Authenticity, Part 3

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the topic of authenticity. What is it? Why do we place such value on it? They discuss authenticity in terms of psychology, art, music, religion and more… (part 3 of 3) 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part three of our series looking at the concept of authenticity. Now,
we had a little break in the middle of our
series there because on Tuesday of this week we had
an interview that you recorded, Rob that was already scheduled
to come out on that date, So there's a little
bit of discontinuity here, but we are picking up where

(00:36):
we left off last Thursday, that's right. So in part
one of this series, we started by trying to pick
apart the different common usages of authenticity, and I explained
why I became interested in the subject. It's one of
those ideas that I think is very very good for
exploration because it's like a commonly used concept that actually

(00:58):
is very vague, and there's a lot of equivocation and
using the idea in different ways. So we tried to
pick apart some of these different usages of authenticity what
people mean when they invoke the idea, and we looked
at a study showing that we are not as good
as we think we are at perceiving authenticity in others.
In Part two of the series, we talked about authenticity

(01:20):
in art and entertainment, what it means to look for
authenticity and musical artists and other types of art. We
talked about the Orson Wells movie F for Fake, and
then we discussed a specialized idea of authenticity that was
proposed by the art critic Walter Benjamin and how it
relates to changes in media technology over the centuries. And

(01:42):
here we are once again to examine a couple other
facets of authenticity. Now, the thing I wanted to talk
about today was the interaction between and relationship between honesty
and authenticity. We talked about this a bit in part
one of this series because we we're alluding to the
way that there is an apparent relationship between authenticity and honesty.

(02:07):
You know, there is some overlap between the two ideas,
but they are not usually understood to be the same thing.
And an easy illustration of that is characters both real
and fictional, who are known to tell lies but are
often thought of as authentic. And yet, despite this clear
illustration that the two concepts are not exactly the same thing,

(02:30):
we sometimes behave as if they're the same thing. We
like forget that we use these ideas differently because we
feel like if somebody is authentic, well, that means we
can trust them. So I ended up looking at a
paper for a trying to find a careful analysis of
the similarities and differences between honesty and authenticity, how these

(02:51):
ideas are culturally understood, and in how they manifest in behavior.
So this paper is by Erica R. Bailey and Sheena
Siing are published in current opinion in psychology called Yours
Truly on the Complex Relationship between Authenticity and Honesty published
in the year twenty twenty two, and Erica Bailey was

(03:11):
also one of the authors of the study we looked
at in Part one, the one about how we're not
as good as we think we are at determining whether
other people are being authentic. Now, as a starting point,
this paper gives essentially the same understanding of authenticity that
we talked about in part one. This will be complicated
when we start introducing survey responses and how people actually

(03:33):
use the idea of authenticity and how it relates to
honesty and so forth. But we start off with the
idea that quote a person is authentic when they genuinely
express their true inner qualities and feelings. In other words,
the inside matches the outside. Our outward behavior is consistent
with our private inner feelings, thoughts, and character. So by contrast,

(03:56):
a person would usually be considered inauthentic if they say
things they don't really feel or think, or if they
act in ways that are inconsistent with who they are inside,
or if they don't express their inner self in the
outside world. And The authors begin the paper by mentioning
an episode in the life of the eighteenth century Swiss

(04:17):
philosopher Jean jacqu Rousseau, where they write, quote, in order
to be more authentic, he committed to expressing himself honestly
in every single moment of his day, certain that this
brutal truth telling, devoid of any cowing to the social context,
would allow him to manifest his authentic self. And I

(04:37):
gotta say that sounds absolutely insufferable.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
Yeah, who wants to hang out with this guy?

Speaker 3 (04:43):
I mean? And I'm a big fan of being honest.
I think honesty is a good virtue that people should have.
You know, you should not tell lies to people. You
should try to be honest with people generally. But this
is actually describing something different than honesty, saying every thought
that pops into you head, telling friends and family everything
they do that bothers you. Being being honest, you know,

(05:06):
quote honest in the most brutal way is always seems
like a kind of nasty way to live. It's going
to cause other people grief and just alienate you from
everyone and everything you care about.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
Yeah, I mean this, you're talking about a life without decorum,
without patience, without you know, the limited capacity to be
supportive of others because sometimes and being supportive of of people,
you know, friends and family with their maybe sometimes half
formed ideas in some cases, like you don't want to
be brutally honest. You want to be supportive. You want

(05:38):
to you want to maybe push them in the right direction,
But being you know, completely brutally honest is maybe not
the right approach.

Speaker 3 (05:48):
I think that's right. I mean, I think there is
a lot of middle ground between lying to people and
or enabling delusions versus being brutally honest to people in
a way that you know is like to hurt them
and just like avoiding tact altogether.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yeah, imagine just deciding a right from here on. Now,
I'm just going to be brutally truthful about everything. But
then like the then we get into that other quese
like what is truth right?

Speaker 3 (06:11):
Right? You may in fact be mistaken about some of
the things that you think are brutally true when you
say them, in which case it would turn out that
it was really unproductive. Uh yeah, So this like raises
the question of whether it would even really be possible,
Like is this kind of radical authentic truth telling even
self consistent because there are momentary thoughts we have but

(06:36):
don't express, And are those actually truer reflections of our
inner selves than what we would say if we thought
about it some more before we talked? Mm hmm yeah
so or also is it are those more are like
expressions of momentary opinions or thoughts truer reflections of our

(06:57):
inner selves even than the choice not to speak certain situation.
Wouldn't that choice also flow from the self?

Speaker 2 (07:04):
Yeah? Yeah. It reminds me of something I've mentioned before
on the show, the medieval doodle of a Christ like
bird or a bird like Christ if you rather, in
the margins of various manuscripts, and the idea it seems
based on what I've read is that thoughts rise from
the heart, they travel up through a very long neck

(07:28):
before they reach the lips, and therefore, like it's about
deciding whether you actually want those feelings to come out.
That is why the neck of the christ like individual,
the christ like bird here is very long, because there's
plenty of time to reflect on said thoughts and perhaps
decide not to say them yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:45):
Or even decide whether you genuinely feel them exactly. Yeah.
I think we've probably all had the experience of feeling
like we wanted to express something, only to think about
it for a minute and think, that's not really what
I feel.

Speaker 2 (07:58):
Yeah, write out that great email, but don't send it today,
set it aside for tomorrow, and then a lot of
the times you'll realize, you know, that's not exactly what
I meant to say.

