Shamelessly authentic
Somewhere in the 20th century we replaced sincerity with authenticity, but neither seems to help with those moral blind spots, writes Aspasia Karras
‘The missing-in-action qualification is also almost definitely not from the London School of Economics, which Dr Leoka claimed to be the source of her much-touted prefix. The institution in question denies any knowledge of this particular punter’
Idon’t know if you’ve read about the highflying economist Dr Thabi Leoka, who’s been sitting on various boards, presidential councils and department of finance panels, influencing key decisions that affect South Africans in their pockets, ie, where it hurts. It transpires Dr Leoka’s PHD may or may not be an actual thing, as in non-existent.
The missing-in-action qualification is also almost definitely not from the London School of Economics, which Dr Leoka claimed to be the source of her much-touted prefix. The institution in question denies any knowledge of this particular punter. The president’s office says it doesn’t check this sort of thing — they just take it on a trust basis that people are qualified in the manner (and to the degree) that they say they are.
The government doesn’t pay these influential advisers. They sit on these boards out of the goodness of their civically-minded hearts. I sincerely hope Dr Leoka clears this up and proves her credentials. Apparently she’s in New York and has lost vision in one of her eyes so can’t see clearly enough to locate the missing qualifications.
Dr Leoka’s blind spot reminded me of the current situation in the influencer economy. Take, for example, the high-flying Italian influencer Chiara Ferragni, aka The Blonde Salad. Until last week she had almost 30million Instagram followers who tracked every moment of her sincerely authentic life, and a lucrative global brand. She had contracts with numerous businesses including Coca-Cola.
She lost both Coke and followers by the hundreds of thousands this week after it emerged that despite being in possession of an actual law degree from an accredited institution, she hadn’t retained the lessons she may or may not have learnt there. She’s been fined by Italy’s antitrust authority to the tune of one million euros (chump change in Ferragni’s empire) because she misrepresented where the money from a Christmas cake she endorsed would be going. Not, it transpires, to the sick children of Regina Margherita Children’s Hospital in Turin for whom the public had paid almost triple the usual price of such Christmas cakes, because the manufacturer of the cake had already paid a fixed sum of €50,000 to the hospital. Everything they made on the cake went to the Blonde Salad’s coffers, and to the manufacturer of the cake, whose sales dramatically increased due to Ferragni’s influence. It is not the only charity finagle The Blonde has effected, which is why she’s also being investigated by state prosecutors for aggravated fraud and has been called out by none other than the president of Italy, Georgia Meloni.
I sincerely hope Ferragni clears all this up because she only got involved with these charities out of the goodness of her heart and because she is civically minded. I hope she proves her credentials, I really do, because she has sincerely apologised in a really low-key grey sweater and almost no makeup and said that she, too, couldn’t read the fine print and got things a little mixed up. Sadly, Safilo, the eye-wear company, has also just pulled its business from her, which really won’t help with the old blind spot.
The influencer economy is always in a state of flux. Who influences whom is dependent on who you trust. Take Donald Trump. Half of the US populace believes the last election was stolen from him. The other half believes he tried to steal it. It’s the kind of mind-bending reality disconnect that boondoggles the casual observer. How to explain that one nation can have such diverse experiences of “truthiness’? The Donald is undeterred. This sort of thing has never held him back. I fully expect him to overcome all legal challenges to his own version of events so he can become influencer-in-chief again. In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling wrote: “Now and then it’s possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself.” He could have been riffing on the influencer economy despite the fact that he was writing in the 1970s. He argues that there is a subtle but critical difference between the ideals of sincerity and authenticity. Somewhere in the 20th century we replaced sincerity, which he loosely defines as an old-school ideal of being a morally sincere person, with authenticity, which is the different ideal of staying true to oneself. “Sincerity is the absence of dissimulation or feigning or pretence” which can, truth be told, lead to a sincere insincerity. But authenticity can equally be shamelessly sincere. And Dr Leoka, Ferragni and Trump are, if nothing else, sincerely true to themselves. They are authentic.