The Pretender

Subverting one's authenticity by means of fantasy

In the 17th century, Anton van Leeuwenhoek discovered with an early microscope that there is more in a drop of water than meets the unaided eye. What might we discover floating in our lives today if we used the right instruments? Hidden wonders perhaps? Perhaps something ominous as well. Sometimes what swims unseen is a spiritual disorder.

I started catching glimpses of such a disorder when I was a boy in the 1960s. One of my brothers suffered from it, always complaining about having spent more than half of his life (8 out of 14 years) in what he called “these godforsaken little burgs,” i.e. the small towns our father moved us to for his work. When I learned the word, I thought of my brother’s behavior as “melodrama,” but that wasn’t quite correct.

All through my childhood and teens I saw the same syndrome like a flush on the faces of many of those around me. People in the 1970s who acted hip or earthy or chic or ironic were almost invariably afflicted. The problem seemed at first glance to be mere phoniness, but really it wasn’t, because these people weren’t trying to fool anybody else, any more than my brother was. They had just fallen into a certain way of being. Sometimes I referred to such people as “smug,” but that wasn’t accurate either.

The syndrome I detected during my youth but could not identify was not merely a matter of style. I knew that even then. I spent much too much time in the 1970s and early 1980s around people who did drugs to believe this to be an issue on the order of wide ties versus skinny ties. I saw in my drug-using acquaintances the same melodrama or smugness or whatever it was, and I grasped in some inchoate way that it factored into their substance use, but that was as far as I could go with the connection.

I developed a bad case of the disorder during my senior year of high school. A girl I had loved rejected me, and I had a near-nervous breakdown. I felt empty, and I filled my emptiness with the manners and tastes of a charismatic friend. He would pump his fist and yell “Neetch!” in honor of his favorite philosopher, and he called people he didn’t like “pigs” and “rabble.” I went against my own nature and became quite cavalier while under his sway. It took years for me to shrug off the influence of my “guru.”

But I still didn’t identify the disorder. I thought about the syndrome off and on for the following decade, but the next great gelling insight occurred only when I was 35. I was reading an article in the November 23, 1996, TV Guide about a television remake of In Cold Blood. Interviewed on the set, one of the stars shared a verse he’d made up and forced into the meter of “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” from The Beverly Hillbillies:

This is the story of a man named Clutter.
He lost his wife and daughter
Who were killed with a shotgun
That made their heads go splutter.

In Cold Blood was based on the actual murders of Herbert Clutter and his family in 1959. The star’s lyrics were incomplete: not only were Mr. Clutter’s wife and daughter murdered, but so was his son, and so was Mr. Clutter, who had his throat cut before he was shot in the face. The thirty-four-year-old actor who bequeathed us this doggerel of course knew that his movie was based on factual events. I was appalled that he had made a joke about what had happened to these real people and that TV Guide had printed it.

And then it occurred to me: to this actor and to the folks at TV Guide, the Clutters weren’t real. Not truly. They were just characters with funny names, like Jed Clampett. And I saw with an awful recognition that there was some nexus where treating reality as a story, lacking empathy, and entertaining oneself joined. This nexus was accompanied by a kind of giddiness, like a fever. I had seen this pattern in many different places, but never so clearly. Further, I reflected that I had sometimes been guilty of it myself.

That’s pretty much where my understanding of the subject stayed for many years. I knew enough not to succumb to the syndrome and to cast a wary eye on anyone who did, but I didn’t follow it down to the root. It took a lot of writing before I puzzled it all out. I gave the disorder several names before I settled on one. Now I call it “pretenderism.”

When I say someone is pretending, I don’t mean that he is practicing normal make-believe or that he is a phony, but rather that he is engaging in a specific kind of unself-conscious simulation. The pretender pretends, without fully knowing it, to be a different self, a self defined by its sense of life.

“Sense of life” is a concept made famous by Miguel de Unamuno, who wrote “The Tragic Sense of Life” in1913. It was further developed fifty years later by Ayn Rand in her book on art, The Romantic Manifesto. I am using a slightly modified version of Rand’s conception.

A genuine, unpretended sense of life is the sum of your bedrock beliefs about the world, manifested as pervasive feelings. You can feel that life is an adventure or that the world is a threatening place where you’d better keep your head down. You can feel that everybody uses everybody or that we’re all vulnerable underneath. You can feel that it’s fun to use your mind or you can feel, “What’s the use?”

