The Cosmetic Class
24th July 2018
What happens when a society with a penchant for the cosmetic meets a medium dominated by it?
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The irony here should be apparent: we were not so much being fed means to become creative or passionate as we were being shown ways to signal that we were either one?—?or better, both. It didn’t appear to matter whether or not we’d ever truly experienced what it was to feel the rush that accompanies creativity, or the bliss that is the complete lack of need for approval when immersed in the throes of passion. All that mattered was that cosmetically, it looked like we had. It was, in many ways, sickening; for years, we existed full of nothing but shortcuts to anything worthwhile; everything with an agenda, and never your own. It was also simply economics; in a society as massive and complex as ours has become, institutions that rely on vetting out the best talent ?—? colleges, companies, banks ?—? use signals of reality, as opposed to reality itself, to determine who makes the cut.
Hence the phenomenon of Virtue Signaling.