All Behavior Is Performative
We're all theater kids now; only some of us see the stage
If you asked the man on the street to define “authenticity,” he’d likely answer in a way men less on the street would propositionalize as a lack of conscious mediation, imitation, or recursive self-monitoring in one’s behavior.
This, in fairness, is a wholly serviceable formulation for socializing middle schoolers into not acting like slippery Byzantine eunuchs all the time.
Applied to any serious adult context, it collapses like an Orlando coed’s rectal cavity the instant you think about it for five seconds.
One time I was fighting with my girlfriend because I’d Promised to take her out for frozen yogurt that evening but couldn’t be roused from my catnap, and in the midst of this altercation—still half-asleep, mind—I pretty hatefully called her a Dumb Bitch.
In that moment she was interfacing with an uncut primordial moidversion of Walt without any plans, goals, pair bonds, abstract values, or complex sentiment—just a body imbibing stimuli and deciding shit ad hoc entirely through instinct that in this moment was experiencing her chiefly as an alarm clock. And so exactly like that body will pretty frequently refer to his phone as a faggot when it wakes him up, he called his baby a Dumb Bitch.
Now in subsequent months she actually came to appreciate MoidWalt for being significantly easier to manipulate than my rabbinical wakeful self, discovering that if she just brought me a cookie / placed her feet on my face I could ackshully be woken up fairly easily all considered. But in that moment it nearly led to the destruction of our relationship, until RabbiWalt emerged to explain how human agency exists on a graduated scale and is meaningfully impacted by bodily factors like exhaustion, inebriation, anxiety, hormonal fluctuations, and somatic threat signals.
Thankfully that made sense to her, and she accepted as obvious that Moidwalt is no more the “truest” version of me than the luteal phase foid who thinks Faggot at me whenever I get cut off in traffic is the realest variant of who she is—because like me Morticia ultimately understood that if we’re going to have a proper civilization where men aren’t constantly raping bitches and said bitches aren’t constantly getting flown out by celebrities we need to let peepo define their trve self in terms of goals, ideals, and desires downstream of long-term higher-order value propositions e.g. “this yappy froyo-powered alarm clock lets me annihilate her throat and ass whenever,” or “this weirdo faggot who can barely drive makes $400k a year,” as well as make tradeoffs that don’t totalistically privilege the animal moid/foidself without said tradeoffs getting narrated automatically as cope—though that’s a slightly different topic.
Point is that if we’re defining any sort of mentalistic or mediated decision-making as “inauthentic” now you aren’t going to find a lot of folks who cut the mustard outside of North Sentinel Island or that trailer park for child molesters, because success in any civilization and especially late modern industrial capitalism demands the constant subordination of bestial appetite to longtermist cold winters values.
Of course, by itself that’s kind of a midwit autist take; in practice some behaviors are obviously perceived and treated as a lot more “performative” than others, and any model that presumes to throw out the normie definition needs to explain why.
Consider for a moment the various factors that influence human behavior.
At the deepest level—which for peeps who aren’t retarded or afflicted with some acute mood disorder comes out only in extraordinary circumstances—it’s the animal self: just raw appetite and affect, which no serious person would say is your “true self.”
One level up from that you have the precognitive self, which is effectively you conscious but on autopilot. It’s the version that judges books by covers, its epistemics boiling down entirely to somatic assessments of status / threat / health / ingroup alignment and intuitive calibration toward one’s own long-term material / status interest—which of course generally ends up moralized in post-hoc normative language that makes it psychically easier and more socially admissible to pursue one’s own adaptive ends past relational friction. Thus neediness conjoined to facial asymmetry in a man cash out to “creepiness” for women, whereas expectations from a chick that a man follow through in various ways after sex will register to him as “craziness,” and a desirable woman who trades on male attention in ways that don’t privilege her peers’ dignity and comfort will read to other gals as a scabbish “pickme.” Meanwhile we experience the actions of friends and family and superhot people as distinct in kind from the same actions coming from an ugly hobo e.g. Lookin Good Susan—note this is the point some folx ackshully would start to insist that it’s your “true self,” though it would mostly all be prostitutes and Red Pill gurus and disillusioned affectless Zoomer boys.
