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How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves
Harper
April 2010
On Sale: April 1, 2010
256 pages
ISBN: 006125133X
EAN: 9780061251337
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
What does it mean to be authentic? For many, the search for
the authentic provides a powerful source of meaning in a
secular age, allowing a person a unique personal identity in
a world that seems alienating and conformist. This demand
for authenticity—the honest or the real—is one of the most
powerful movements in contemporary life, influencing our
moral outlook, political views, and consumer behavior.
Yet according to Andrew Potter, when examined
closely, our fetish for “authentic” lifestyles or
experiences—organic produce and ecotourism, bikram yoga and
performance art, the cult of Oprah and the obsession with
Obama—is actually a form of exclusionary status seeking. The
result, he argues, is modernity’s malaise: a competitive,
self-absorbed individualism that creates a shallow
consumerist society built on stratification and
one-upmanship that ultimately erodes genuine relationships
and true community. Weaving together threads of pop
culture, history, and philosophy, The Authenticity
Hoax reveals how our misguided pursuit of the authentic
exacerbates the artificiality of contemporary life that we
decry. Potter traces the origins of the authenticity ideal
from its roots in the eighteenth century through its
adoption by the 1960s counterculture to its centrality in
twenty–first–century moral life. He shows how this ideal is
manifested through our culture, from the political fates of
Sarah Palin and John Edwards to Damien Hirst and his role in
contemporary art, from the phenomenon of retirement as a
second adolescence to the indignation over James Frey’s
memoir. From this defiant, brilliant critique, Potter offers
a way forward to a meaningful individualism that makes peace
with the modern world.
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