Perfection And Vanity
The Amateur Philosopher

 

Life in the 21st Century. Day after day the senses are assaulted by a truly insurmountable flood of advertisements and images of perceived physical perfection. Bright shiny teeth on skinny, pale women glitter on every second page of magazines and in the windows of many a store. One can hardly walk the streets of any city these days without seeing girls crowding around the latest selections of flip-flops and Capri-style pants. As suicide rate increase among society�s �imperfect� teenagers and even adults, one cannot but wonder why these people, whose spirits are so similar to those of the outcasts many despise for resisting the temptations of clothing and the mindless pursuit of perfection, crave these things and make them into the centers of their world.
To analyze this problem, we have to look at maybe the greatest of modern social influences, the mass media. Day after day, hour after hour, modern people are subjected to multimedia programming which glorifies the external beauty of certain people, causing others to crave the same perfection. Unfortunately, most of our fellow homo sapiens do not posses the same physical traits as these showcased in the modern media jungle, but rather have to make do with what they have, lacking the funding required for a change of outer appearance, maybe the greatest desperation move of all time, which is supposed to improve their self-confidence and allow them to live a �normal� life.
Normality, as dictated by television and written press these days, consists of a life of external beauty, in which all people are harmonious or can be changed by simple words and acts of kindness or sheer will. Furthermore, to live the normal life, one requires a nice car, preferably made by either the Italian or American industry, a quiet home in the outskirts of a sunny mid-sized city, a dog, preferably brown, and a wonderful same race relationship.
Happiness in its basic psychological and philosophical way can only be attained through the possession of the aforementioned things and a great amount of cash which can then be used to purchase further luxuries, like every normal person�s obligatory yearly luxury cruise in the Caribean. As life goes on, the average person�s income can then be used to purchase an expensive car and apartment somewhere on the islands or in one of the standard retirement locations. Such is the nature of the normal life of a person in the 20th Century, who, with a normal income of about $50,000 standard, if at all, has all the financial freedom necessary to purchase luxuries to distract him from the basic emptiness of his or her commercial life. If not, one can always use an easily obtainable loan to acquire equipment which one truly does not need for anything, but which aids the economy nonetheless, and is thus found to be incredibly useful and vitally important for the survival of the individual.
Thus, as humans trudge through their everyday �happy� lives, they still see the problems facing those that are not quite as fortunate as themselves. They fawn and sometimes cry for the poor souls in the Third world, then pay a small sum of money a day to help feed and shelter them, a process which reminds one of those happy times at the zoo, where a similar procedure takes place day after day.
This random act of kindness and fraternity, perceived by the social watchdogs of Church and State as a great contribution to the unification of the world, truly does not mean much when the same watchdogs turn on the poor they are supposed to aid, taking their money away to help with administrative costs and wages for their employees. Unity in the modern world is not an acts achieved by the kindness of the few who give to the many and never receive anything but a standardized picture and a random name drawn from among the many hungry souls who starve every day, waiting for money to arrive from their saviors, only to find that the local magistrate, in his action as distributor of kind gifts from the European and American middle class, has used what remained of the daily 24 cents to purchase alcohol and women for the amusement of his men.
If unity among all is ever to be achieved, and happiness should ever be the ruling power in the world of men, the people and governments have to change in their outlook on the world. They have to see that the image of perfection is not one which should be shown to the masses, similar to the image of utter chaos. The lies which society spreads among the souls of many should seize to exist and an image of the average human being should replace those shiny gems of human existence which are treated as Gods by a society devoid of any cares for the ancient laws presented to them in their most hallowed scripture of all. It says there, plain and simple, that there should only be one God, and no images should be created and worshipped. Why then does the modern man create and worship men and women who, with all their talents, could hardly be called prophets or even Gods, given their many shortcomings and the overall detrimental effect their fame has on people?
Perfection is, in truth, in the eye of the beholder. While people in the first World, especially America, acknowledge the vanity and external beauty of the skinny, tall, and blond, people in the Third World see people of wider girth and higher intelligence as perfect. Through an image of perfection we create a rift between those who favor the idols and those who seek to live their lives in their own way. We have thus created outsiders, a sub-group under the common �normal� man. These beings, perceived to be crazy and outlandish by their peers, seek to act and behave opposite of the status quo in everything day do. They dress darker and differently, change their hair in ways which the common person finds truly odd, and listen to music found to be loud or annoying by the common crowd. To the dismay of many, even these people, though they may not know it, form their own image of perfection, causing them to be truly no different from the main group.
As the two sides meet, friction is created between the two sides, resulting in minor verbal or physical confrontations over such pointless things as music or clothing. Humanity has thus found a way to take the primordial conflicts between tribes and continue them in a modern fashion. Territory and loot is replaced by clothing and social classes while the weapons remain the same.
The most perplexing aspect of this entire mess we call life is the complete lack of acceptance for intelligence. Classical virtues like honor, wisdom, and temperance are frowned upon as people ignore the intelligent for the sake of those who may look more like the current image of perfection, thus causing bitterness and desperation among those whose minds could reshape the world, should they remain uncorrupted by other social forces. This despair leads to a number of changes, as the intelligent either change and adapt to the standards of those who are in the ignorant majority, casting of their intelligence and abandoning their studies to �fit in�, in the process allowing their minds to go to waste, or isolate themselves, becoming distant and arrogant, resulting in an increase in the mutual dislike, as the socially minded normal people, partially driven by jealousy, find the behavior of the �elite� to be anti-social, as they tend not to give to the poor or care much about the problems faced by those fellow human beings who did their best to isolate them in the past.
Of course, either way is undesirable, as the minds of the academics can be just as useful as the brawn of the common man in achieving the shared goal of a better tomorrow for all. Through the isolation of one group for their particular faults, a rift between the classes is created which causes them to seize any form of useful cooperation which could be employed to further change and prosperity, and perhaps even bring unity to a divided race of beings called the human race. Again, the image of perfection plays a part in this problem.
Stereotypes also add to the destructive mixture which has spoiled the modern earth. Again, the media is to blame for this problem, as it presented average humans of all classes and ranges of intellect with a series of pre-fabricated imagery usually depicting certain ethnic, religious, or minority groups in ways which lead others to despise or ridicule them. This ridicule and hated then allows groups to form which only intend to �purify� their sphere of influence from such despicable creatures. Humans thus create further violence and an even greater waste of resources which could be spend on the creation and unification of our world, and the advancement to the logical next step in human history, the conquest of further worlds.
Instead, governments have to spend billions each year on protection, not only from one another, but now also from within, as the disgruntled and the ignored rise up to protest their treatment and stand against those who have wronged them, smashing up the creations of previous generations in the process. These men and women, often poor and jealous of the life of the �perfect� human, form their own movements to combat those created by the masses who keep them down. This resistance, expressed through riots or speakers, is then perceived as something terrible, something unnatural which should not occur among humans, even though it has always been the way an oppressed people has shown its distaste for the �superior� class.
If prosperity and true advancement for the human race should ever be possible, it is necessary for all of the aforementioned groups to come together and form a bond which would allow humanity as a species to benefit from all the physical and mental abilities given to them by nature. The first step on the long road to unity and cooperation would be the abolition of perfection as a state of beauty, as it can never be obtained, and only serves to separate what should be united.

 

 

Copyright © 2001 The Amateur Philosopher
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