You hear less about authenticity than you used to.  That’s not because our culture has stopped caring about it.  It’s because its become so widespread that its just an unspoken assumption.

I’m feeling out a few ideas about being authentic that I think have a bearing on our current situation and on  the Book of Mormon.

(Reminder that we have quite a bit of prior work on authenticity that many of our JG readers contributed to–

The Contradiction of Celebrity

tag The Cult of Authenticity)

Fear, anger, depression, victimization, pleasure-seeking, “identity” are all aspects of authenticity gone so mainstream that its just an unspoken assumption.  Lets start with fear.

We live in fearful times, with much to be fearful about.  And that’s the point.  Fear is always going to be authentic. (more…)

Certain “outward observances” are private by design.  It’s very hard to virtue signal or be conspicuous about them.

Hypocrisy is the vice of claiming a high degree of righteousness in public while excusing your black sins in private. Hypocrisy is a satanic parody of the virtue of upholding standards that you yourself fall short of. We call this the nameless virtue.

The virtue that is the opposite of hypocrisy is obvious. It’s where you do good in private so you don’t get social credit for it. Virtue non-signalling, we could call it. Christ was big on this virtue in the gospels. ‘that which do in secret your father will reward openly’ ‘let not your right hand know…”

Probably any type of virtue can be hypocrited, but the two classes of virtue are the most vulnerable. One is whatever type of virtues are involved with publicly signalling your allegiance to good stuff.  We don’t normally think of these as virtues because virtue signalling is so common in our world.  But there are virtues like that, they are just buried under the vice of virtue signalling.  The other one is when doing good requires outward observances, where virtue consists of identifiable acts that people can see.  This was the type of hypocrisy that the Pharisees embraced.  Super-large phylacteries, tithing their herb garden, etc.

It’s interesting that most of our restoration outward observances are things that naturally occur privately.  Wearing the garment, fasting, paying tithing, are all things that no one really knows whether you are doing it or not.  To an extent the same is true with sabbath observance and even with the Word of Wisdom.  Of all these I think garment wearing is particularly interesting.  It is *by design* private.  People can tell if you are not following the standards, but it is hard to tell if you are.  Wearing the garment is in a sense the opposite virtue to the nameless virtue.

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(Dusting off the Archives)

Authenticity is integrity with the element of time irrationally and wickedly stripped off.  It is trying to be true to yourself right now, without regard to being true to who you were and especially to who you will be.  The honest seed sprouts and flowers.  The authentic seed falls on stony ground and stays a seed, then a withered caricature of a seed, then a husk.  Authenticity is death.

In Mormon terms, where damnation means the cessation of progress, authenticity is damnation.

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I think authenticity is the modern day version of the Puritan doctrine of election.

Remember that Puritan Calvinists believed that only the elect could be saved and that election was a pure act of will by God.   This meant you could not achieve election by your own efforts.  But it also meant that you could not really know when you were elected.  The resulting anxiety drove a lot of Puritan behavior.

Now, our modern Puritans want to be authentic.  But how to be authentic?  If you are trying to be authentic, you aren’t authentic.

The resulting anxiety drives a lot of their behavior. (more…)

One of the great modern sin complexes goes by the name of authenticity.
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It’s no mystery why a world that rejects the nameless virtue would reject heroes. At first glance, its no mystery why that same world would embrace celebrities. (more…)

One kind of creativity is making unexpected connections. Wodehouse excelled at this kind of creativity. I just read where Fink-Nottle, on a vegan diet, started weeping at a sunset, because the color reminded him of a nice, underdone slice of beef.

Most of my creativity comes to me second hand. Providence makes the connections for me. “Look on this picture, and on this,” Providence says, and all I have to do is look, and think. (more…)

This post is about discretion and legalism. It follows up on the post The Virtue with No Name, or the Best Mormon Essay You’ll Read This Month. (more…)

No, not this essay, goose. Another essay. Which will be revealed to you later.

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