Authenticity

Don't trust the "authentic." They complain with the voices of a bloated and drowned existence. They are swollen corpses, re-animated with resentment.

If a man would have you believe "authenticity," he's asking you to place your faith in a circle of acceptable conduct, with him at its center. He will hate you for leaving it. He already hates you, which is why he wants you in it. It is his vanity, circumscribing a life he no longer has the stomach to live. He is already complicit. He has complied, surrendered. And it's not enough to do it alone. He wants you drowning in simplicity with him. He wants you to be himself.

It is a mean, petty, beggared existence, this adherence to a demand for "authenticity." It's one thing to be honest, to speak words which match memory and experience. It's quite another to assume that you can know how to best live for everyone. And to rage at others when they choose not to drown, or even just wallow, at the shallow edge of a muddy puddle To fury at them when they fail to choose to conform to a simplicity which is as artificial as a Versailles ball room. If you aren't constrained by the limits of an undead shuffling towards a real-dead grave, the "authentic" will crave your embarrassment. It's the closest they can get to believing you too are a corpse. That you are one of them.

Given a thousand thousand opportunities to conform, and even in the face of terrible and real oppression, at the boot heel of manacled slavery, at the juncture of starvation and compliance, people still diversify. For all that we share an organic baseline, we lead dissimilar lives. Within a single household, under the same parental gaze, with the same standards and rules, two children will become different. And one is not more "authentic" than the other.

Hatred for this diversity, for the panoply of possible humanities - and it is hatred, whether its speaks fancy words, cloaks itself in revolutionary rhetoric, or grumbles from the seat of a rich man's bicycle, stopped sideways on a trail through stolen Indian land - is an emotional shorthand for a life conceded. In its least refined form, it translates a desire for simplification into a hunger to consume the lives of others; it confuses sincerity with a chimaera "authenticity." It is a personal defeat ballooning, swelling out in a blast radius of wounded pride and a failure to die at the right time. It is death, with a human face.

Because.

There is no correct way to be human. Right and wrong have nothing to do with how to live - and this covers all human conduct. All of it.* Those who want boys "to be boys," who need women "unadorned," who rage inside at the moving image of children who play but have never learned to pray, who need feats of strength to test their masculinity lest anyone question it, who would have their own meager mental entrails become the standard and the norm: these are the tyrants, big and small.

It may mask itself as rebellion, this demiurge towards "authenticity," but it hears a single voice, an endless self-confirmation: "I am right. I am right. I am right." It is the old god-voice in the head, and from that pulpit issues the same old demands: Be like me. Be like me. Be like me. Because the "me" doesn't know how to be other.

It is the remnant of desire - of need thwarted in the decay of a shambling corpse of a life. Perhaps, even, it as an authentic one; a body servant to a life which has already perished, ridden by a brain that doesn't know it yet.

Anyway you want it - and you have the freedom and liberty to want everything - the "authentic" cannot be trusted. They would kill you too, and have you share in their pallid reflection, a companion corpse staring into a cracked and greasy mirror.



* - which does not justify the rapist or the murderer; feelings of right and wrong don't alter the fact of the act itself. They are epiphenomena. There is an argument for stopping the rapist. Or even killing him. But, right and wrong don't speak to the desire not to be raped. Or murdered. Or punched in the face. Those needs are good, of themselves. They don't have to wear the heavy drapes of morality.