Sincerity & Authenticity

You and Your Profile, Part 3

Apologies for the delayed post. I’ve been struggling with a bad headache – perhaps brought on by bad sleep – for a few days. I usually read the material throughout the week, take notes, and then write my post on Sunday afternoon. Due to my headache, I wasn’t able to look at a screen for long without experiencing considerable discomfort.

But that’s behind us now, and today we continue reading You and Your Profile, part of our 2026 philosophy of technology book club. Here are the books we’ll be reading next:

• In April, we’re reading The Right to Oblivion by Lowry Pressly.

• In May, we’re reading The Score by C. Thi Nguyen.

• In May, we’re The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor.

And I have a very exciting announcement: C. Thi Nguyen has agreed to join our Zoom call in May! That means paid subscribers will be able to ask him questions directly.

For the rest of March, we’re finishing You and Your Profile. Here’s the schedule:

• March 2: Chapter 1 of You and Your Profile

• March 9: Chapter 2 of You and Your Profile (note: this is a long chapter)

  • March 13: Members-Only Zoom Call, 8 PM Eastern (note: the Zoom recording failed, my apologies)

• March 16: Chapters 3 & 4

• March 23: Chapter 5

  • Supplementary Reading: ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (link to PDF)

• March 29: Members-Only Zoom Call, 3 PM Eastern

• March 30: Chapters 6 & 7

If you’d like to support my work (and get access to those Zoom calls), you can become a paid subscriber.

Over the last several weeks, the focus of You and Your Profile has been to describe a shift in how we think about identity. Moeller & D’Ambrosio believe that our conception of identity has gone through three distinct phases: sincerity, authenticity, and profilicity. We’ve now explored profilicity in some depth – the entirety of last week’s reading was the chapter on profilicity – and now we’re taking a step back and looking at sincerity and authenticity.

Sincerity

Under the regime of sincerity, your identity is constituted by your social role — or, more accurately, your social roles. We have to put this in the plural because none of us ever occupies a single social role. Off the top of my head, I am a husband, father, son, writer, philosopher, academic (of sorts), content creator, layman, and friend; how I behave depends on which of these roles is most salient at a particular time and in a particular place. Personally, I think of some of these are closer to my core identity than others: as I’ve grown older, I think of myself less as a son (except when my parents are visiting), but I’m never not thinking of myself as a father. I asked my wife how she would define her identity based on roles, and she told me that the first that came to mind were mother, daughter, wife, and philosopher. I asked whether the order was ranked by importance, and she said yes. Then she asked me to answer the same question, and I said writer, father, and husband. (She thought it was funny that I would put ‘writer’ first, but then said it might be healthier that way.) But that order isn’t static. A few nights ago, my son decided that what he really wanted to do was sleep in bed with me (Mengyu was sleeping in the guest room with our daughter, who isn’t sleeping through the night lately.) When he came into the primary bedroom and asked, I wasn’t thinking of myself as a writer or philosopher: I simply was a father, and that governed my actions at the time.

We read:

It was acknowledged that people had to assume numerous roles in society, and thus integrity did not lie in presenting the very same, “true” persona all the time. Rather, it rested in carrying out one’s different roles properly and virtuously, as well as in fully committing to those roles, to the extent of truly identifying with them. This was the integrity of sincerity.

I’ve emphasized that last point to make clear that sincerity still involves integrity, which is a moral notion. You can be more or less sincere, and under the regime of sincerity, you can be morally evaluated by your sincerity.

There are a few conceptual points to make about sincerity.

First, Moeller & D’Ambrosio use a metaphor – borrowed from another philosopher, Henry Rosemont Jr., who works in the Confucian tradition – of a peach versus an onion.

People may be seen as peaches: an external skin that is public, the fruit itself which is our body as well as our personality and history. And then there is the peach pit, our self, that which endures, does not change from day to day, and is quite literally the seed of future life (biological and mental).… But think instead of an onion. I peel off successive layers; first son, then husband, father grandfather; I continue peeling away the layers of friends, students, teachers, colleagues, neighbors, etc. And what is left when there are no more layers? Nothing at all.

A ‘peach model’ of identity is more at home when we are thinking of authenticity, which we’ll discuss a little bit later. It presupposes a core to your identity. Rosemont endorses the ‘onion model’: each layer is a social role, and if you peel back all of the layers, you will find that there is no core there. Which is to say that the idea of a single, core identity would be an illusion: your identity is entirely constituted by your various social roles.

Second, these roles are normative. They govern our actions. As a father, I am expected to behave in a certain way. As a son, Teddy is expected to behave in other ways. Your various social roles determine your individual actions, and we are expected to psychologically endorse these actions, often in the name of social harmony. These can go beyond the ordinary function of the roles, too. Moeller & D’Ambrosio use the example of a professor in Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries:

A professor, for instance, had to show up at the university to lecture, grade assignments, and attend department meetings—these are duties that MacIntyre would associate with modern “social roles in general.” In addition to meeting such “general” role expectations, however, a true character had to do much more. The character extended to all sorts of non-university-related areas; in everything from shopping to riding the train, professors were expected to be dressed, behave, speak, think, and feel like professors.

