On Sincerity
This is a piece about sincerity, not authenticity. It’s about Confucian Xin, not Sartre. If we think about sincerity rather than authenticity, we are able to see some things that are helpful.
In a society where there is a moral consensus, those who are sincerely committed to the consensus inspire a real, concrete following. Exhibiting moral virtues has political effects, and it becomes possible to argue that someone should be followed on the basis of ethos, on the basis of how that person lives. A person who is sincerely committed to the moral values that are widely affirmed is someone who will be widely regarded as leadership material. Provided such a person is sufficiently competent, they will go far.
When there is social fragmentation, there is proliferation of moralities. It becomes impossible to establish a consensus on which moral principles are important or how moral principles ought to be understood. This disagreement operates not merely at the level of argument, it is baked into the structure of the society. It is consequently intractable—it is not responsive to social techniques for its resolution. So, when people give each other arguments and try to persuade one another to adopt different moral principles or to understand moral principles in different ways, these attempts at persuasion are unsuccessful. No one agrees on who is admirable, so ethos no longer persuades.
As ethos declines, there is a renewed focus on logos and pathos. But as the disagreement spreads deeper into the social fabric, it attacks epistemology and aesthetics. No one agrees on what counts as a reasonable argument, and no one agrees on what is disgusting and what is attractive. There comes to be a widespread sense that the whole field of rhetoric is in crisis.
When this happens, there is, for a time, a renewed focus on sincerity. If we cannot agree on moral principles or on epistemology and aesthetics, perhaps we can at least demand sincerity from one another. At the very least, when we speak to each other, we should speak in terms of what we really believe. Since we have no chance of persuading one another, we start to focus on whether people really believe what they purport to believe—are they hypocrites?1
In this way, sincerity appears at two different stages in the process of fragmentation:
Initially, the sincere person is committed to principles that are widely affirmed, and this commitment has obvious real benefits for that person (as it attracts a committed following).
Subsequently, the sincere person is not a hypocrite, and so is at least regarded as a good faith discussant.
The trouble is that once the discussion does not produce a consensus, it is not clear that it confers any real benefit on a person to be regarded as a good faith discussant. After all, the discussion doesn’t go anywhere or have any real effects on the social structure, which has fragmented for reasons that the devices of rhetoric cannot reach. So, why shouldn’t the discussion be entertaining or profitable?
Once the purpose of the discussion is entertainment or profit, sincerity is an active impediment to success. The sincere person might be regarded as good faith, but nobody is going to watch, because the sincere person will not change what they discuss on the basis of what viewers find entertaining or profitable.
So, this gives us a third image of efficacy:
The entertaining ironic clown, who has a lot of followers on the internet, but cannot motivate any of these people to do anything that requires a major sacrifice on their part.
The ironic clown receives a superficial kind of recognition and perhaps does well financially, but they are not even regarded as a good faith actor, let alone as a leader who ought to be followed.
Most of the people who are called “influencers” are not leaders or good faith actors, they are ironic clowns. But this is not to accuse them of hypocrisy. You see, there are two types of sincere ironists:
The person who is sincerely committed to ironism, who is genuinely committed to being an entertainer.
The person who lacks self-awareness, who has lapsed into ironism without meaning to do so. This person is objectively an ironist but remains sincere at the level of subjectivity.
This means there are two types of ironic clown—the ironic clown who is genuinely committed to being a clown, and the ironic clown who has lapsed into being an ironic clown.
In the 2010s, there was, I think, a Millennial fixation on sincerity. The Millennial left believed that it was possible to create an moral consensus on the basis of which it would then make a political intervention. So, for the Millennials, it was possible to become a leader through one’s participation on the internet. It was only after Bernie Sanders was repeatedly defeated that it became clear to many Millennials that this is not possible, that the internet cannot produce leaders given the current level of social fragmentation.