Speaker 3 (08:07):
So, anyway, to come back to this relationship between authenticity
and honesty, from this example of Rousseau, you know, we
see someone at least partially equating authenticity and honesty, assuming
that to be authentic is the most honest way to live,
and that authenticity entails NonStop, moment to moment displays of

(08:28):
quote fearless honesty or brutal truth telling. And the authors
also quote another another writer in this paper named Valor,
who makes a similar equivalent, saying that honesty is defined
as quote a willingness to put one's authentic self in play.
But the authors actually propose a counter hypothesis in this paper.

(08:48):
They write that quote honesty is one of many tools
in the pursuit of authenticity, and that people will disregard
or discount honesty as authentic under specific condition. And I
want to be clear that they're not making a normative
argument like about how people should use the concepts of
honesty or authenticity. They're just trying to be descriptive and

(09:12):
discover how people actually do already use these concepts in
their day to day lives and in their self image.
So the authors investigate this idea of the relationship between
authenticity and honesty in several ways, and one thing they
do is a simple small survey with an open ended question.

(09:32):
They asked participants if they could describe a time in
their life when they quote, lied or did not tell
the truth in a way that was authentic or true
to themselves at the time, and the results of this
were that quote authentic dishonesty really did not generally seem
to people like an impossible situation or an incoherent concept.

(09:53):
People generated autobiographical examples of when they were dishonest in
a way they thought was authentic to themselves. Furthermore, and
here's the interesting part, the authors say that the examples
people gave of their own authentic dishonesty fell into basically
four categories. And I'll list these and describe them as
I go. So the first example is when the subject

(10:16):
was dishonest with other people in a way that they
were also not honest with themselves. So this category might
not be immediately intuitive, but I think it makes sense
if you see examples. So, the stories people tell seem
to be about lying to others about some objective situation,
for example, about a worrying health prognosis or bad outcomes

(10:38):
at work or school, or mental health struggles or something
like that, at the same time that they themselves were
in some way deluded or quote lying to themselves about
the situation. So, for example, I'm telling my parents that
I'm doing fine at college, but in reality, I am
failing my classes and I'm going through a mental health crisis,

(11:00):
and the person who says this might say, even though
I was lying to my parents about how well how
I was doing, I was being authentic because I was
also lying to myself. Essentially, I managed to truly convince
myself of the false things I was telling them.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
Yeah, to borrow the catchphrase from stand up comedian Dusty Sligh,
we're having a good time like that can essentially be dishonest,
but you can believe in it, and other people can
believe in it even if it's not true in the moment.

Speaker 3 (11:29):
Yeah. And actually that raises an interesting facet of this,
because it raises the question of what exactly it means
to quote lie to yourself. This is a common enough
concept that we've all heard of it, and probably you
have used it ourselves to describe something we've done. And
it seems to not be the same thing as simply
being convinced of a delusion. There's some overlap, but being

(11:54):
delusional can be entirely involuntary. You know like you, don't
you don't feel like you, or in any way the
cause of being deluded about something. But when people say
I was lying to myself, I think they usually mean
there is some element, even if just a small element
of willfulness in believing in the delusion, like some part

(12:14):
of them knows better, but they are they are purposely
disregarding or ignoring that knowledge.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yeah, Like I mean, one easy example of this is,
like you thinking back to like the old days of
buying CDs, especially as a young person with money's a
lot tighter, Like you spend your money, you cannot you
can buy no other album this week, maybe this month,
And afterwards you're maybe a little less won over by
the album than you'd hoped, but you're kind of like

(12:43):
fooling yourself and like, Noah, this is good. I'm getting
I'm jamming to this. This, this was worth my money,
This is worth my time.

Speaker 3 (12:50):
It's even got the bonus tracks.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
Yeah, it's got the bonus tracks. It's like I thought
it was ten tracks. No, it's twelve tracks. I'd be
losing money if I didn't buy it.

Speaker 3 (12:59):
Yes. So, However, despite this element of wilfulness, it seems
to at least in some cases, not rule out seeing
yourself as authentic when you represent that same misunderstanding of
reality to other people. So, like you take that CD
that you're talking yourself into thinking is so great, and
you show it to your friend and say it's so great.
You might not think you were being inauthentic there, because

(13:21):
you really worked yourself up to convince yourself it was great.

Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, I was authentically delusional about the quality of this record,
and honestly, if you know me, you should have seen
that in me. You should have seen that in my
eyes and known to approach this recommendation with caution.

Speaker 3 (13:38):
Okay. Other examples of quote authentic dishonesty that people gave.
There were some examples that were when being honest would
have threatened the subjects basic needs survival or employment. This
is the self protection category. A lot of these seem
to have to do with employment, which I think is
kind of revealing, but things like lying at work to

(13:59):
avoid revealing a mistake that could have cost the subject
their job. Another one that somebody gives is lying about
former job experience in order to get a new position,
and the subject in this example specifically says they feel
it was a good thing to do because they ended
up doing exceedingly well at the new job that they
lied in order to get.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
Fake it. Do you make it right? I mean, that's
basically what we're alluding to.

Speaker 3 (14:24):
That's what they're claiming. I mean, we can't evaluate if
it's true that they did exceedingly well, but you know,
for the sake of argument, we'll take it. Another one was,
and you understand this, somebody lying about psychiatric symptoms in
order to get admitted to a psych ward to avoid
being homeless. The subject says that this was authentic because

(14:45):
they were trying to escape living on the streets during winter,
which was extremely hard. So that is a lie. It's
hard to blame somebody for that. But in this case,
the subject not only saw that as justified, but they
said for that reason, it was authentic that they did that.

Speaker 2 (15:01):
Yeah, I mean, they're talking about survival here right.

Speaker 3 (15:04):
At the same time, it does raise questions about what
authenticity means in this case. But we can come back
to that third question. When honesty would harm an important relationship,
you protecting a relationship, this is probably People can think
of examples like this. A close friend says, does my
new haircut look good? And maybe you find nice things

(15:25):
to say about it, even if you don't actually love it.
People thought this was still authentic behavior. And then there
are much more serious examples such as like within family
and marital relationships, like protecting loved ones from negative judgments
that you or others would have made about them.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yeah. Yeah, I think both these are very understandable. I mean,
the haircut is probably the best example, because there is
a line, there is a line at which your close
friend's haircut has become so bad that you do have
to say something. You have to say, actually, this doesn't
look good. Come with me, we're gonna go get fixed
right now. You have a job interview tomorrow or something.