A sense of life can be sparkling, defeatist, exalted, down-to-earth, etc., with many nuances. Multiple beliefs meet in the same person, some-times with inconsistencies, but they tend to add up to an overall emotional gestalt. It’s like a tone or mood that is in the background of everything you do and feel.

You develop a sense of life through your pre-theoretic encounters with the world beginning in childhood, through ten thousand impressions and choices that you half-consciously integrate into a sensibility. It is at once something about what you think the world is like and something about the kind of person you are. It helps define you, and others perceive it almost as an emotional “aura” surrounding you, giving you your unique connotation as a person. It is the basis of art, especially music, which embodies sense of life feelings.

The feeling aspect of a sense of life, however, is not a primary—it is the product of your thinking about reality, built up impression by impression, choice by choice. The pretender, however, is not thinking about reality: he starts with a moodlike feeling—call it a" pseudo sense of life”—which he uses to define an artificial self and which he projects onto the world in an attempt to generate a certain kind of emotion or style. In other words, where a genuine sense of life is a response to experience, a pseudo sense of life is an attempt to conjure experience.

Pretenders play a role defined by the pseudo sense of life they choose. They can play at being macho or torchy, glib or self-pitying or five hundred other things, but whatever it is it will inevitably be much simpler than the complex mosaic that is a genuine sense of life, and this is because it is not arrived at organically. Usually, pretenders just grab it off the rack. They are typically not old enough at the time to realize what they are doing.

Adopting a pseudo sense of life is the emotional equivalent of jumping to a conclusion, and like jumping to a conclusion it seems usually to be motivated by impatience with the proper process. It is an almost existentialist maneuver, like a leap of faith in the dark. Pretenderism is an attempt to control one’s experience beyond the point to which one can reasonably expect to control it.

Pretenders are often afraid of meaninglessness (frequently in the guise of boredom), helplessness and worthlessness. They project a “vibe” onto the world in order to avoid these bad feelings, living out a stylized fantasy instead of exploring the world and themselves and working through their issues.

Most of them see reality as an aesthetic phenomenon: for them life is a movie, other people and they themselves are characters in it, and their pseudo sense of life provides the soundtrack music that enhances the mood at different points. Pretending a sense of life is an act of magical thinking, because the pretender believes implicitly that he can remake himself and the world just by choosing to feel a certain way about them.

The pretender doesn’t fully see the difference between the inner world and the outer world. He thinks that his soundtrack music is playing out there in the world instead of merely inside of his head. The idea of an impersonal reality is foreign to him. Being a pretender is like wearing sunglasses indoors. They make one feel cool, and they give things an interesting tint, but they get between the self and the world and make both seem like what they aren’t. They are a mask.

In many cases, the pasted-on sense of life is borrowed from role models, such as those in the media. The process is seductive and not fully conscious. Bored children see Bart Simpson and think he’s cool and exciting. They get charged up and resonate with his brattiness. They “snap into” the character’s sense of life, and before you know it, they’re little Bartmen, skateboarding through a world of thrills and fools.

They probably don’t think of themselves as Barts or brats, since like many of our most important decisions, this one is wordless. Perhaps they think of themselves as “smart” or “cool,” but those words are just handles for the pseudo sense of life that draws them. Later, because the child is father to the man, they become big Bartmen, with grown-up brattiness, and perhaps they think of themselves as “rebels.” Beneath this brattiness, however, there is still a genuine person who isn’t a brat, with a sad and stunted but genuine sense of life, a person who doesn’t know what to do with himself.

Even when the adoption of a pseudo sense of life is somewhat self-conscious, it is usually still not intended to deceive others but is a sincere attempt to become something new. For example, as an asthmatic youngster, Theodore Roosevelt made himself over with a program of calisthenics and manly interests. At some point he decided to become a cowboy, no doubt inspired by the glamorous depiction of cowboys in the mass media of his time. Roosevelt’s “strenuous life," with its gratuitous killing of animals, crowing over dead Spanish soldiers and calling things “bully” when he was in his forties, was the product of decisions he had made as a child, decisions that left the mark of a child on him his whole life. “You have to remember," said one of his friends, “that the President is six.”

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Signs and Symptoms

You can often spot a pretender because of his manner: He is artificial without being insincere—more over-stylized than anything else. You know that someone is pretending when he adopts a style that no one of his age and education has any business adopting, for example, suburban teenagers who buy into hip-hop fashion. The endless procession of style tribes that have been spawned during the last 60 years—beats, rockers, hippies, punks, hip-hoppers, Goths, hipsters—has been full of pretenders. You can also spot a pretender because his manner or work is artificially one-note, as in, for example, the cagey-sage persona of Jordan B. Peterson.

