The Authenticity Hoax

How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves

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Last edited by ImportBot
August 1, 2022 | History

The Authenticity Hoax

How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves

  • 6 Want to read
  • 1 Currently reading

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.

Publish Date
Pages
308

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Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: The Authenticity Hoax
The Authenticity Hoax
2010, HarperCollins
Electronic resource in English
Cover of: The authenticity hoax
The authenticity hoax: how we got lost finding ourselves
2010, HarperCollins
in English - 1st ed.
Cover of: The Authenticity Hoax
The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves
April 6, 2010, McClelland & Stewart
Hardcover
Cover of: The authenticity hoax
The authenticity hoax: how we got lost finding ourselves
2010, HarperCollins
in English - 1st ed.

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Book Details


Classifications

Library of Congress
B105.A8 P68 2010

The Physical Object

Format
Hardcover
Number of pages
308

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL24088960M
Internet Archive
authenticityhoax0000pott
ISBN 10
0771071051
ISBN 13
9780771071058
OCLC/WorldCat
456151164

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Download catalog record: RDF / JSON
August 1, 2022 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
December 26, 2021 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
January 3, 2021 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
July 22, 2019 Edited by MARC Bot remove fake subjects
March 12, 2010 Created by WorkBot work found