A level up from that we have the relational self, which consists mostly in narratives that diachronically cohere one’s self-concept as high-status / desirable / trustworthy in a repeat-game social environment while also stabilizing crucial pair bonds, sanding off impediments to productive coalition, and mitigating the cognitive load induced by dehumanizing contextual adversaries with whom one’s usually cordial should it prove conducive to his own safety and prosperity—though, again, it’s more or less always unconsciously moralized / aestheticized post-hoc in ways that make accommodation, transaction, arbitrage, and specialization feel a lot more dignified / coo, which is what the aforementioned Zoomer boys call cope. It’s the modality where the housewife and girlboss each determine the other is deluded and miserable while the financebro and artist and mechanic all narrate the other two as unmanly and bihs see Tony Soprano as less fat than an identical Walmart worker and Wally B for his part develops a thing for Jewesses because they find his hyperverbal affect less Exhausting than shiksas. It’s why a lot of you still have the same religion as your parents and will never viscerally experience your dad as pathetic or mom as disgusting even when intellectually you know they are—and also why lot of guys develop perfectly sincere Wife Goggles (even today I see my first chickie as 22) while girlypops naturally suppress more synchronic animal-level icks given a strong pair bond buttressed externally by longstanding social alliance, institutional binding, or material provision, to the point that it will genuinely never occur to Rosemarie Fritzl to ask where all those babbies came from. Anyway I’d hazard this is where your average mildly cynical person lands defining the “true self.”
Above that we have the societal self, which involves everything from making sure your pants aren’t wrinkly before an important job interview to pretending Michelle Obama is attractive and teenage girls are not to talking about Erling Haaland to pronouncing it Keev to telling women with practiced nonchalance that you don’t know what those incels are talking about cause Tinder seems fine to you 😉—really any behavior that demands conscious mediation or affective mirroring. In the past and more parochial modern social contexts (high school, 2010s-era Millennial subcultures and modern-day Zoomer microcultures a la Chudstack, Nebraska) this modality is contiguous with the relational self since the market for muh values is illiquid enough for high-status actors to play Mansa Musa in Cairo and orient hundreds of nervous systems around the vicissitudes of their own amygdala at a deep and mostly unconscious relational level, such that people instinctively align with this cool girl / eceleb / kulak over that one based almost entirely on private factionalism, with “Reasons” as such serving mostly as pretext. But as you scale to more liquid markets (university, Boomer TV culture, Zoomer feedslop platforms like Insta / Twitter / TikTok) it becomes a lot more about signaling with-itness / earning good goy points by following trends and going alsong with established mores that represent canonical game theoretic resting points for nodes of human interchange like dating and the workplace that operatively require such norms to facilitate cooperation and disincentivize bad faith poolshitting abuse of the commons via repeat-game reputation markets (or in the case of the ZoomZoom feedslop platforms making fun of those who don’t defect so as to hasten equilibriation towards professional and erotic Hobbesianism becoming the only viable strategy, at least locally). At this level behavior itself has become almost entirely conscious while the teloi it serves remain sufficiently unconscious and widely understood as normal healthy shit to want that it’s generally only cranks and losers and guys who randomly hate your face who’ll call you performative for it—with the somewhat weighty caveat, of course, that some of us have quite a lot more facehaters than others, whether it’s by dint of physiognomy or genetic neurotype or divergent life experiences. Either way this is likely the level your modal streetman would define authenticity as if you asked him, not being the least bit familiar with the writings of Baudrillard and McLuhan or understanding he himself acts like a TV character half the time, let alone grokking the impact of a life spent under the digital panopticon and obligate participation in algorithmically mediated global status markets on the Zoomer psyche.
But anywho go up one more level still and we have the ideological self, which you can basically think of as the Bentham’s Bulldog dimension. Effectively this is the realm in which men and at times very autistic / high openness women mentalistically dispense with what’s somatically palpable and intuitive and socially ratified and instead ride the tiger of propositional coherence to whatever bullet buffets it takes them, even when it produces a threat signal, lowers their status, degrades their material position, or just causes social friction. In most cases it’s a function of being a gadfly neurotype with low agreeableness and high systemization propensity conjoined to diminished precognitive/relational/societal fields, which creates a situation where inconsistency with the foundational axioms of one’s conscious world model (and especially pressure to conform in that direction) become so physically intolerable that the sperg begins to orient major life decisions around his ideological mandates, which to the normalfags in his life seems every bit as insane as their refusal to do so registers as unprincipled and vaguely niggerish to him. Sometimes normies though also get swept up in this field during moments of broad civilizational crisis, whether that involves undercuts and tiki torches or pussyhats and blackrectangleshit. Either way it will usually get narrated by most normal people as out of touch and silly or deranged, if not exactly “performative” in a maliciously deceptive or overtly pathetic way.
Then above that level you have two separate and complementary registers I’d ackshully put on approximately the same tier.