In our last Zoom call, we talked a bit about fashion and how this plays into identity. This is where Moeller & D’Ambrosio touch upon the issue, but only briefly. We have an image of a professor – a certain kind of dress and a manner of speaking – and even today we find it odd when someone does not conform to this image. Under the regime of sincerity, you are judged by the extent to which you are able to conform to your various social roles.

This gets us into a pickle, and that is the third point. When each social role provides a standard to which you must conform, you will quickly find that you are dealing with incommensurable duties. As a father, I have to do X. As a writer, I have to do not-X. In that case, the choice is a little easier: I tend to do what I ought to do as a father, not a writer. But what about my duties as a father and a husband conflict? A husband and a writer? A writer and a content creator? If we are deriving our norms of actions from our roles, we will find ourselves pulled in multiple directions, and there may be no resolution.

Fourth, these roles stand in need of justification. Traditionally, we could appeal to a ‘way of heaven’ (the Confucian justification) or a ‘created order’ (the Christian justification); admittedly, these justifications read as implausible to modern minds.¹ The promise of sincerity is that if everyone plays their part, the community will thrive, as we will be (collectively) building a harmonious world together. Just a thought: it may be much easier to justify harsh punishment, even things like the death penalty, if this is your way of thinking about identity, because transgressions are not individual choices, but rather threats to an entire way of life — for everyone.

Authenticity

I grew up in a very rural part of Ohio — my elementary school was surrounded by cornfields, and it was part of a larger building that contained the middle school and high school I attended as well. Every year, about 120 other students and I moved a little bit further down the halls; when we reached the end of the hall, we graduated. I am not a modern Hans (the imaginary man who Fukuyama introduces as a thought experiment), but I did see some similarities in our condition. Where I grew up, your role strictly defined you. There were kids who were raised by steelworkers, and they planned to go into steelwork themselves; the same could be said for the children of long-haul truckers and farmers. I was a strange one, because from the moment I began to dream about my future, I knew I wanted to get out of there.

Leaving rural Ohio and going to college, and especially once I moved to Boston for graduate school, I was faced with choices. I could make myself into the kind of person I wanted to be. The presence of choice is what leads to the regime of authenticity. This is what Hans discovers as he moves into the city: he has to make choices about his future and about whether or not he wants to fulfill his inherited social roles.

Modernity brings about authenticity, though there are certainly traces of it earlier on (the authors mention Plato’s idea of a stable soul), because modernity increased choice. The authors write: ‘Modern authenticity and individualism blossomed when personal autonomy and creativity became identity ideals.’ Thus, you might to think about the relationship between modernity, authenticity, liberalism, capitalism, individualism, and a few other isms I might have missed.

At its root, authenticity demands self-discovery. Instead of looking for your social roles to constitute identity, authenticity tells you to look inward, and there you will discover yourself. As you discover yourself, you can then make choices that conform to this self. I find this a helpful way to look at authenticity, because:

• In sincerity, identity is imposed, while in authenticity, identity is discovered.

• In sincerity and authenticity, your actions can be evaluated by conformity to a standard.

• In sincerity, that standard is the social world as a whole, while in authenticity, that identity is the self.

Charles Taylor is one of the most important philosophers to read about authenticity, and that’s why we’re reading The Ethics of Authenticity in June. Moeller & D’Ambrosio provide us with a passage from that book, which I’ll include here as well:

Authenticity (A) involves (i) creation and construction as well as discovery, (ii) originality, and frequently (iii) opposition to the rules of society and even potentially to what we recognize as morality. But it is also true, as we saw, that it (B) requires (i) openness to horizons of significance (for otherwise the creating loses the background that can save it from insignificance) and (ii) a self-definition in dialogue. That these demands may be in tension has to be allowed. But what must be wrong is a simple privileging of one over the other, of (A), say, at the expense of (B), of vice versa.

And Moeller & D’Ambrosio think there is a tension in this definition, because Taylor emphasizes creation and construction alongside discovery. If you happened to be at my live show in Austin a few weeks ago, you would have heard a talk I gave called ‘The Dignity of Darkness.’ There, I mentioned that I am skeptical of a core, inner self that is discovered, and that I prefer to think of this identity as one that is created again and again; thus, you might think that I am ready to endorse what the authors say here. However, I am stepping back and trying to think if discovery can coexist with creation and construction — I think there are interesting theoretical possibilities here.

