Monday, September 24, 2018

Convenient Answers to Stupid Thoughts, II

"Standards of beauty are oppressive."

It goes without saying that the sort of people who constantly harp on this sort of thing are seldom themselves paragons of beauty. lolz feminists are fat and ugly is not a novel observation. It is curious, however, that Leftism, the philosophical parent of anti-beauty resentment, tends to make otherwise beautiful people ugly when it sinks its claws into them. Case in point, this young woman:
It never ceases to horrify me.

It is impossible to apply a concrete standard to an abstraction. Beauty, being a transcendental value, is by it's very nature abstract. We created works of beauty not as a final goal to judge ourselves by, but as an attestation to something greater than ourselves. Beauty is not a standard in the way neurotic females gripe about the models in advertisements or on the cover of lurid grocery store magazines. Beauty is a goal and a purpose simultaneously. The goal itself is unreachable because of entropy. In time all things fail. The great works of art will someday crumble to dust and ashes, and long before then your body will betray you, bowing you to the ground under the weight of your age and weakness, before you return to the earth from whence you came. The tapestry of the stars will one day fade away as their lonely lights go out one by one. But it is the ephemeral nature of the beauty that we behold and manifest that gives it value and wonder and splendor. Without entropy, beauty would be omnipresent, and therefore impossible for us to notice. Ubiquity is the scourge of value.

But because the goal is unreachable we are mistaken in believing that the journey is not worth the undertaking. It is not the goal that makes us better, it is through each step along this great undertaking that we gain, becoming more than we were the day before. To dwell in and strive towards beauty is valorous in the same way that a last stand is valorous, only stretched out over the collective lifetimes of everyone who came before you, and all who will come after you, who worked to keep that candle lit against the eternal power of entropy. To shake your fist in defiance against an unassailable enemy, knowing that you will lose none-the-less: that is glory. That is beautiful, for the same reason Oswald Spengler thought so highly of that Roman soldier who died at his post when Mt. Vesuvius buried Pompeii. I will be better, even though I will someday die. It is not in merely being attractive that we truly are beautiful, it is in dwelling in beauty and creating the beautiful that we stand on the shoulders of giants to perpetuate the manifestation of beauty in our universe, and therefore ourselves becoming Beautiful, the transcendental by proxy.

But we do not dwell in beauty any longer.

Instead we purposefully make of ourselves an ugly spectacle. Is it any wonder that the rise of solipsism in modern Westerners coincides with the disfigurement of our physical bodies? The tortured fashions and whims of modernity are a thin veneer covering the hollowed out shell of our collective soul. An emptiness that pervades, conquers and occupies everything, turning it into nothing. We flatter ourselves with our simplistic and ugly art, the thoughtless and haphazard creations of the lazy, envious, sullen and weak. In reality, we are nothing compared to what we once were. We have become entropy, and in time enough, we will become nothing in the worst sort of way.

And that is a tragedy.

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