It’s no mystery why a world that rejects the nameless virtue would reject heroes. At first glance, its no mystery why that same world would embrace celebrities.

There is a hero-shaped hole in the human heart. That hole can’t be filled with actual heroes, because acknowledging someone as a hero requires acknowledging a standard that they have excelled at, which we personally haven’t. The hole gets partly filled with victims, who aren’t any different from the rest of us except something bad happened to them. But celebrities fill most of it. The platonic ideal of a celebrity is someone who is famous for being famous. They don’t conflict with the cult of authenticity or with self-esteem because their basis for fame is how they make us feel. They are “part of our lives.” That’s why the arc of the celebrity universe bends towards the first name basis. Brad and Angelina. If I say I’m a big fan of George, do you think I meant Clooney or Washington? I rest my case. Being “part of our lives” is also why celebrity gossip is such a thing. A stint in drug rehab is no career killer. It’s gossip fodder, its relatable, it humanizes. It paves the way for the Exclusive Candid Interview where the star Bares All and Shares His or Her Struggles. Non-celebrities get sucked into the celebrity mode too, which is why we now ask presidential candidates what kind of underwear they favor.

But here’s the puzzle. Celebrity is all pretense. Actors and musicians are consciously putting on a show. They are performing. That’s true off-stage, where the real person and the real talent is deeply concealed under layers of strategized publicity. “Being part of our lives” is an illusion. But it is necessarily, inherently, by definition true of the actual performance. In other words, celebrity is deeply inauthentic. That’s the puzzle. It’s the cult of authenticity that requires dethroning heroes. Why then would the cult of authenticity throw up big fakes as substitutes?

The same is true of athletes, who are the other major category of celebrity. Even when they aren’t consciously performing for the crowd, they are playing by a completely artificial set of rules. They are playing games. It is mock combat, or a formalized ritual of competition. There is nothing “authentic” about sports at all. But sports is where are heroes come from in this age of authenticity.

Even more puzzling, celebrity has moved more and more in the direction of greater faking. Acting is less mannered than it used to be. Method acting is probably the metaphysical summit of pretense; it’s a pretense where nothing is held back from the pretending. Musicians have to pretend to be primal and gritty. Media go to great length to act objective. The florid rhetoric and prose of yesteryear has gone. In its place is a highly-produced and focus group simple, folksy patter that layers the pretense that we are not pretending on top of the basic pretense.

Here’s another inauthenticity. What celebrities excel at is money, fame, good looks, and good muscles. Precisely the things that our society today considers to be superficial.   Those things are trappings. “I feel like you appreciate me for who I really am—a rich guy who is totes good looking” is a line from no romance novel ever. Fame, wealth, and looks aren’t part of the “real me,” and are therefore inauthentic.

The cult of authenticity requires that we not celebrate any meaningful public standards that we don’t ourselves adhere to. So, instead, we all end up celebrating inauthentic standards like wealth and cosmetic appearance. The cult of authenticity exalts our feelings—so it ends up exalting performances, though they are inauthentic by definition, because performances are what makes us feel. The cult of authenticity insists on realism and the primacy of our personal life—so as a society we expend enormous amounts of effort sustaining the illusion that celebrities are part of our lives and their performances are real.  The authentic world is littered with fakes.

I hear the Savior saying “He who insists on authenticity shall lose it. And he who abandons authenticity shall find it.”