(16:04):
You know, we I'm a good enough friend to let
you know that we have to go fix this. But
there's a lot of room on that spectrum for just
saying yeah, it looks great, and that's what you're expected
to do as a friend.

Speaker 3 (16:18):
Or in fact, in the haircut example, in this paper,
they're like the person describes things they found to say
about the haircut that were true, even though overall they
did not actually think it was good.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
Yeah, because I mean, bad, bad haircuts happened, and you'll
grow out of them. You know, it's gonna be pretty
bad to take it to that next level and say
we've got to go fix this.

Speaker 3 (16:40):
Yeah. Yeah. I think the example was like, yeah, this
will really stand out, you know, putting a positive sounding
tone on that, but that'll grow in nicely. Yeah. And
then fourth final category, this one you can very much understand. Again,
it's hard to blame people for this when honesty would
threaten the survival or well being of someone else in
the protection of other people, So examples would include like

(17:04):
lying to protect people from physical danger, maybe like a
counselor lying to potentially abusive family members that you don't
know about somebody's whereabouts, or maybe to protect someone from
information that would be devastating to them. So it's interesting
that some of these versions of authenticity do sort of

(17:25):
go along with the inside matches the outside definition, but
some do not. Some of these are simply cases of
people lying or misrepresenting themselves in a situation where they believe,
in some way it was justified. So in those cases,
authenticity would seem to mean something different than than the
way we've been using it. It would seem to mean

(17:48):
morally justified, regardless of whether you were expressing your true
feelings on the outside or not. And these examples just
seem to reinforce to me how fluid our concept of
authenticity is. Once again, despite how important it is in
these day to day judgments we make about people and
about ourselves, it seems to have ill defined boundaries, and

(18:11):
the authors review some other findings that further illuminate and
complicate the relationship between honesty and authenticity. For example, and
this came up in Part one, in order to evaluate
whether your external behavior is consistent with your true self,
you have to both know what your true self is
and be able to objectively observe and analyze your external behavior,

(18:35):
and both of those tasks are non trivial. The authors
point out that both of them are problematic even given
what we know from other psychology studies, because studies show
systematic biases in how we perceive ourselves. People tend to
see themselves as morally better than the average person, and
experiments show that people have selective memories of events end

(18:58):
of information that help bolster a positive self image. So
this can make research about honesty and authenticity rather difficult
because both honesty and authenticity people take to have moral implications,
so people are motivated to exaggerate the extent to which
they are both in self reports. Though the authors do

(19:19):
point to one pretty interesting study from twenty twenty that
used a bit of trickery to look into whether self
reported and even test evaluated authenticity might be biased or
strategic self presentation. So this other paper I went and
looked at was by William hart at All, published in

(19:39):
Personality and Individual Differences in twenty twenty, called to be
or to appear to be evidence that authentic people seek
to appear authentic rather than be authentic. So the authors
in their abstract right quote participants numbering two hundred and
forty completed a bogus color gazing task under the presumption

(20:01):
that authentic people see colors become more or less intense
while gazing at them. And these were the two conditions,
the more intense condition and the less intense condition. And
they say that quote participants reported perceiving color as more
intense in the more intense condition. But this biased responding
consistent with appearing authentic, was enhanced by trait authenticity indicators.

(20:27):
So to paraphrase there, participants were told that other studies
have found that more authentic people will see the color
of this block either intensify or de intensify, and in
reality the colors did not change at all. And then
the experiment found that on average, people who rated themselves

(20:48):
as more authentic on a self assessment test were more
likely to claim they saw the color change in line
with whatever they thought an authentic person was supposed to see. So,
in other words, there was some amount of interest in
either lying or in perceiving reality differently in order to
protect the idea of an authentic self. So this is

(21:10):
a piece of evidence that maybe not all the time,
but probably some of the time, maybe a lot of
the time, authenticity itself is a strategic performance e g.
Inauthentic behavior in service of appearing to be authentic. So
it's interesting to pair this with that study, that finding

(21:31):
from part one about how people are not good at
judging who is authentic and who is not, at least
when compared with self assessments, which of course are themselves
possibly misleading. So I want to pause briefly here before
you lose all hope, because remember that studies like this
are observing trends and tendencies on average in behavior, not

(21:51):
like totalizing realities about all people all the time. So
I would not walk away from these kinds of findings thinking,
oh my god, life is a lie. Nobody is ever
been genuine. I don't think that's the takeaway. Personally, I
would think about it more like these types of studies
offer limited individual pieces of evidence, that often the social

(22:12):
impressions of authenticity that we form are misleading, that social
impressions of authenticity are often not what they seem, and
we should be careful about placing too much weight on
the authenticity assessments of people that we form, especially after
superficial interactions. So in other words, you know, I'd say
it's probably not a good strategy to decide whether you

(22:34):
trust someone with something important on the basis of whether
they give off an authentic vibe or not. It might
be better to look at like an objective track record
of their behavior in the past or something like that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
But though, of course the conundrum is we do this
all the time, right, Yeah, And a great deal goes
into making sure that individuals put forward that vibe that
we trust, be that individual, sale person, a company spokesman,
a politician, a newscaster, I mean, you name it. We're

(23:08):
supposed to to instantly feel like, yeah, I trust this person.
This person seems to know what they're talking about, they
seem authentic. I don't need to look at a track
record I don't need to see any papers.

Speaker 3 (23:19):
Yeah, and again, you know, it's not that nobody is
trustworthy or nobody is authentic. I think it's just more that,
like you know, more caution and careful analysis is required.
Maybe sometimes we are a bit naive in trusting how
good we are at judging the authenticity of others.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
Yeah, I mean sometimes it comes down to the fact that, yes,
more homework would be required to make a really accurate judgment,
but we also often don't have time to make do
that homework, you know. Like I'm thinking particularly about local elections,
looking back now on a local election maybe like a
couple of cycles ago, there are a lot of local

(23:56):
candidates going through this one position and getting a lot
of information about these candidates nice you know, big sheets
put in your mailbox, and sometimes they drop by the house.
And I had one interaction with one of the candidates
who dropped by the house, and then afterwards I was like, oh, yeah,
she's the one.

