The curtain is coming down this week on Dan Rather as anchor of the CBS Evening News, and he’d like you to remember him as being authentic. Good luck to him – and many others.
In a recent Ken Auletta article in The New Yorker, Rather said, “The one thing I hope and I believe, is that even my enemies think I’m authentic.”
In America today, too much time is expended on wishing for authenticity; or, better put, working to manufacture authenticity. Leaders and organizations that are purportedly civic-minded engage in endless posturing in order to suggest to people that they “care” about you and understand your reality.
As Frank Rich pointed out in Sunday’s New York Times, Rather’s competitor, Brian Williams, the newly-installed anchor at NBC News, has adopted the slogan “Reporting on America’s Story.” It is NBC’s way of signaling that they understand us – they’re on our side. No more of that silly news.
But why can’t people simply let their true words and deeds speak for themselves? Why must they tell us they are being authentic?
What all this hoopla amounts to is a vacuous attempt to connect in a world in which people’s reality is constantly distorted in the pursuit of one’s own narrow agenda. And let’s face it: in so many of these efforts, authenticity is not the goal at all; manipulation is. The bottom line is to make someone believe that you are real; actually being real is beside the point, if not a hopeless endeavor.
More than ten years ago I wrote a report entitled, Meaningful Chaos, which revealed how and why people form relationships with public concerns. One of the key factors involved was something we called “authenticity.” People formed attachment to public concerns when there were three standards of authenticity met (which we have since added to). The standards went far beyond people merely insisting that their own personal prejudices be reaffirmed by what they see, read, or hear.
When I wrote this report, the word “authenticity” was not nearly as widely used in public settings as it is nowadays. But the more we talk about it, the less of it we seem to have.
The problem is that our false intentions become confused with true commitment and follow through. People want authenticity in public life. But it must come from someplace real.
We can't get the truth about anything.
Everyone wants you to be careful and sensitive to others. I say its time to just call a sanitation technician by his real job title...a janitor. But it is a degrading, menial job. So what? Are we going to spin it into a prestigious career with a phony name change?
Honesty is a moving target in these days of political correctness. Terrorist criminals are "insurgents". The agendas move the target.
Its time to just tell the truth.
Otherwise, follow the money and don't blindly believe everything you are told.
"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." Jean Giraudoux (1882 - 1944).