity in 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 Taussig's theory of defacement.

So Tosig 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 Tossett 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. Right.

So Alberts argues that, quote, fake religions produce sacrality in their connecting the body of the perceiver with the movements of concealment and revelation. Hmm.

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

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 assume a mantle of cultural power and people may well look to you then and say, well, 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 were 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, uh, the empire in, um, uh, 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. The, the, the empire, they're, they're cool villains, but,

I don't know. But what's at what point do you end up drawing the line and think like, wow, you know, 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 going to end up casting a shadow on our reality and the way we interact with reality?

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 and 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

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 a pull to start saying, actually, that is right. Yeah, yeah. So this whole like defacement theory thing, I think 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, that's more bombastic, and in some cases, not without the trappings of religion in the end. Oh, now that you get into 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. Uh, but,

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 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 don't want to overstate that. I mean, I think it probably takes time and repeated engagement and stuff like that. But I do think that tendency is there. Yeah. So again, there's much more that

can and could be said about the interplay of authenticity and religion because you're dealing with very complex topics when you're just asking what is religion, what is authenticity, what is truth and religion. It 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 can come back in the future. Who knows? Yeah, 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 Christian traditions, but also like globally, you know, with accusations of heresy being thrown between different factions, different religions and so forth. And what 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, 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 what is the real Highlander to? Is it the theatrical cut? Is it the director's renegade cut? Is it a fan edit that comes later on that is combining the portions for multiple versions of the film into a new model? Which 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 2 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 going to 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 or for history and just the entire human experience. So right in, we would love to hear from you. Just a reminder 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 aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. ♪♪♪

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