Speaker 3 (24:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:14):
It was just it was totally a vibe thing. It
was just like she seems nice, and and I've seen
that the literature is coming through the mail about this candidate.
They're definitely on the ballot. I got a good vibe
off of them, they're the one, but I did not
do the homework. I think later on I did do
a little bit more homework and I realized, Okay, I
need to be more informed about this. But at least
for a while there, I was like, oh, yeah, yeah,

(24:35):
that's that's the candidate I'm voting for.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, it's in
that specific example, but in many things in life, you
just feel like it's it is. It would be a
prohibitive investment of time to try to get as much
information as you feel like you would actually need. Yeah,
so it's just like how are you supposed to live?

Speaker 2 (24:53):
Yeah, but I guess the challenge is just sort of
to have some level of self awareness when we're doing that,
so that we can we can avoid making the wrong
choices in life.

Speaker 3 (25:05):
Yeah. Yeah, or at least, I don't know, be conscious
of ways that we are vulnerable to being swayed.

Speaker 2 (25:11):
Yeah, Because of course you also don't have to. You
just don't have time to be like, prove it faker
everybody that comes at you, you know.

Speaker 3 (25:17):
But even then, I mean, like another question is is
imagine somebody is actually being quote authentic. They are truly
representing their inner thoughts and feelings versus somebody else who
is not. Is that necessarily actually a better a better leader,
or a better officeholder? Not necessarily Yeah. This paper looked

(25:46):
at several other studies in various domains about the relationship
between honesty and authenticity. One was cultural variation in how
seemingly honest expressions of internal states relate to perceptions of authenticity.
They at a study from twenty fourteen that compared perceptions
of authenticity among both German and Chinese participants, and this

(26:07):
experiment found that you take a fictional character and you
have them list either their likes and their dislikes or
just their likes. And this experiment found that the character
was judged to be more authentic by German participants if
they listed both their likes and dislikes, but judged as

(26:28):
more authentic by the Chinese participants if they listed just
their likes and not their dislikes. Now, in both cases,
the likes and dislikes were presented as honest expressions, but
there were apparently some likely cultural differences in what types
of honest expression were thought of as displaying authentic behavior.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
That's interesting.

Speaker 3 (26:50):
There were also some studies in the political context, and
some of these findings can be a little bit unsettling.
The authors mentioned a twenty eighteen study by hall At
which found that in the case of a hypothetical political
demagogue who told flagrant and provable lies, people could still
believe the lying demagogue to be authentic, and that mere

(27:14):
partisan affiliation was not sufficient to achieve this view of
the flagrantly lying demagogue is authentic. The other condition that
was necessary was that the participant viewed the political system
as illegitimate, so kind of interesting finding like lies, flagrant
lies can be perceived as authentic if you think the

(27:34):
norms of the system under which you live is not legitimate,
and in a way, kind of the flagrant lying, the
violation of those norms comes to be perceived as some
sort of righteous rebuke. In a similar domain, experiments have
found a tendency for people to view expressions of prejudice
and politically offensive language as authentic as long as they

(27:57):
held the same prejudiced views as the person may The expression.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
That's that's a weird one to unwrap, because I feel
like you can you can judge someone's offensive language and
expressions of prejudice as being authentic even if you don't
share them. Yeah, but this is saying that there's a
tendency for people to view expressions of prejudice and politically

(28:22):
offensive language as authentic as long as they hold those
same views, right, Okay.

Speaker 3 (28:28):
Right, or maybe just to judge the trait authenticity in
the person making the expression, rather than evaluating the expressions themselves.

Speaker 2 (28:37):
Okay, So this is kind of a someone's finally saying,
it's sort of a thinking with the language.

Speaker 3 (28:43):
Gotcha exactly. Yeah. So, given that whole blizzard of different
findings in the seemingly paradoxical relationship between honesty and authenticity,
the authors propose a model of how these two concepts
actually interact, and they call it a coherent model. So,
to use their own words here, quote, A coherence perspective

(29:06):
stresses the importance of how much new information makes sense
in light of what is already known or believed to
be true. And then later, a little later, they say, quote,
we propose that the more coherent the mental image of
a target person is, the more authentic they will seem. Similarly,

(29:27):
the more coherent a mental version of oneself is, the
more authentic they will report being. So does that make sense.
It's about like the idea of having a consistent mental
picture of the person, whether that's yourself or of another person,
that you feel like you fully understand and all the

(29:48):
information you have checks out with that image. So, under
this model, in both the self perception and in perception
by others, if behaving honestly in a given situation cuation
will help increase the coherence of that self image of
that image of the person, honesty will be perceived as authentic.

(30:08):
And if honest behavior would be inconsistent with that self
image or helps that image of the person make less sense,
then it will be perceived as authentic to behave dishonestly.
So the question is what makes sense given the image
you have of the person in question. And I think
this goes a long way to explain a lot of

(30:30):
these so called authentic lies, which are either rationalized as
authentic to the self because they serve a higher moral
good and the protection of others, or because they are
justified in some way in self preservation or in the
protection of an important relationship, or because at the time
the person told them they were also quote lying to

(30:51):
themselves in any case, they could be framed as making
sense based on the image of the self or the
image of the person inoperation at the time. So I
think the lies that people might see as inauthentic to
themselves would be ones that sort of undermine the self image,
that seem out of character, or don't make sense within

(31:14):
the coherent view of the person.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
All right.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
So, according to this model, people perceive authenticity as not
the unvarnished expression of people's true inner feelings, but rather
acting in a way that is predictable and consistent based
on the image of that person that they already have
in their head. Okay, And this makes a lot of

(31:38):
sense to me. I think this is a good model
of how people most often use the idea of authenticity,
but there's still so much variation in how it's applied,
and I think plenty of reason that we should be
cautious about relying too much on our heuristic judgments of
authenticity in others.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
Yeah, absolutely, because Yeah, like we've been saying on one love,
you can't go through life accusing everyone of being a
faker and assuming that no one is being genuine, that
no one is authentic. But on the on the other hand,
you know, the reverse is true as well, Like it
pays to have some level of self analysis about uh,
to what extent we're just you know, having these gut

(32:15):
impulses and believing this person or believing that person. We
should be able to take it apart to some degree.
Uh though as we've looked at though, that can be
difficult given all that's going on.

