Authenticity Hoax Quotes

The object of their desire, the “essential” core of life, is something called authenticity, and finding the authentic has become the foremost spiritual quest of our time. It is a quest fraught with difficulty, as it takes place at the intersection of some of our culture’s most controversial issues, including environmentalism and the market economy, personal identity and the consumer culture, and artistic expression and the meaning of life.

The story borrows from the real-life discovery of the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark at Mar Saba in Israel by the renowned American scholar Dr. Morton Smith in 1958. It was a find that sparked a furious debate in the popular press and among scholars over the manuscript’s authenticity, with some suggesting Smith was the perpetrator of one of history’s most brilliantly executed hoaxes. That debate continues today. Since Smith’s death in 1991, the speculation has only increased.

We were possessed by that hoax that history has produced, and because of it we have lost sight of what is means to be truly, authentically human

I’m not a conspiracy theory kind of guy, but when city officials close down on you, when Princeton University won’t provide any answers, and when the media says what you’ve got is all a hoax, then where am I? So here is the true story of the Peter Armstrong Papers. You think you know all about them. Such eminent publications as The New York Times and The New Yorker have already said they were a forgery. (The New Yorker went so far as to say that I created a hoax to scare an already virus-nervous public.) Experts I hired examined the papers and verified that they are authentic documents from the period, and that some elements of the stories were undeniably true. Newsweek examined the documents with an open mind and a battery of forensic experts and historians of the era, but would not go as far to say that they described actual events. The women on The View had a rare moment of agreement when they said I was “a menace.” Rolling Stone, ever classy, said I was “full of shit.

Conrad spent six months working for a cargo company in the EIC in 1890, three weeks of it aboard a steamship traveling up river to today’s Kisangani. There is no mention of rubber in the novel because Conrad was there five years before rubber cultivation began. Kurtz is an ivory trader. So whatever sources Conrad was using when he began work on Heart of Darkness in 1898, his personal experiences would at most have added some color and context. Hochschild will have none of it, insisting that Conrad “saw the beginnings of the frenzy of plunder and death” which he then “recorded” in Heart of Darkness. The brutalities by whites in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now were inspired by the novel, Hochschild avers, because Conrad “had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.” In another example of creative chronology, Hochschild cites a quotation that he believes was the inspiration for Kurtz’s famous scrawl, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The quotation was made public for the first time during a Belgian legislative debate in 1906. Whatever its authenticity, it could not be a source for a book published in 1902.

The sharpest version of the argument that the Internet is bad for democracy comes from Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago. In recent years, Sunstein has been fussing about the rise of what he calls the “Daily Me,” the way the Internet permits highly personalized and customized information feeds that guarantee that you will be confronted only with topics that interest you; they screen out those that may bore, anger, or annoy you. As Sunstein sees it, the Daily Me harms democracy because of a phenomenon called group polarization: when like-minded people find themselves speaking only with one another, they get into a cycle of ideological reinforcement where they end up endorsing positions far more extreme than the ones they started with.

The Kensington Rune Stone is either a late nineteenth century hoax, or it’s not. If it’s not a hoax, it must be genuine. Since it is dated to 1362 A.D., the language, runes, grammar, dialect, and weathering of the inscription must be consistent with the fourteenth century and, therefore, authentic. The evidence presented in our book demonstrated that this is true.