In the 1990s the favored pretenderist attitude was chronic irony (Think Seinfeld). That attitude abated somewhat after 9/11, but it has made a partial comeback. Pretenders leave a wide trail of small, generally reliable signs including backward baseball caps and funny facial hair on young men and bow ties and seersucker suits on older ones, although single signs are never decisive. Excessive make-up and overly sexualized attire are some of the reliable signs in women. People who aggressively act out their ethnicity count, too. Pretenders choose style as their substance with frightening regularity.

Some senses of life simply cannot be genuine. Nobody is really hip or cool: Miles Davis was a pretender. Nobody is really a sex kitten: Marilyn Monroe was a pretender. Nobody with any education is really “folksy”: Ronald Reagan was a pretender. Nobody is really morbidly droll: Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Addams and Edward Gorey were all pretenders. (And I don’t think all of these qualities were just acts for the public.) While we’re at it, snarky people and officious people are all pretenders, though not vice versa. Notice that the pretender is not just one personality type but is rather a galaxy of related types. Pretenders share a general recipe for falsifying the self, but the particular flavor they adopt varies according to taste.

Think of the distortions of personality that many people undergo by pretending. Kim Kardashian is probably a good example of a hyper-feminine pretender. At the other end of the gender spectrum, Andrew Tate is an example of the hyper-masculine pretender, living in a world where only the bellicose survive. Too many young men are seduced by Tate’s “coolness,” despite his criminal behavior. If you want to look for contemporary pretenders on your own, check out movie directors, among whom they are legion. I don’t know about Quentin Tarantino the man, but Tarantino the director is a grade-A pretender.

Let me hasten to say that most pretenders are decent human beings and that many are attractive, creative people. I’m not trying to condemn anyone merely for being a pretender, and I’m not trying to reduce complex individuals to mere “types.” Pretenders usually deserve our sympathy, because they generally do not know what they are choosing when they start pretending and because they are their own worst enemies.

The reader may wonder what the difference is between being a pretender and simply adopting an “attitude.” The two are certainly on a continuum of make believe, but adopting an attitude in the normal sense is typically a conscious and limited tactic for impressing others, while being a pretender means adopting a manner full-time, unself-consciously, and primarily for oneself. Likewise, the pretender is not simply displaying a persona in Jung’s sense or a false self in Winnicott’s. A persona is one’s social face, adopted to deal with social pressures. A pretender pretends in response to private, inner needs. Furthermore, I should mention that the overwhelming majority of pretenders are not clinical narcissists, although there is a touch of the narcissistic personality style in many of them.

It’s comfortable to think that pretenders are basically harmless, even charming, and not to be very concerned about them. If you don’t like them, just don’t associate with them. The problem with this easy-going attitude is that a lot of pretenders are dangerous to themselves and others. Theodore Roosevelt lost the vision in one eye from boxing in the White House (he was nearly fifty at the time). And Roosevelt started the tradition of the crusading president that has led a string of disastrous policies, including the Vietnam War and the War on Drugs. These crusades are born of the disorder of pretenderism.

The political pretender’s pseudo sense of life entails a sense of self-righteous urgency that turns every problem into a crisis—and crisis thinking is almost antithetical to reason. Note that the modern president who defused crises best was also probably the one who was least a pretender: Dwight D. Eisenhower.

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Putting the Syndrome Under the Microscope

We need an anatomy of the pretender. The best place to start is his relationship with reality. The pretender sees the world through the tinted glasses he has donned. Typically, he is looking to be entertained by the world, not engaged by it. Reality may not even seem real to him. Rather, to him it seems like a story, all surface with nothing behind it. Instead of seeing other people in a matter-of-fact way, recognizing their humanity, many pretenders regard them as little more than objects of the imagination to be mocked or romanticized at will.

The pretender creates a Bubble Universe to live in, a kind of virtual world of idiosyncrasies, no-context beliefs and references to the surrounding culture, all glued together by the story the pretender is trying to tell himself. The pretender furnishes his Bubble Universe according to the pseudo sense of life he has chosen: He has his habitual jokes, his favorite conspiracy theories, and references to Breaking Bad or Fleabag. The pretender lives among these trinkets. They make him happy and reinforce his attitude. (The same goes for females, too.)

There is an excited-kid kind of joy to many a pretender, attractive unless you spend too much time in his presence and realize that Harry Potter really is the pinnacle of literature for him. The way in which comic books, Star Wars, zombie stories, video games and other fantasies have become adult fare in the last couple of generations is another sign of the spread of pretenderism. A lot of grown-ups today are just big kids.