Speaker 3 (32:25):
Yeah, just to I would say my own thoughts here.
This is not necessarily based on anything we've read in
this research that I think with like interpersonal relationships, friendships
and stuff like that, it's good to be more generous
at least at first, like unless you've you know, been
seriously betrayed in some way to be more generous and
and awarding of trust to people. And if it's ambiguous,

(32:48):
I guess the situation in which you want to be
careful is like if there is something material, like a
big material question on the line, and you're you're trying
to decide whether or not to trust somebody and they
just give you an authentic vibe, you know, or are
you looking to invest a lot of money, are you
looking to like make somebody, put somebody an important leadership
position or something like that, and you're just going on

(33:10):
an authenticity vibe. I think that's a good time to
put the brakes on and say, wait a minute, or
is there another way for me to look at this?
Can I be more objective?

Speaker 2 (33:19):
Yeah, but like your favorite musical artists, just switch genres
a little bit, you know, give it the benefit of
the doubt. Let's tell you the worst thing that could happen.

Speaker 3 (33:27):
Right, Okay, That's what I've got for today. But Rob,
I think you wanted to talk about authenticity and religion, right.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
Yeah, Now, this is a big, big topic to sort
of dip our toes in a little bit here, Authenticity
of religion, authenticity in religion. I mean, we've already discussed
how difficult it is to frame all this up in
terms of the self, you know, and the mysterious nature
of our own self and other selves, other individuals that

(33:56):
we just have to form mental models, sometimes very informed
mental models, but still mental models of what their internal
life is like, what is what is truly authentic for
that individual where we have to form a model of
that in our own minds. But then getting into the
realm of religion, Uh, yeah, that's obviously a whole different
kettle of fish totally. So yeah, how broadly are we

(34:20):
supposed to think about authenticity in religion? You know, there's
a there's a lot to unpact there, you know, as
as we've already discussed multiple ways is it to think
about the concept of authenticity in this series? And on
top of that, there are various ways to think about religion,
you know, especially on this show, we tend to dismiss
the idea of just like okay, religion, is that? Is

(34:40):
that fake or is that real? You know, like there's
there's a lot of space between those two extremes, you know,
you know, you could you can think about religion in
terms of whether it is one hundred percent accurate. Is
it a one hundred percent accurate understanding of reality? Is
it a legitimate cultural tradition? Is it are we talking
more about the realm of mythology? Are we talking more

(35:01):
about a particular worldview? In many cases we may get
into like religion as literature, Like there's just so many
different ways to look at a given faith as opposed
to just you know, saying like is this a real
story or is this a fake story? Like, no, there's
a lot of room between there just in terms of stories.

Speaker 3 (35:20):
Well, yeah, I mean, I would say specifically for our audience.
I think one thing that that did a lot of
damage was, like in the two thousands in the United
States context, there was a lot of like evolution versus
creationism debates and stuff that really forced people to think
about religion primarily in terms of whether the claims of

(35:43):
its founding myths are literally descriptive of facts that took
place in history. And I mean, obviously that is a
question you can ask, and it's fine to ask that question,
but I think that it caused a lot of people
to see questions of religion only on those terms like
is the bi Bible literally true or something in the
US context, which I think is a sort of deranging

(36:06):
lens of focus that really causes people to miss a
lot of what religion means to people and the role
it plays in their lives.

Speaker 2 (36:14):
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, So before we even get into it,
just know that, like, that's largely I think where we're
coming from. It's largely where I think a lot of
the sources that I was looking at are coming from.
And this is a topic concerning authenticity and religion that
a lot of people have written on. So I'm not
going to be able to provide like a huge overview

(36:35):
of everything has been thought or said about this. But
I was looking in one particular paper, this is a
Fake Religion or Deals of Authenticity in the Study of
Religion by David Chidester. At the top of this paper,
he points to a quote from Thomas Edison, who apparently said,
I think this was maybe in some letters said, so
far as religion of the day is concerned, it is

(36:57):
a damned fake, okay, and so on one level, okay,
if we if we just go with this view, all right,
if Edison is correct here, if all religion is fake,
then no auth then no religion is authentic. Nothing can
be authentic. Everything is just a story created by human beings,
and we can just simply pack it up right there, right.

Speaker 3 (37:18):
Well, I mean that would raise questions about what he
meant by a fake, like does that mean that it
is that like the founding myths are not literally true,
in which case, you know, I guess I'm more sympathetic
to that idea. But if he means like it is
all propagated from a place of inauthenticity, I don't think
I would agree with that. So obviously the multiple meanings

(37:39):
of authenticity and fakeness come into play here.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
Yeah, even in a statement like this that would at
least i'm a surface appear to be very you know,
like firm and extreme. So, as Chinaster points out, yeah,
it's not. It's not so simple to really weigh in
on authenticity and religion because even if this is even
even if we agree with this and say, all right,
to some degree, all religions are fake, and yet some

(38:04):
religions are definitely faker than others. That is to say,
we have occasionally or even frequently, depending where you're looking,
we do contend with outright religious frauds. You can you know,
likely bust out some sliding scales on this idea as well.
But there are clear cases of hoaxes, pyramid schemes, and
cons that use the trappings of religion and are not

(38:27):
engaging in what you might call good faith at any
level of the operation.

Speaker 3 (38:31):
Okay, yeah, so I can definitely see the difference there.
For example, faith healing. I might be skeptical of the
literal efficacy of faith healing in any case, at least
you know, by other than placebo mechanisms, but there are
different types of faith healing. There are the kinds where
people believe they are engaging in something that is really

(38:52):
going to help people, and then there are people who
are pulling hoaxes. There are people who are like you know,
engaging in conscious fraud fakery.

