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Can the Olympics Save the World?
Beauty standards have been narrowed by advertisers and media companies. Can the Olympics heal our broken eyes?
The Art of the Flower of Peerless Charm
There is something not quite right about the modern world, beyond all the injustice and suffering, the arms races and political power struggles. Something is missing.
We all feel it, to one extent or another, this nameless affliction, this absence. In many ways we have it better than 99.9% of human beings who have ever lived- most of whom didn’t live half as long as we will.
Yet, we feel unfulfilled, lost.
For all our modern conveniences and endless entertainment options we still feel narrowed, blinkered, and cloistered. We have a near-universal fear of missing out because we are missing out, on something we can’t even define.
What is missing is beauty. More specifically, a wider framework for the concept of beauty- beyond our navel-gazing preoccupation with human beauty. (Though that needs work, too.)
There is no shortage of beauty- it’s everywhere. We are drowning in an ocean of it. We are dying of thirst in a pure wellspring of fulfillment and joy. Why?
There is nothing wrong with our bodies, in their infinite variations on the same, brilliant human theme. Nothing wrong with the spectrum of human artistic expression. Nothing wrong with nature.
Something is wrong with our eyes. We need to retrain ourselves to really see beauty; to see through the veneers and social conditioning.
It isn’t our fault: A steady stream of homogenized beauty ideals has been drummed into our dear little ears and eyes since infancy. We are the first generations to grow up in near-universal thrall to advertisers.
These advertisers have grown in reach and influence over the past decades. Now they cover the entire industrialized world, and beyond. Advertisers aren’t a monolith, some of them are perfectly fine. But if they were, the sins of advertisers would fill a million Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Where do we begin? Even identifying the top ten worst offenders would be a serious undertaking. The tobacco companies would undoubtably make…