Near the end of this period, there was a brief moment in which Millennials used the term “grifting” in a morally charged way. The “grifter” becomes a genuinely committed ironic clown, but attempts to conceal this change from the viewers, who are invited to follow the grifter. This obsession with grifting came from our generation’s inability to recognize that people become ironic clowns not as a means of leading but because they recognize on some level that there is no opportunity to lead. We do not have to worry that people will follow ironic clowns. Ironic clowns are a symptom of a crisis of rhetoric, they emerge when leadership has become impossible.
Once leadership is off the table, why bother with the sincerity? Millennials did not want to admit that leadership was off the table. But if you’re just a good faith actor, your following declines, and you run out of money. To maintain the illusion that leadership is possible, it is necessary to become an ironic clown who lacks self-awareness. This is the fate of Millennials who continue to try to have followings after the failure of the 2010s. They think their followers regard them as leaders, when really, their followers enjoy their content.
So, we have two kinds of Millennials now:
Good faith Millennials, with diminished followings, most of whom cannot make a living by writing and talking about politics, because no one really cares anymore about the moral principles to which Millennials are sincerely committed.
Ironic clown Millennials, most of whom are not self-aware, who still believe that they are leading people they are actually entertaining.
Gen-X, which never received even the chimera of an opportunity to lead, never became absorbed with sincerity in this way. Instead, Gen-X was, from an early point, committed to ironism. The same goes for the Zoomers—during the pandemic, they were trapped inside their homes, unable even to demand an opportunity to have ordinary teenage social experiences. It is obvious to them that they cannot shape social mores, that they are subject to a confusing mix of conflicting moral evaluations. So, for them, there has never been a real alternative to ironism. Most Xers and Zoomers are trying to be entertainers. They hope for fame and wealth, not for a fundamental social or political transformation. They are self-aware, genuinely committed ironic clowns.2
So, what do you do if you actually want to contribute to meaningful social and political change? You can’t be an ironic clown, but good faith discussants don’t seem to accomplish anything, either.
In my work, I have tried to advance the view that political and social change must occur in a manner that is immanent to the social fragmentation that has, in fact, occurred. The “vulture socialist” is meant to watch the fragmentation from a perch, to try to grasp its dynamic without intervening until the dynamic is understood in such a way that an effective intervention appears plausible. But how is the perch to be sustained? Traditionally, my answer is the four P’s—parents, partners, patrons, and professional institutions.
But here’s the problem. Often, the four P’s want you to entertain them, or they want you to obtain certain worldly goods that you can only obtain in our form of society by entertaining somebody else.
Suppose a vulture is on a perch, looking at the trouble down below, when all of the sudden, there is loud shrieking and the perch starts to rock back and forth. The vulture looks down, and there are a bunch of little babies, crying out for the vulture’s attention. If the vulture appeases the babies by giving them attention and making silly vulture faces at them, the babies will stop crying. But if the vulture looks away, they will once again begin to shriek and shake the perch.
What do you do about that?
In other forms of society, there would be a way to satisfy the babies without being an entertainer. But our society’s focus on entertainment itself stems from the fracturing process that the vulture is attempting to study. If theory birds could lead, then they would be expected to do so. It is only because theory birds cannot lead that they are expected to put on a show. And they can’t lead because there is too much fracturing for any of them to inspire more than a narrow handful of people.
You see, if the moral principles are the muses, and the theorists who are inspired by the principles become exemplars, then the people who are inspired by the exemplars can deliver social and political change. But if no one agrees about what constitutes a muse, then no one agrees on who constitutes an exemplar, and there is no concentration of energy. No one agrees which birds are beautiful. And why should disgusting birds get perches? There are only so many perches to go around, after all. So, in many cases, the perches become conditional on a willingness to entertain. Once that happens, do they remain perches in the relevant sense?
Charitably, we might say that they remain limited instantiations. But this may be a way of avoiding the issue, of engaging in precisely the sort of self-deception that mars many Millennial projects. More rigorously, this grave threat to the quality of intellectual output must be recognized, and prudent steps must be taken to protect against it.
This was observed and discussed at some length by Judith Shklar in Ordinary Vices.
These are ideal types—there are some Millennial ironic clowns who are self-aware, and there are some Xers and Zoomers who lack self-awareness or are good faith actors.