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I believe you misstep in lumping aesthetic beauty with narcissism. The narcissism you speak of refers to aspects of most everyone, such as vanity or pride, that have swelled to debilitating proportions - the crux of this being that it's either unwarranted or ubiquitous to the point of arrogance. Aesthetic beauty, however, is (obviously) relatively subjective, but still there exists some very simple, generalised truths; the modern notion of beauty is often or expressly not a call-back to the classical idealism of reproductive beauty, yes. This is art at its most basic (perhaps even primitive) level. Beauty is also (often) adherence to an already established archetype, even moreso these days where people are constantly bombarded with images of consumer idealism and the sort of ultimatum that personal shame has become.
Jingles was certainly right when he said that beauty can largely be reduced to the idealism of youth and fertility, but further, I believe there is a sort of hysteria out there in fashion that has only been catalyzed by mass communications. People have always been galvanized by an array of social threats into their "tribes" so to speak - whether these boundaries really exist in some way likely lies between slippery and improbable, but what does matter are people's perceptions of these sub-groups, and I'd say that the attainability of financial/reproductive status amongst your particular niche can be effectively reduced to something like attraction and 'beauty'. It's easy to see how a consensus on what's beautiful and what's not can get lost in the ether of avant-garde and conservativism, but if you are critiquing this dynamic, I urge you to consider the utility of pride and vanity.
As inherently social beings, heirarchy likely comes to us (literally) as naturally as violence. There is absolutely no reason to believe this will ever change. Pride, I would say, is the result of an effective self-image. It's vanity and "beauty" and egoism at its height, but more interesting still, is that pride can be an utter fabrication. In fact, at its most noticeable, pride is an achilles heel to the viciously humble constituents of faith, and, ironically enough, a Gift from God in the hands of any determined animal of our species seeking to deceive his or her way into the sexual imperative. Ambition is the fruit of the tree of pride, and perhaps it is a double-edged sword, but ambition is what leads men and women into becoming far more than the baseness of chittering apes clinging to the comforts of illusory permanence. The bitter part of this dynamic is that once something becomes of use, it ceases to be beautiful.
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There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Last edited by Halcyon+On+On on Aug-26-2009 at 16:13
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