The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves

“A totally real, genuine, authentic book about why you shouldn’t believe any of those words. And it’s genuinely good.”
— Gregg Easterbrook, author of Sonic Boom

Exploring a number of trends in our popular culture—from Sarah Palin to Antiques Roadshow, organic food to the indignation over James Frey’s memoir—Andrew Potter follows his successful Nation of Rebels with a new book that argues that our pursuit of the authentic is fraught with irony and self-defeat. Readers of The Paradox of Choice or Bowling Alone will find many enlightening insights in The Authenticity Hoax, which is, in the words of Tom de Zengotita (Mediated), “the kind of criticism that changes minds.”

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.

“There are excellent arguments here to steal for the next time some bearded hipster at a party enthuses about brining his own beets or vacationing in an eco-tent.” - Newsweek

“Potter’s book is very smart.” - National Post

“Unique insights on every page and breathtaking in scope... We’re not quite certain what is authentic but we know what it is not. Andrew Potter helps us sift through the confusion.” - John Zogby, Chairman of Zogby International and author of The Way We'll Be

“In The Authenticity Hoax, Andrew Potter masters two of the trickiest balancing acts in contemporary social criticism. He takes on a wide range of highbrow sources—from John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Walter Benjamin and Lionel Trilling—and he makes them accessible without reducing them to cartoons. And he comments on an even wider range of pop culture items—from The Matrix to skateboarding to locally grown produce and the YouTube aesthetic—in a tone that’s pitched just right, each mordant insight framed in terms that show he understands the appeal of the quest for authenticity, even as he unmasks it. That’s the kind of criticism that changes minds.” - Thomas De Zengotita, author of Mediated

“The kind of criticism that changes minds.” - Thomas De Zengotita, author of Mediated

“The Authenticity Hoax has the estimable virtue of bringing the profound down to scale while keeping the big picture in hi-def clarity. It’s as lively, funny and easy to read as one would want a book on epidemic spiritual malaise to be.” - Toronto Star

“Potter’s broad-ranging survey makes a good case that the authenticist fantasy is deeply embedded in the culture.” - Wall Street Journal

“Potter weaves elements of history, philosophy and pop culture together in a book that will leave an impression even if it doesn’t necessarily show us the path. Is Andrew Potter one of the great thinkers of our age? He may well be: this is great stuff.” - January Magazine

“A totally real, genuine, authentic book about why you shouldn’t believe any of those words. And it’s genuinely good.” - Gregg Easterbrook, author of Sonic Boom

“The author writes with authority about the ways in which today’s men and women seek authenticity, or meaning, in their lives … A provocative meditation on the way we live now.” - Kirkus Reviews

“Unique insights on every page and breathtaking in scope, The Authenticity Hoax is a useful guide to understanding what we humans are all about. The polls show that with affluence and insecurity comes a search for authenticity. We’re not quite certain what is authentic but we know what it is not. Andrew Potter helps us sift through the confusion.” - John Zogby, Chairman of Zogby International and author of The Way We'll Be

“[Andrew Potter] offers a shrewd and lively discussion peppered with pop culture references and a stimulating reappraisal of the romantic strain in modern life.” - Publishers Weekly

“It’s a fascinating approach to a fascinating subject... Written in a lively style that invites the reader to argue with the author, the book, at the very least, will turn the reader’s eye inward, and make us take a good, long look at the way we present ourselves to the world.” - Booklist