Speaker 2 (39:01):
Yeah, and obviously with various with largest larger religious organizations
and groups and even like big churches or temples, there's
room to have multiple things going on at once. You
could have conceivably easily have a situation where you have
some individuals in an operation that are very much believers
and are being what you might call authentic, and then

(39:22):
you might have say, like, I don't know, maybe the
building department they're just bad, like they there's there's there's
there's something very suspicious about this spotch You know, you
can have multiple energies going on within the same movement. Obviously,
so anyway, there's sort of one way of thinking about it.
But uh, there have also been numerous inauthentic efforts or

(39:44):
attempts to communicate say, indigenous religions to foreign audiences. So
the author here, David Chidester, points to an extreme example
of this again like getting into just straight up con
artist here and that would be eighteen tenth century French
con artist George Saul Maanassar, who was who for years

(40:06):
convinced many in Britain that he was a native of
Formosa what we now know is Taiwan uh, and shared
all sorts of discompletely fraudulent information about his supposed life there,
shared an invented alphabet, uninvented religion and saying, oh, yeah,
this is the this is the real Formosian religion right here,

(40:27):
this is what I grew up on, and also making
all sorts of crazy claims that okay, some of them
protective of his con like saying, well, of course I
have pale skin because upper class Formosians live underground obviously,
and uh, and he was, and he could he still had.
There were plenty of skeptics that were like, this guy's
not on the level. But they also included and they

(40:49):
also included Jesuits who had actually visited Formosa, but they
were largely apparently dismissed within Britain due to anti Catholic
sentiments of the time. So still, and there were people saying,
you're full of it, this doesn't sound right. But he
was good at at least fighting off these critiques, at
least in the short term, and his reports of life

(41:13):
over there contained all sorts of just you know, outrageous
and offensive concepts, including things like ritual cannibalism. But the
thing is they felt exotic enough to capture the attention
of his intended audience, like they met expectations to some degree,
like this is the kind of account that many in

(41:34):
the population were hungry for, even if the experts were saying,
I don't know if this is actually accurate. This doesn't
match up with what I've heard from other individuals who
have traveled either to this particular place or to places
in the region.

Speaker 3 (41:47):
Oh, that's interesting. It sounds almost like from his audience's perspective,
he was presenting a coherent view of a person that
made sense given their expectations of what someone from this
place would be like. And thus like there, you know, yeah,
he's being authentic.

Speaker 2 (42:02):
Yeah, and essentially created inauthentic religion, a fake religion, and
presented it as if it were real. Again, this is
an extreme example, and it's one that's grounded in outright fakery,
but there are various levels of the problem, even in
well meaning attempts to study and chronicle religion. Now he

(42:23):
gets into another obvious reality about all of this. Among
the faithful, the religion you practice is often talled is
the authentic one, and of course it's the other religions
that are the fakes. Like, that's just how this sort
of thing works. That's how you build your worldview, that's
how you maintain the US versus the them.

Speaker 3 (42:40):
Well, to be fair, I would say that there is
actually variance among the religions in how they regard the
other religions. So there are some religions that are outright like, yes,
every other religion on earth except mine is a lie.
It's a complete fraud. There are others that have kind
of like, uh, yes, other people may have part of
the truth or something like that.

Speaker 2 (43:01):
Yeah, it definitely depends on the context and the exact
arrangement in time period. You know, there are there are
cases where you have different Like you can look to
some Protestant versus Catholic divisions. They have been rather extreme
and heated obviously at different times and in different places

(43:24):
in ways that seem like, you know, more heated than
would be the relationship between religions that were more different
from each other.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
Yeah, it's a part of that would be physical proximity
and thus having to negotiate sharing political spheres. But then
on top of that you could also attribute some of
it to what might be called the narcissism of small differences.

Speaker 2 (43:48):
Yeah, and of course it's often the role of an
orthodox fate faith to point out who the heretics are
within their own faith or in the peripheries of that faith.
And these efforts, I guess in some cases, you know,
they may deal with identifying actual harmful splinter groups or extremists,
but it can also simply involve the other ing and

(44:09):
criticism of competition or you know, the endangerment of other
practices of a of a mainstream and entrenched religion, if
you will. And of course this also includes the demonization
of local religious traditions. We saw this especially by European Christians.
You create an inauthentic interpretation of a traditional faith in

(44:31):
order to prop up the authority and authenticity of one's
own your gods, these old gods you believe in, well,
those are actually demons. That's how we understand them. Women
are the truth thing.

Speaker 3 (44:41):
So not just saying whatever you believe is wrong, but
also saying, like here, is an alternate interpretation of whatever
you believe, a very unflattering one.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
Yeah, And the interesting double nature of this, as Shyduester
points out, is that on one hand, you're saying a
local shaman is a fraud who made all of this up,
But on the you're saying that he's totally not a
fraud and is actually in league with demonic powers. So
which is it? Sometimes both even at the same time.
Chiitaser points to examples of this involving say, early nineteenth

(45:12):
century missionaries in Africa, who at once would have been saying, oh,
well that that guy, the shaman, he's a fraud, he's
just making all this up. But also beware of him,
he's in leak with the devil, which is we also
see he points out the double standard regarding authentication via
material objects. So relics were of course of great importance,
especially the early Roman Catholic Church and into the Middle

(45:34):
Ages and so forth. And know, the tradition still holds
to this day. You know, here is physical evidence that
this saint existed, that this saint suffered. You know, here
this is our evidence. This is this is authentic. And
chidas are points to accounts that stolen relics were sometimes
thought to be even more valued because the saint it

(45:55):
was associated with could have been viewed as implicit in
the theft, you know, like they the saint willed that
this item be taken so that it could be kept
somewhere better, that sort of thing. But on the other hand,
magical items from outside of the faith, well, these were
deemed as fetishes and idols. These were harmful things. These
were not proof of anything, These were just these are

(46:17):
harmful fixations.

Speaker 3 (46:20):
It's interesting in that it frames like the artifacts used
within one's own religion as like pieces of rational evidence,
and the artifacts used within someone else's religion as objects
of people's irrational emotional attachment.

Speaker 2 (46:34):
Yeah. Now, eventually you get into the Enlightenment and the
out there points out here that you have two sort
of contrasting ideals that emerge to determine authenticity, particularly with
Christians in Christianity and Christian thought. One is transparency, which

(47:00):
seems to kind of center on kind of a gut
feeling a Christian will have. He describes it as an
illuminated capacity, uh, that would supposedly help you distinguish between
genuine and the genuine and the fake, which is something
that we've been saying. This could surely never steer one wrong, you.

Speaker 3 (47:17):
Know, right, No, this is you sometimes like you you
just you have a feeling in the in your heart
that you know it's true.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
And then the other idea is control. And this, uh,
this is interesting getting this idea that it's it kind
of gets back to what we were talking about in
terms of like not not being the first to speak
your mind and letting thoughts percolate, but it ends up
ends up going beyond that. So much of this is
apparently based on the New Testament and then the letter

(47:49):
Letters of James, and I think the two main bits
from the scripture here are those who consider themselves religious
and yet do not keep a tight rain on their
tongues deceive themselves and their religion is worthless. And then
I think there's a later bit where it is but
no human being contained the tongue. It is a restless evil,
full of deadly poison. And so it gets into like

(48:13):
controlling the human voice, controlling what you say and more importantly,
what you don't say. But they didn't stop at the
human voice. They also put a great deal of thought
into how belching and farting impacted authenticity and religion. Apparently
I'm not making this up. Like laughter, sneezing, these are
also things that attracted the attention of the theologians of

(48:36):
the day, though it really feels like they're in the
weeds at this point.

