Let’s try: “Authenticity” is an opposite of “pretending”.
There are situations where it is useful to pretend to have thoughts or feelings, to manipulate other people’s perception of us. This can be relatively straightforward, such as signaling loyalty to a group by displaying positive emotions to things associated with the group, and negative emotions to enemies of the group. Or more complicated, such trying to appear harmless in order to deceive opponents, or pretending to be irrational about something as a way to signal credible precommitment.
As a first approximation, “authenticity” means communicating one’s thoughts and feelings as one feels them, without adding the thoughts and feeling made up for strategic purposes.
This is complicated by the fact that humans are not perfect liars; they do not have a separate brain module for truth and another brain module for deception. Sometimes deception is best achieved by self-deception, which raise the question what “authenticity” means for a self-deceiving person. But going further, self-deception is also often imperfect, and requires some kind of active maintenance, for example noticing thoughts that contradict the projected image, and removing them. In this case, “authenticity” also includes abandoning the maintenance, and acknowledging the heretical thoughts.
As a first approximation, “authenticity” means communicating one’s thoughts and feelings as one feels them, without adding the thoughts and feeling made up for strategic purposes.
To elaborate on this, a common move in Circling is to notice the thoughts and feelings made up for strategic purposes and explicitly name the strategic purposes. That is, when I notice “I want to be closer to you,” I might directly say “I notice I want to be closer to you” instead of saying a sentence designed to have the effect of making us closer.
That is, just like I don’t think authenticity involves “saying everything you think,” I don’t think authenticity means “giving up on goals and strategies.”
Let’s try: “Authenticity” is an opposite of “pretending”.
There are situations where it is useful to pretend to have thoughts or feelings, to manipulate other people’s perception of us. This can be relatively straightforward, such as signaling loyalty to a group by displaying positive emotions to things associated with the group, and negative emotions to enemies of the group. Or more complicated, such trying to appear harmless in order to deceive opponents, or pretending to be irrational about something as a way to signal credible precommitment.
As a first approximation, “authenticity” means communicating one’s thoughts and feelings as one feels them, without adding the thoughts and feeling made up for strategic purposes.
This is complicated by the fact that humans are not perfect liars; they do not have a separate brain module for truth and another brain module for deception. Sometimes deception is best achieved by self-deception, which raise the question what “authenticity” means for a self-deceiving person. But going further, self-deception is also often imperfect, and requires some kind of active maintenance, for example noticing thoughts that contradict the projected image, and removing them. In this case, “authenticity” also includes abandoning the maintenance, and acknowledging the heretical thoughts.
To elaborate on this, a common move in Circling is to notice the thoughts and feelings made up for strategic purposes and explicitly name the strategic purposes. That is, when I notice “I want to be closer to you,” I might directly say “I notice I want to be closer to you” instead of saying a sentence designed to have the effect of making us closer.
That is, just like I don’t think authenticity involves “saying everything you think,” I don’t think authenticity means “giving up on goals and strategies.”