What happens under the regime of authenticity? Well, just like sincerity leads to some negative consequences (see the authors’ discussion of suicide in China, e.g.), so does authenticity, because authenticity may be a profoundly isolating way of living. As each of us pursues our own way of thinking about human life and freedom, we may forget that we are living together. I don’t want to linger too much on this point, because it will come up when we read Taylor in June, but notice that he also includes ‘self-definition in dialogue’ as part of his definition of authenticity. (Michael A. pointed this out in the last Zoom call.) We don’t individually and in isolation decide what each of us will be; we work it out together.

Working it out together, though, leads us to Moeller & D’Ambrosio call the ‘paradox of authenticity’ (and sometimes ‘the inauthenticity of authenticity’). For we find that in our pursuit of our own true selves, we are always thinking about others. Fashion comes up in the discussion again. We have to rely on social conventions, like fashion, to express our true selves; we’re always using a language we’ve inherited to try and describe what makes us unique.

I’ll admit it, though: I don’t see the big deal here. I think this is fine, and perfectly consistent with valuing authenticity. Once one recognizes Taylor’s point about the dialogical quality of identity and self-definition, then it becomes trivial to point out that we rely on social conventions and trends as part of this dialogue. The claim that ‘true’ authenticity is impossible (made at the beginning of Authenticity Nostalgia) seems to me to be lacking in support.

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We had many great comments on last week’s post. Here are three that stood out to me.

Energetic Girl, as she goes here on Substack, is true to her name, leaving multiple lengthy comments. Let me highlight one part of one of those:

They spend all this time providing clear examples of how they are fully aware that all of these specifically non-autonomous actions are being taken by outside forces to shape people's profiles without their consent or realization. But then they will somehow just apropos of nothing keep coming back to statements about how people still have agency over their profiles. They also spend a ridiculous amount of time making statements about how the internet allows for people to finally - at long last - have more than one identity and profile, and how all of people's profiles don't have to actually overlap each other and can be tried on and cast off at will in a liberating way. But that makes me wonder about their core understanding of how the internet works or even of the examples they are providing. The early internet did in fact work that way in its earliest incarnation, yes. But how can you have multiple profiles that don't force an even more rigid fixed identity on you than previously existed in something like the Chinese social credit system? How does the fact that dating profiles, for example, are known to be getting ever more homogenous (as in the first chapter they recognized that selfies are) reflect people feeling more inclined to try out multiple identities in a playful way? I brought up Ronson's So You've Been Publically Shamed before, but there he provides ample evidence that mistakes on the internet follow people until the end of time in our current environment, and they do it even to people who did not either understand the audience who would see their content or even get a choice in who did. His book generates important questions surrounding things like the "right to be forgotten" and the total inability to actually delete profile information about yourself from basically anywhere on the internet or control even which audience your content is aimed at in the first place that in fact mean that the opposite of the authors' assertions is now true. The internet locks people into one identity forever rather than allow them to flexibly move between identities in different contexts far more than past modes of existence ever did. For them to claim otherwise is just something that they provide little to no actual support for from what I could tell in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. That they include and don't properly refute!

What I take to be the main point: Moeller & D’Ambrosio clearly approve of profilicity, seeing it as a more free conception of identity (and critiques of it as being remnants of sincerity and authenticity). Yet, the internet ‘locks us in’ to an identity very quickly (that’s a great point illustrated by Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publically Shamed, which is a book I highly recommend). There may considerably less ‘play’ with one’s identity than Moeller & D’Ambrosio are willing to admit.

Mitch corrected me, which I want to highlight:

Jared, to your surprise that the authors didn’t touch on the demanding nature of one’s identity under profilicity, I believe they did address it briefly. Starting on page 58:

“Given the close ties between profilicity and social media, this means that personal identity, too, must be fed. Our profilic self-portaits demand more intense attention than ever before. In sincerity and authenticity, identity needs to be maintained and developed, but it is not subjected to the same feeding frenzy as in profilicity...It needs to be constantly updated.”

I had said that profilicity would require constant updating and the feeding of new information (in Luhman’s sense), and I wondered why this point wasn’t made by Moeller & D’Ambrosio. I had missed, or forgotten, this passage. Thank you, Mitch, for catching the error.

And this is from Megan, about the move to a ‘multiplicity of perspectives’ and the abandonment of objectivity:

Speaking about validation for high profiles (and really for all profiles) - “...there is no God, no family member, and no inner self that can provide it instead”. (112)

My first thought was honestly, how sad. How sad that we are giving the faceless masses such power over us and our sense of worth, that their approval gives us some feeling that we are acceptable or accomplished. Then I wondered which “came first”. Did the lessening of the value put on religion, family, community, self lead us to a place where when seeking validation the only source left was the general peer? Or did social media (and previously other media perhaps) create this general peer, which then pushed out the validating relationships we previously had with God, family, self?

This would be a good question for us to ponder.

1. See Moeller & D’Ambrosio’s discussion of ‘thick, extrinsic’ relationships, like motherhood, and the Zhuangzist critique of Confucius.