Authenticity & self-deception

In his invaluable book I Told Me So, Gregg Ten Elshof indicates that studies demonstrate that people over the age of 50 list competency as their most desirable trait in a leader, while college students list "authenticity." The difficulty, suggests Ten Elshof, is that when authenticity is the chief virtue, self-deception becomes the most egregious vice. But rather than eliminating self-deception, that ordering actually breeds it. As he argues, the cultural recognition and ascension of racism as a sin made it harder to admit to ourselves that we are racists. Similarly, when inauthenticity becomes the chief sin, it becomes that much harder to see it in ourselves.

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