First you have the recursive self, which involves the conscious interrogation of one’s own thoughts, motives, and behavior in a deeper, more complex, and higher-order way than you ever get with the societal or even ideological self, as at this altitude you’re dealing with a hugely complex interchange of appetite, long-term goals, relationships, coalitions, and propositionalized “beliefs” and “values.” And that could mean a lot of things: consulting a therapist or priest, seeking out impression management / Red Pill content or femininity coaches on YouTube, independently developing finer-grain heuristics for parsing human behavior—what matters is that you’re engaging in some kind of metacognition and proceeding from mentalistic frames that will always track some situations better than others and so make someone feel Unseen—or Too Seen, because observe also that this is the level of modeling prestige economies and power structures in a way that presumes to reallocate moral authority and epistemic standing from the default arrangement of the societal field where conformity to broadly legible archetypes is rewarded with instant dignity, whereas the recursive self by definition has to explain itself and so often reads to more somatic neurotypes as sussy ipso facto (which btw is responsible for like half of antisemitism). This in turn creates an unhappy ratchet effect wherein the more one’s recursive self explains shit the more slippery and kikey (or solipsistic and ouroboric, or histrionic and brattish…) it comes off as, leading eventually to dehumanizing accusations of being a dangerous narc who doesn’t have any ackshual interiority and doesn’t appear in mirrors etc. etc.
At more or less the same level you have the theatrical self, which boils down to largely authentic affect deliberately modulated or played up for effect in a bounded container experienced internally as preserving the sincerity of one’s underlying sentiment while instrumentally serving some orthogonal purpose in a way unmodulated affect would not—so think a consultant explaining some situation to the client in a manner that saves the face of everyone important, or a dude telling a story at a party in a way that isn’t really boring, or a homosexual uttering yaaas queen, or most instances of chicks faking an orgasm or men saying no hon you don’t look fat, or guys telling girlypoops they’re trying to fuck about they side hustle, or girlies saying that they’ve never done that before🥺, or actively reifying one’s bestie’s copestory, or most on-the-job speech acts of shrinks, realtors, trainers, sugar babies, Walt Disney World princesses, and the better sort of Chik-Fil-A workers. This register tends to be experienced as inauthentic by peepo with very low openness or neuroticism or just some deeper private interest in diminishing the theatrical person’s status / reputational standing, and tbf is pretty clearly “performative” in some sense—but also everyone who exhibits such behavior would register you as kind of a piece of shit for flattening it into *only that*, because they experience their theatricality as a fundamental part of who they are.
Then at last you have the deceptive self, which entails straightforwardly lying to peepo or fabricating affect in a way that’s experienced as wholly discontinuous with one’s sincere internal state and highkey mere meanses niggas—think seducing someone’s grandma as a Nigerian prince or garnishing your CV with a stint as treasurer of the Latino Student Union or promising that Seeking bih you’ll zelle her a few benjis if she sends you a clip of herself wiggling her toesies whilst belting out I’m A Little Teapot and balancing one of her heels on her head, or insisting to your best bud Skyler during recess that last night you figured out how to catch Mewthree, and so on. Obviously no one would call this register authentic, so we won’t give it much consideration.
What matters for our porpoises is that basically all accusations of “performativity” don’t involve calling out LinkedIn Pajeets and the like so much as neurotype bigotry fronting under a pigheaded banner of “authenticity.”
More specifically what’s happening is that peepo who by disposition or circumstance often inhabit their recursive self (autismos, Jews, anyone with a complicated past) or theatrical self (anyone high in neuroticism, gheyguise, most artists, anyone paid to interact with others in some personalized container) are being maligned as deceptive or pathetic by people who experience their own stolid neurotypes, legibly monotonic identities, and more general alignment with society’s central measures as themselves constitutive of moral righteousness—which, fine; essentially everyone does that on some level, and it would be equally mawkish to call such a person depraved for never interrogating an arrangement that plainly works to his benefit.
But those who don’t benefit from it are likewise under no obligation to honor it outside whatever extent seems instrumentally useful to one’s recursive self, and must never forget that even highly legible neurotypes are themselves performing constantly, if unconsciously, in response to wholly external relational and societal cues they think themselves morally superior for taking at face value like a woman—and which under a digital panopticon conjoined to global algorithmic status markets functionally makes everyone you interact with in nearly any context a reality tv character.
What it all boils down to is this:
On some level those inclined to experience your neurotype as Bad are just inexorably your foes on a deep bioschmittian level, and there isn’t much to be done about it save acknowledging them as such.
And if you feel most yourself acting in a manner that gets your dago mick ass called a sleazy kike by shape-rotating homestead acters who even today have a certain stench of Rhine on them, perhaps the only truly authentic move is to become a Kahanist.