Austin Fontaine 
Megan Novelli 
When I was a freshman in high school this album was the cornerstone of my record collection and thus, to a great extent, helped define my identity. I thought Liz Phair was above reproach and that by being a fan her irrefutable coolness gave me a similar luster. I thought I was so cool. Or more accurately, I thought I was so uncool that I came around the block back to cool. You see, Liz Phair was an artist. She played guitar, she wrote all her own songs, she had indie cred and she was a critical darling. Listening to her made it easy to feel superior to all the music they played on the radio, which I thought to be vapid and devoid of any true artistic merit.
Thank Madonna that’s over. Not that I don’t like Liz Phair anymore, quite the contrary, she’s still one of my favorites, but I couldn’t be more thrilled that that attitude isn’t around anymore. Unfortunately I still know people with that attitude, people who center their tastes around some notion of artistry and authenticity; they listen to “real music.” Here’s the thing though, what does artistry change? If one listens to a song and withholds judgment until they can check the liner notes to see who wrote it and who played what instruments then it becomes clear that said person doesn’t actually like music. They’ve heard the song and decided to judge it, not on the merits of how it sounds, but how it was created and then taken it into their own hands to determine if that process was “respectable” or not. Suddenly, aesthetics play no role in their opinion of music, and what is music if not aesthetics? No, they don’t like music, they like the baggage that comes with taste; they like to be “authentic.” In short, they’ve fetishized authenticity.
This all seems so irrelevant, I know, but here’s the point: I feel that there’s a huge movement in our culture that is actively fethshizing authenticity and that this movement is exemplified by Plato’s theory about the cave. In the same way that many snobs seem to make music about everything except the music, many people have made life about everything except life. There’s constant pressure to find your “real self,” live free of society’s expectations and belligerently not care about what other people think because we’re individuals for crying out loud. Instead of this convoluted process and line of thought I propose this: we are exactly the way we are acting and to change ourselves we need simply to change the way we act, not get in touch with some true self that’s buried deep within us or dwelling outside some cave.
I believe that our actions and beliefs really do define us to a great extent. We are all living in this world, we are all different and anyone who says that they’ve found this world to be fake, and on top of that, found a way for us to shed the fake identity we’ve been living with and exchange it for a real one has fundamentally misunderstood people. There seems to be this contrarian impulse among people that grows larger every day. If the majority of people believe something then we become immediately suspicious of it and begin to take pride in ourselves for simply not being part of something we probably haven’t evaluated properly. One ACU relevant example is the contempt I often hear in the voices of people who don’t like social clubs. They accuse them of brainwashing people and their members of trying to buy friends. The tone in their voice suggests that they fancy themselves to have wandered out of the cave and found the real world, and it did not include social clubs.
The point of all this is that I don’t believe authenticity to be this independently existing entity that we all should strive toward. We become inauthentic when we believe something or feel something and then purposefully act against it, which I don’t want to characterize as inherently wrong, there a lot of potential murderers out there whom I’m glad have decided against authenticity. Our actions make up our authenticity or lack thereof and as such I believe the majority of people to be authentic, but I would be remiss if I didn’t make it known that I hardly consider authentic to be the greatest of compliments.
Bradley Campbell
1:42 pm, 08.31.10
I really enjoyed reading your post, I agree that some of the social norms that we get trapped in are kind of funny. Our desire to break the mold and be unique is actually the norm because when you step out of the cave you can see that everyone else is trying to do the same thing, so really……breaking away from the social norm becomes the social norm.
Jordan Johnson
3:11 pm, 08.31.10
I think that no matter what a person does they authentic in a way as they are authentically trying to be different or authentically wanting people to see them as different or the same which ever the case maybe. Its not really what the person does that make them authentic its the reason behind it and as long as that reason is their own, it makes them authentic. Great post I enjoyed the whole thing!
Michael Bartholomew
3:52 pm, 08.31.10
I must agree; when you base your appraisal of any art form on the basis of how authentic it is, you’re definitely not judging the art but rather the artist. There are lots of things I enjoy that probably have very little authenticity to them, but I enjoy for what they are, whether they sound good or look pretty.
I also agree on the comment that change doesn’t come from finding a hidden “true self” but from actions. To look for change without making some kind of alteration to one’s lifestyle in the necessary fashion shows a lack of commitment to the aforementioned change and a total lack of motivation to the cause. Which raises the question why one would be so pressed to make the change to begin with if it’s clearly not motivating factor for them.
Mary Tomkins
2:06 am, 09.01.10
Josh, you make a good point. I really appreciate the idea of not liking something just for the sake of liking it, and being ‘authentic’ just for the sake of being authentic. You look at this in a way I hadn’t thought of before. When being a nonconformist has become a way of conforming I see what you mean. It reminds me of something that happened to me in high school. I had a teacher who was talking about authenticity and said that he’d only had one student in his teaching career that he really thought to be genuine. When I heard that I was offended, and I remember thinking something along the lines of “I don’t know who he is, to think that I’m not authentic just because I don’t feel the need to stand out.” Maybe a better term for him would have been ‘unique’, but our society places such a great value on authenticity. Too many people are trying to hard to be authentic and miss out on actually living life. Thanks for the post!
Danielle Urias
6:30 pm, 09.03.10
Josh, I have to start off by saying I found your post very entertaining and interesting. I agree with the conclusions you drew about the pursuit of authenticity and the resulting lack thereof. I actually have a joke that made me laugh and I felt like you’d enjoy it as well; how many hipsters does it take to screw in a light bulb? um…I’m not sure, it’s some obscure number…=]
On a more serious note, I was very excited when I came across a line near the end of your post. It went something like, “we could all use a dose of humility” or “we shouldn’t be so afraid of new ideas or being wrong,” something to that effect. Anyway, I completely agree. Randy Harris refers to it as epistemological humility. I believe questioning the order of things is healthy and doing so doesn’t always have to be malicious.
Amy McLean
12:25 am, 09.06.10
This was a very enjoyable and interesting interpretation of the cave. Your comment about being inauthentic when we purposefully act against something in order to break the mold prompted me to think about fashion as an art form. When piercings, tattoos, and wild hair styles became an alternative way of dress in western culture, they were breaking the social norm purposefully. Now, however, that has almost evolved into a culture of its own. Does this make them inauthentic?
Josh Morrison
2:54 am, 09.06.10
I also just want to make it clear that the point of all this wasn’t to draw some linear definition of authenticity. I think that, like Jordan brought up, you can deny one urge to satisfy another. When one has two urges that are mutually exclusive then it seems impossible to be completely authentic in that moment because said person can’t be true to everything they’re feeling. The main thrust of this post was simply to say that I don’t think authenticity is an independently existing or external thing that we should all be searching for, which is what it seems to me that Plato suggests.