Sometimes what goes into the Bubble Universe is a little more disturbing. In my experience, most feelings of outrage, offendedness and violated honor are pretenderish self-indulgences, not genuine moral responses. Ann Coulter’s theatrical indignation might serve as an example here. The genuine reaction to most immorality is quiet disgust, followed, if appropriate, by a deeply felt yet measured response. Vituperative moral condemnation is more often than not just pretenderist melodrama. However, I can’t tell whether Donald Trump is a pretender or is just self-consciously playing to his base’s desire to see him “own the libs.”

The pretender often treats knowledge as if it were trivia for his entertainment, and indeed our contemporary fascination with trivia is a sign of the pretender’s cognitive style. There’s no external reality with deeper meanings and internal connections for the pretender: there’s just random, disjointed “factoids.” To mention a particularly disquieting example, I recently stumbled across a website that catalogued gruesome deaths of celebrities. That website embodied pretenderism in three ways: it treated facts as trivia, it treated human beings as mere objects of entertainment and it pandered to some morbid/hateful pseudo sense of life, the exact nature of which I do not care to investigate.

The pretender likes things that blur the line between truth and play. For many bright people, such things might include Last Week Tonight and The Onion. For the cultured set, they could include postmodern art that “subverts the difference between reality and representation,” to quote a description that I have seen in the blurbs of many art photography books.

One characterization of postmodernism in art is that in it “style becomes content,” which more or less means that reality is subordinated to sense of life. You may think that postmodernism is something you only see in art galleries. If you believe that, watch a Quentin Tarantino movie, and you will definitely see style become content as Tarantino bends genres to serve his revenge fantasies, and you will see a subversion of the difference between reality and representation as he rewrites history to make it more entertaining.

Before you brush all these phenomena off as just the usual foolishness, remind yourself that people who get their news from John Oliver have the vote and that people who revel in postmodernism are probably among your children’s professors. This is a dangerous situation.

The mental furniture in the Bubble Universe includes obsessions with what-if scenarios, “bright ideas” and floating abstractions. The pretender specializes in way-too-clever schemes that fizzle or blow up in his face, but to which he stubbornly clings. Putting concepts above reality is the essence of a cognitive style called rationalism (not to be confused with genuine rationality, which uses concepts to understand reality). Many clever theories from academia, such as deconstructionism, are examples of rationalism. In the world of commerce, subprime mortgage securities seem like a colossal instance of a rationalistic “bright idea.”

Modern American history is littered with such “bright ideas” that were probably born of pretenderism: the New Deal, with its entitlements that we cannot pay for, the Great Society with the welfare dependency it created, the Vietnam War with its slaughter of the young without a defined purpose, the War on Drugs with its imprisonment of thousands of innocent people, and the Iraq War with its imaginary weapons of mass destruction. Trump’s tariffs also seem to be a similar “bright idea.”

We keep getting things wrong because of our national pretenderism. Our mistake is that we are trying to underwrite a vision of ourselves—usually a vision of ourselves as rescuers—instead of looking out at the world for solutions to our problems. Failures do not teach us the needed lessons about reality, because for the pretender, reality is not the point—confirming his image of himself is, and that means judging success by intentions rather than results.

This is one reason why arguing about politics rarely leads anywhere: The positions we take are often, perhaps usually, determined by the pseudo sense of life we adopt, not by facts and logic or by attempts to find fresh solutions to problems. Before you will be moved by arguments you must first choose to be moved by reality and not your fantasies. Pretenderist rationalism is a closed loop.

Just as reality in general is not quite real to the pretender, so other people are not. As a result, the pretender tends to have diminished empathy. He is not a sociopath, but his put-on sense of life blots out the reality of (at least some) other people. A few pretenders have a kind of artificial courtliness about them, but many tend to be glib and too easily to find others foolish and mock them. Pretenders can be jarringly and cruelly inappropriate in what they say—sometimes without fully knowing it, because they unselfconsciously view other people as mere material for entertainment or self-congratulation, instead of seeing the tangible reality of others’ joys and sorrows. Bill Maher epitomizes this attitude.

Pretenderism, especially in the form of national crusades, takes an enormous toll in blood and treasure. To name just one fairly recent example, the Iraq War seems to have been the product of George W. Bush’s pretenderist desire to be a cowboy along with neo-conservative rationalism about the possibility of democratic revolutions in the Arab world. It claimed about 4,500 American lives and over 100,000 Iraqi ones. It has also cost the American taxpayer perhaps as much as one trillion dollars.

