We all are attracted to beauty, and as much as specious clichés would suggest that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it isn't. I find it amusing that people like to imagine that beauty is subjective, that what most people consider beautiful isn't an objective fact. Like it truly varies from person to person what physical qualities that people consider beautiful.
I guess that explains why good looking people all look so different. That's why models aren't all young, tall, and thin with perfect skin, high cheekbones and nice breasts.
I can't think of any human responses more consistent across the board than a normal person's reactions to attractive people. Men are worse than women, or at least men behave as if we are intrinsically more shallow. I haven't once in my life seen a man treat a heavy girl and a hot girl as if they were equally interesting. I can't remember once seeing a man not snub a girl for one who was better looking or pass up an opportunity to trade up.
I have even noticed that in myself. I can usually find something to like about an attractive person. It's pathetic actually. I could be talking to an attractive girl who told me she likes to hunt asian men with a crossbow for sport and I would probably think "...hmm, so she likes the outdoors..."
You might also have noticed that if a person is attractive enough many people will overlook just about any glaring character flaws they may have. "Oh, so you think that God created AIDS to punish homosexuality? That's a slightly uninformed view. But you're so hot, I'm sure I can find a way to work around it."
There is clearly some instinctive reason for why people pursue beauty the way we do, probably simple biology like selecting a mate to produce offspring with the best possible chances themselves. But look at how people act it out on a daily basis. This civilization has a total preoccupation with the surface of things, almost to the exclusion of everything else. In fact, if there is some clear and obvious contradiction between the surface and what lies beneath we generally rely on what the surface tells us.
Where is all this going, I am sure you're now wondering. Here's where. If we all basically just go by what appearances tell us than we all run a pretty clear risk of being deceived. And I am beginning to think that maybe we are all being deceived. Not by some grand conspiracy but by our own lack of interest in looking deeper.
I will use work for an example. For the most part I appear normal, well adjusted, maybe even slightly charming to the people I work with. No one ever asks what I am thinking, which is good because what I am thinking is mentally rehearsing my next great campaign of orchestrated fraud and misdirection to disguise the fact that I am lazy and unprofessional. What I am actually hiding via my laziness is my discontent. Laziness is my zen way of dealing with my discontent about how the last 10 years of lost weekending and fucking around in school and at work actually has consequences which I am only beginning to fully realize now.
But to the untrained eye of my coworkers I am just another normal person. If this is what I am hiding, what are they all hiding? The face they put on, the act they put on that face is probably just as phony as mine. The Oscar goes to Trudy for her performance as a caring mother and loyal wife who absolutely does not have any unspoken wishes to abandon them all and start a new life as a cruise ship hostess.
The maintenance man at the building where I work has a secret but he's sloppy at hiding it. Whenever I rode in an elevator with him he used to just smell like cigarettes, but recently he has smelled like cigarettes and Jack Daniels. Maybe he has always been drunk and now he's just getting worse at hiding it, or maybe I just finally noticed. But if I ever see him fixing the elevator I'm taking the stairs.
That little story actually sort of contradicts what I was getting at before. Other than the drunk maintenance man, most people camouflage all kinds of things. They get a lot of help from the that fact that other people don't ever look too deep. All you need is to be a lifelike and believable version of a human being and people probably aren't going to ask a lot of questions.
I am not suggesting that I particularly want people to be transparent anyway. It would be retarded not to appreciate the fact that we need to have private thoughts. The calm happy faces people put on are their business and the typhoon inside their head is none of my business. I'm perfectly content to accept everything they want me to think about them at face value and I will decide if I think it is true, or as bogus as the movie of the same name starring Whoopie Goldberg and Gerard Depardieu. Bit what I am also saying is that what happens when you always only ever look at the surface of things isn't too great.
You may be familiar with the concept of decoys, things like christian punk for example. What I find humorous is that the christian punk producer level of sophistication in understanding why kids respond to punk music is entirely based on image and so the image is what they counterfeit. Sadly that works on more kids than it should, which is because kids are dumb. Faux punk christian bands have an image almost exactly like the actual punk bands they are trying to pass themselves off as and they have spread like polite and morally decent body snatchers and now somehow comprise a lot of what is mainstream counterculture music, if that makes any fucking sense. The punch line of it all is that for what they were worth(which wasn't really much), the punk ideas of rejecting authority and hating your parents were the reasons why punks dressed so crazy. Now that exact same image is being copied, twisted and sold back to this kids with their own ass attached. Hilarious. And more ironic is that the urge for rebellion that these kids feel, as most kids feel towards authority, is being used by the very authority the kids think they are rejecting to play right back into their hands. Sooner or later Mxpx is going to do an army recruitment commercial and the dark circle will be complete.
Now then, I personally have no problem with the army. And no real problems with christian punks, other than the fact they are all pretty sad excuses for rockers, no late nights drinking and nihilistic drug binge mayhem for those fellas. In bed by ten, they got a lot of non confrontational lyrics to sand any edges off of in the morning.
Ducks flying over ponds can't tell the difference between a wooden duck and one of their feathered friends and so they think the coast is clear, land in the pond and ... blammo! Brainwashed by a kid almost just like you, next thing you know you're doing your homework and going to church, how the hell did that happen? It could be for the best though if it keeps them from getting pregnant or breaking into my car again.
Another funny example of how looks can be deceiving are the live performances of hilarious lip syncing "artists" who are easy to recognize just for their groundbreaking work in the music world. You may have heard about Ashley Simpson lip syncing on Saturday Night Live, which was pretty funny. What is also funny is that anyone was actually surprised that she wasn't genuinely singing. Seriously, where did she come from? I don't think it was years of vocal training at Julliard. She is a cookie cutter teen pop star, of course she wouldn't sing. In fact I would be less surprised if a chupacabra stepped out of a UFO onto the stage and sang her songs, as artistically unique and not at all filler as those songs are, I might add.
A willful suspension of disbelief of the basic fact that looks can be deceiving is a pattern in our civilization. At some point I think we need to wonder where this will take us.