Speaker 3 (48:39):
I don't think this is what you're talking about at
this point. But Martin Luther, that you know, who was
responsible for the Protestant Reformation, was famously skatological love talking
about like farting and pooping.

Speaker 2 (48:51):
Yeah, And it seems like he would be kind of
in sharp contrast to what this line of thought is saying.
You know that you know absolutely shouldn't be belching in
f ard, you shouldn't be sneezing, you should be controlling laughter,
or any kind of physical outburst that is not tightly
control is somehow a danger to authenticity. So I don't know.

(49:12):
I won't pretend to fully understand how this applies to
being able to judge one's religion as being authentic and
to rightfully judge other versions of the faith or other
faiths as inauthentic. But I guess it shows like the
level of sort of mental gymnastics and theological gymnastics you

(49:33):
end up turning to when grasping, grappling with a question
like this, like what how do you know what religion
is true? Like, because you know, outside of miracles occurring,
what do you have? You know, just subjective experience, personal charisma,
and other people weighted arguments for interpretations of natural phenomena

(49:56):
that are better understood through science. That's what I see
all the time. You know, where someone's like, you don't
believe in God? Well have you looked at this cat?

Speaker 3 (50:05):
Right? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (50:06):
You know, on an emotional level, it's like cat is cute.
I don't know, you kind of got me there, But
we have all these other ways of understanding why the
cat looks like it looks and why we feel this
way about said cat.

Speaker 3 (50:20):
Oh yeah, yeah, I'm very much on that frequency. I
don't begrudge anybody their religious beliefs, but you can't prove
your religious beliefs by saying, look, observe the cat, look
at the cat?

Speaker 2 (50:29):
Yeah, I mean, in my own opinion, I mean it
comes down to faith, right, And a lot of faith
is believing in that which cannot be proven without without
a shadow of a doubt, you know. Yeah, that's what
it's about again. Without an outright miracle occurring. And even
then you get into you know, we've discussed hallucinations and

(50:51):
so forth on the show before, So even then you're
still dealing with something that has tremendous subjective weight and
tremendously in motion weight, in personal weight, and is therefore
not something that can be presented as like here we
go a prove of God.

Speaker 3 (51:05):
Confirmed right now.

Speaker 2 (51:07):
The author here also gets into what he calls virtual
religions on the internet, but something that is elsewhere discussed
in terms of hyper real religions. And I believe we've
talked about the hyper real religions on the show before.

Speaker 3 (51:20):
Right, so religions that we've actually been able to see
within human history. The arc from something that began as
consciously inauthentic in some at least in one sense, like
began maybe as a joke, or began as a sort
of an art project or something like that, something that
was not originally believed as a genuine religious movement, that

(51:44):
came to be believed as a genuine religious movement.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
Yeah, like it's the roots may be in fiction, they
may be in activism, you know, or like you said,
parody and so forth. But over time, they may grow
into something else. They may not, they may not grow
at all. It may just be, you know, a quick
laugh and then we're done with it. But you know,
we we have been able to observe some of these

(52:08):
things growing, taking on some of the the the aspects,
the trappings, and sometimes even the legal protections of religion
of quote unquote authentic religion.

Speaker 3 (52:19):
And as with most things in authenticity, it's it's hard
to look at somebody else and judge whether, wait, do
you really believe in the Jedi religion? I mean, there's
a there's a tendency to doubt people like that. But
if someone professes that they do. I'm I am a
true believing Jediist, what are you going to say to them?
You're not?

Speaker 2 (52:37):
Yeah, yeah, Jediism is a good example of this. There's dudism.
There are other examples like Church of the SubGenius and
so forth, where yeah, it's like it may start as
a joke, it clearly has roots in fiction. But if
it takes if it truly takes on this this light,
if it becomes an important part of someone's life and
their worldview, and and above all of it, it improves

(52:59):
their life, life and doesn't hurt anybody else, then you
know what's the beef right. And I think you can
also throw in discussions of the likes of say Leveyan
Satanism and also more recently the Satanic Temple, with the
acknowledgment that there's often this kind of ambiguous space for
any new religious movement, a kind of discussion of authenticity

(53:21):
and even a change in mission for a given movement,
because as with any religion, things change over time and
a central body or central individual cannot always control it. Actually,
this is something that Frank Herbert gets into a bit
in the Doom novels. You know, it's like once a faith,
once a following has built up, that doesn't mean the

(53:43):
person at the center of it has full control over
it anymore, you know. And just because you have the
copyright for the name of the religion doesn't mean that
you are its master.

Speaker 3 (53:53):
And this doesn't apply only to religions, but I think
there is a general tendency among people to, over time
try to find meaning in whatever they have spent their
time and effort doing, even if that thing started off
as just fun. Whatever you have spent your time and

(54:13):
effort on, even if it started just as a game
or a joke or whatever. I think there's just this
inexorable pull over time to look back and want to
feel like your time has been well spent, and thus
think that maybe there was more to what I was
doing than I originally thought. And I can definitely see
how this tendency like on one hand, this is the

(54:35):
kind of thing that turns like jokes and memes over
time into sincere political beliefs. You've probably seen this kind
of arc of people who are like meming all the
time on the Internet. I think the same thing could
happen with a joke religion. You spend enough time on
the joke and you eventually decide like, actually there's something
going on here.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
Yeah. Yeah, And I was thinking about that a lot
as I was looking at this other source two thousand
and eight worked by Thomas Alberts titled Virtually Real Fake
Religions and Problems of Authenticity and Religion, and he invokes
three different principles, including Walter Benjamin's theory of the dialectical
image and Peter Berger's theory of redeeming laughter. But I

(55:19):
want to just briefly focus on the third, and that's
Australian anthropologist Michael Tausig's theory of defacement. So Tasig wrote,
quote defacement asks what happens when something precious is despoiled.
It begins with the notion that such activity is attractive
in its very repulsion, and that it creates something sacred,
even in the most secular of societies and circumstances. So

(55:43):
Tausig gets into the importance of like secrecy and both
religion and taboo and the interplay between the two. And
I may not be grasping the full depth of this topic,
but if I'm understanding it even halfway correctly, I think
one possible use of defacement here is that anytime you
despoil something that is held up as sacred, you can't

(56:06):
help but potentially create something that is also sacred. So
Alberts argues that quote, fake religions produce secruelty in there
connecting the body of the perceiver with the movements of
concealment and revelation.