Pretenderism has infected the highest reaches of business, politics and the media, and we all pay a daily price for it. Even setting aside the cost in lives and money, however, I would point to the spiritual harm that pretenderism causes all around us. It diminishes compassion, seriousness and wonder, except in the most canned and immature forms, as in the politically tendentious science fiction movie Avatar and its sequel, which tug at the heartstrings by portraying aliens as practicing the romanticized mysticism of American Indians while making yet another tired slap at big business.

Pretenderism is a major reason why young people are having trouble growing up: It sets the wrong expectations for life. Pretenderism gives rise to an all-too-common modern person, one who does not live in reality, is low on empathy, limits himself to a small collection of mental trinkets, and is as much trapped in his narrow worldview as religious fundamentalists are in theirs. Something has to be done about this problem.

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Ending the Pretense

It took me over 40 years to clearly identify pretenderism. Along the way I have encountered hundreds of victims and dozens of ways our culture encourages it, and I have fought it within myself. It is an addiction that needs to be combated in both the public and the private sphere, because it is an aspect of many, if not most of the problems of our time. I would estimate from my own limited experience that something like 20% of the American population are pretenders, disproportionately concentrated among young people and public figures.

But well over 20% of Americans embrace pretenderist art, especially music: Many contemporary categories of music, such as metal, rap and country, for example, are pretenderish to a very high degree. And it’s probable that a majority of Americans live in a fantasy when it comes to politics and economics, laboring under the delusion that we will never have to pay the bill.

To combat pretenderism in the public sphere it would be good to see thoughtful critics using the concept to comprehend politicians, movies, books, and each other. I don’t mean the usual sniping, but an introspective look at pseudo sense of life in the political or cultural community to which one belongs. In other words, I don’t want to see Commentator X calling Politician Y a Pretender. I want to see Commentator X showing how our system fosters pretenderism among politicians (including Y), among commentators (including X) and among the electorate, who bought tickets for the whole sorry circus. More name-calling would be unproductive, and I am not interested in handing a new club to the ignorant mercenaries who clash by night.

We need calm, reflective but morally firm voices of whatever ideological stripe to comment on events. George Will might serve as an example among pundits, whatever you think of his particular views. I know introspection is a lot to ask, but once the public recognizes that the latest political crusade or crazy art movement or degrading piece of music is born of pretenderism, it can withdraw its support for it. Likewise, the public can boycott or even picket the latest degrading movie. Getting just a small minority of the populace involved could make a big difference.

It would also be beneficial if there were more anti-pretender works of art being made. This could include movies about pretenders, such as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which was a wonderful story of how a boy adopts of false sense of life based on the media of his time and how it lands him in trouble. Another such film might be The Whale, about a morbidly obese teacher who struggles for authenticity. I would trade the entire Coen brothers oeuvre for either of these films. Whatever can be done about the problem on the public stage, real change will happen only on the level of the personal. Fundamentally, it comes down to having the right attitude.

The attitude I have in mind is a complex combination of pride and humility. For me, it was best captured in a 1937 best-selling self-help book by psychologist David Seabury entitled The Art of Selfishness, which I reviewed here. Seabury boils his counsel down to two basic principles: “Never compromise yourself” and “No ego satisfactions.” I think that as a society we’ve done a pretty good job over the past 50 years of implementing the first principle: the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation and reforms in the police, FBI and CIA during the 1970s generally have all been about not letting others walk all over us, which is what Seabury was concerned with. (We have started losing ground, however, in the post-9/11 security state, and I fear the second Trump presidency will be a disaster.)

The second principle is the one that helps ward off pretenderism. By “No ego satisfactions” Seabury means you should not be self-righteous, arrogant, self-pitying, a smart ass, or anything else that stokes your self-image at the expense of real effectiveness. As Seabury states, “No one who cares more for self-glory than for self-expansion is concerned with meeting life successfully.”

This second principle balances the first: Yes, you can be self-assertive, but you must never engage in posturing or using others to feel superior. This keeps your uncompromising attitude from becoming abusive. Needless to say, we haven’t done as good a job implementing this principle as the first one. Pretenderism is an ego satisfaction, because it puts getting a charge from one’s falsified sense of life above living earnestly in the world. Pretenderism takes us inside ourselves where we busily feed our feelings, instead of outside ourselves into open encounters with reality and other people. I would hypothesize that many pretenders are actually dualists who experience a split between the head they live in and the body whose genuine feelings they ignore.

