Beauty, again, again.

It has come to my attention that there was a grave mistake in that essay. Argument ad hominem should be argumentum ad hominem, I hope you can forgive me for this daft, foolish stupidity.

Anyways, continuing on the topic of the subjectivity of beauty, it has now been explained, how beauty depends on opinions and how opinions (world view) depends on outside influences, intentional or not. Therefore beauty is apparently influenced by personal and public manipulation.

This claim is very easily seen every day – the more people consider something beautiful and say it is so, the more people start to think the same way. If something’s beauty is stressed constantly, not calling it pretty becomes hard to resist. One could call it a kind of mass hypnosis. Sure, there are exceptions to the rule due to people being different, but those are minor deviations.

And it makes perfect sense from a Darwinian perspective as well, after all, we all look for the perfect mate to spend our lives with (this includes gay people, though Darwin and Co. might not see it this way). Perfection is different for each of us, but a lot of it is similar. Some say it does not exist in the real world, but I disagree. Perfection is what we make of it, we can influence our thoughts, self-hack our brains, if you will. And by making ourselves think differently, we pervert our own understanding of beauty.

 

It is us who define beauty by considering our needs, our wants and fears, our present world view and personality, and our understanding of logic.

 

So all I can say is that beauty depends on everything that has happened, happens, or will happen in the future, it depends on everyone we meet, see, and/or hear, it depends on our moods and emotions, it depends on our existence. As long as we have that, we can change beauty. As long as we have that, we have beauty. And it depends on everything that changes us in any shape or form.

And as we all know, we are what we were.