Speaker 3 (56:21):
Hmm, well, I'm not sure I fully understand the concealment
and revelation aspect of this, but I mean I can
certainly see how by simply engaging with the sacred at all,
even to negate it, you implicitly assume some of the
power and authority of the sacred dimension of life, because
you're sort of showing that you yourself are on the

(56:44):
level like the plane of authority with which you can
interact with the sacred, and so by defacing the sacred
or negating it in some way, you assume a mantle
of cultural power. And people may well look to you
then and say, well, are you the new Are you
the new boss? You know, is what you're doing somehow
supposed to replace what you destroyed?

Speaker 2 (57:04):
Yeah, I mean I was thinking too about you know,
like what you're just talking about with various memes and whatnot.
And I'll see occasionally memes that are about propping up
villains from popular franchises, you know, siding with the villain,
be it the Empire in Star Wars or with Thanos

(57:25):
in the Marvel Cinematic universe, you know. And on one level,
it's like, yeah, it's fun. They're just movies, right, It's funny. Yeah,
and Fanos is a great villain the Empire. They're cool villains.
But I don't know, but what's at what point do
you end up drawing the line and think like, wow,
you know, are we how much thought are we putting
into this? Are we propping up, like, you know, some

(57:48):
sort of like awful authoritarian figure, even in fiction that's
gonna end up casting a shadow on our reality and
the way we interact with risks in the real world.

Speaker 3 (58:00):
Well, yeah, I would say, like, it's a it's funny
to say, Okay, yes I'm with the Empire in Star
Wars because it's not a real it's not a real thing.
That's like funny Initially, I would truly be careful about
keeping up that joke for a long time. If you
just keep doing that over time for years, I strongly
suspect some people who do that would end up thinking

(58:22):
that it's not just a joke and the Empire had
some good points.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Speaker 3 (58:27):
I think that's just how we are. It's like you
want to think that what you've spent your time on
is time well spent, even if it's something you originally
meant ironically. I think there's there's a pull to start
saying actually that is right.

Speaker 2 (58:40):
Yeah. Yeah, So this whole like defacement theory thing, I
think it can. It seems to definitely get a bit heady,
but I think we can easily take it and apply
it to discussions of conspiracy thinking, fake news, misinformation, and
more items that often twist authenticity and or reality into
a form that is on some level more appealing to

(59:02):
the individual, that is more infectious, it's more bombastic, and
in some cases not without the trappings of religion in
the end.

Speaker 3 (59:09):
Oh, now that you get into like conspiracy theories and stuff.
I've said this on the podcast before, but I will
reiterate my personal belief that I think a whole lot
of conspiracy theory ideation begins as entertainment. It's people not
engaging with this subject as a serious true believer. At first.
It starts with people engaging with it because it's entertaining.

(59:32):
It's just kind of like funny and interesting. Okay, it's
a meme whatever. But you spend some time with it
and it works its magic on you. You get adapted to it,
and it starts to seem more and more legitimately authentically compelling.
So I think it's it's a dangerous road. Things that
start off as just just for a laugh end up

(59:53):
being quite serious and meaning a lot to you.

Speaker 2 (59:56):
Yeah, So think about that the next time you load
up a particularly dank meme to to share on social media, I.

Speaker 3 (01:00:05):
Want to be I don't want to overstate that. I mean,
I think it probably takes time and repeated engagement and
stuff like that, but but I do think that tendency
is there.

Speaker 2 (01:00:13):
Yeah. So again, there's much there's much more that that
can and could be said about the interplay of authenticity
and religion because it's you, You're you're dealing with very
very complex topics when you're just asking what is religion,
what is authenticity? What is truth? And religion? Uh, it's
it's very gets, very subjective, open to a lot of

(01:00:34):
different interpretations.

Speaker 3 (01:00:36):
All right, does that do it? For Part three on authenticity?

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
I believe that is authentically the end of the third
episode on authenticity.

Speaker 3 (01:00:44):
This is one of those subjects where I feel like
we we went kind of deep for three episodes and
still there's like so much we didn't get into. So
maybe we could come back in the future, who knows.

Speaker 2 (01:00:54):
Yeah, I think, And I think there's some sort of
like splinter topics. Like I was looking at some others
regarding the topic of heresy, and I think there's a
lot to discuss there that might be more deserving of
its own episode or series of episodes on just the
topic of heresy, you know, not just within like Christian traditions,

(01:01:15):
but also like globally, you know, with accusations of heresy
being thrown between different factions, different religions and so forth.
And what does it mean.

Speaker 3 (01:01:24):
Getting into the idea that a religion which is in
fact just like a set of related practices and beliefs
held throughout a culture, that there is some correct, original
version of that, there's the authentic version of it, and
that at some point some practice that a person has
is different enough that it's actually not the same thing anymore. Yeah, Like, yeah,

(01:01:48):
where do you draw those boundaries and how does that emerge?
That is an interesting question.

Speaker 2 (01:01:52):
Yeah, what is the real Highlander too? Is it the
theatrical cut? Is it the director's renegade cut? Is it
a fan at it comes later on? That is combining
portions for multiple versions of the film into a new model,
which is heresy, which is orthodoxy, which is authentic.

Speaker 3 (01:02:10):
Fortunately, I am a geist cut fundamentalist, so I can
speak for the authentic version of The Highlander two religion.
Anybody who's trying to get me to watch the renegade
cut or whatever you blaspheme.

Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
Well, fortunately we're aligned on that. All right, We're going
to go and close it out. But we'd love to
hear from everyone out there, because, again, everything we've been
discussing in this series, there are so many applications for
our daily life, for history, and just the entire human experience.
So write in. We would love to hear from you.
Just a reminder of that. Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is primarily a science and culture podcast, re core episodes

(01:02:44):
on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do listener mail,
On Wednesdays we do a short form episode, and on
Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk
about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (01:02:56):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:03:17):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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