Ego satisfaction was the aspect of pretenderism I perceived as smugness when I was a teenager. I have incorporated Seabury’s counsel against ego satisfactions into my own mind-set as a standing policy and it has been very effective. Whenever I feel that I am stoking my own attitude and not directing my attention enough at the world, I invoke Seabury’s principle and shift my orientation more toward reality. I am now mostly free of pretenderism, thanks in large part to it.

(I also use another principle to stave off pretenderism: Whenever I discover some unwholesome behavior in someone else, I always ask myself whether I do it too. Not only does this question often lead me to a valuable insight about myself, but it also serves to keep me humble, not in the bad sense of having low self-esteem, but in the good sense of helping me to avoid inflating my self-image.)

I’m not saying that Seabury’s advice is a substitute for a fully developed system of ethics, but I do believe that Seabury did manage to capture two broad ethical principles in a pithy and memorable form that one can use like proverbs to help guide one’s life. And no ethics can be effective without wise sayings to make it digestible. Think of the role Poor Richard’s Almanack played in disseminating the ideas of the American Enlightenment. Seabury’s book is about at the same level. It is what I would call proto-philosophical.

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Conclusion

We need a healthy alternative to pretenderism. That alternative is authenticity. Authenticity means not putting on a pseudo sense of life or a pseudo anything—it means acting from a physically, mentally and spiritually centered position and letting life in, in an earnest way. It means only adopting beliefs that make deep sense to you, and it means never “pasting on” a sense of life. The authentic person puts his respect for reality and other people ahead of any attempt to entertain himself.

I wish I could give lots of examples of authentic people you might know, but that would be difficult because politicians, entertainers and other public figures typically put on a performance as part of their jobs, and one often cannot say with certainty whether that performance is pretending or not. The last president whom I am reasonably sure was not a pretender was Gerald Ford. The best example I can come up with of a well-known authentic person is fictional: Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel and a film that tell of two siblings who start out as little pretenders but grow out of it during the course of the story. Atticus, their father, is the soul of good sense and responsibility. He loves his children without trying to dominate them as so many parents do. (To dominate a child is to use her to fulfill a fantasy.) Atticus clearly does not see the world as an aesthetic phenomenon, but as real. Especially since I cannot come up with a lot of famous real-life examples, I would like to sketch the authentic type in words. Maybe one of your teachers or a friend or your doctor or someone else you know fits the bill. Maybe you do.

The authentic person is reasonable, purposeful and compassionate. He is not hyped or bored. He is present and self-contained, as crisp as an autumn day. He takes responsibility for the things that go on in his head and does not project his feelings onto the world. He may or may not be tempestuously passionate, but his emotions and convictions run deep and true. He raises the Sanity Quotient in every room he enters. His sense of humor is playful and a little mischievous, never inappropriate or mean. Most of all, to the authentic person the world and other people exist in their own right and are not props for his fantasies.

It might be tempting to make a fetish of authenticity and to build a cult around it, with “Hip to be Square” as its anthem and Oprah as its favorite TV show. But authenticity isn’t something you can adopt directly: It’s a side effect of focusing on where you are and who you are. We will look at more advanced strategies for combating pretenderism in other essays but for most people a good beginning can be made by dropping the dramatics, being open to experience and exploring their environment in a heartfelt way.

No doubt most educated people would like to believe that they are open to experience and that they do explore their environment. But if that exploration gets no further than this week’s comic book movie or support for the latest unrealistic plan from Washington, then we still have a problem. The authentic person will be able to solve that problem by following and developing his natural inclinations, guided by reasoned principles. Building on what’s healthy from Shakespeare to the Beatles, he will seek and find better things in both high and popular culture, and in the political realm he will look for answers for troubles in their causes, rather than pasting a contrived solution over a problem as a pseudo sense of life is pasted over a genuine personality. He will be a happier and more elevated person and unlike the pretender, he will not be his own worst enemy.

I am convinced that for many people, reality is an undiscovered country, full of wonders. Green valleys and rugged mountains, cathedrals and skyscrapers, heroes and wise people are just waiting to be found and engaged. But to see them, to feel them, to let them lift us up, we must abandon the pretense that stands between us and reality. Fortunately, we all have the power to cast aside the sunglasses, to see the world for what it is—and to become who we are.

This essay is an excerpt from my book Killing Cool: Fantasy vs Reality in American Life, which explores the pretender in greater depth.