Our Age of Inauthenticity
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
October 28, 2009

To many in our culture, truth is a lie-threatening-disease.  You lie or you die (metaphorically speaking), not just in business in government, but in every aspect of our culture.  Lying is a ubiquitous American custom. 

In this age, when image is everything, the authentic side of our natures, which is the private side, has withered away.  The private side has virtually been extinguished by the public persona.  We do it, we deceive, so much, so often, that almost no one recognizes it as deviant.  Deception is especially not recognized as unethical.  In fact, our children learn, are taught, that ‘white lies’ are essential as a form of kindness and diplomacy.  Oddly, those devoid of a talent for ‘the white lie’ have come to be perceived as the deviant, unkind, and unethical ones. 

Lying is such an essential and inherent part of the American public personality and image-based culture that I doubt that anyone knows the way back from this horrid aberration.  Furthermore, most likely, no one knows that we should try to find our way back to authenticity.

Nevertheless, we all have an intuitive or instinctual awareness of this state of being of our culture as being a bizarre aberration.  Consequently, the absolute, unwavering, truth-telling girl or boy, man or woman for that matter, ingénue is a favorite component of many a drama’s plot.  A contemporary writer or director of movies knows that the straight-faced, truth-telling character will evoke that classic winning response from an audience when tactless, socially taboo, raw, but brutally accurate, honest comments are made to an inimitably pompous or to a vulnerable and haughty example of the public persona.  That nervous little giggle of glee when seeing the put-down of the uptight and over-confident arch deceiver accompanied by the secret, simultaneous relief of knowing they, themselves, who are all too akin to the exposed disingenuous one, have just escaped exposure, vicariously of course.  That kind of nervous giggle-night movie is almost as popular as are fright-night movies.  As such, the nervous giggle-night movie is a devastating disrobing of the true nature of our culture. 

This phenomenon is a hint, no a manifestation, of the depth and pervasiveness of ours as an ‘Age of Inauthenticity’.