God, I'm tired.
The idea of people is not more important than people. Just like philosophy is less than who makes it up in the world.
Aesthetics trick the mind into changing these truths. We want the minds of people to be as aesthetically subjectively pleasing to us as we find their external images. We forget, we idealize, and we make our image of someone's internal based on their external more important to us than their reality.
This is (partially) why all over America, people wear feathers and weave mats and hang flutes and dreamcatchers from their rearview mirrors, while on reservations people die of curable maladies. We internally homogenized* the indigenous Americans into an aesthetically pleasing archetype, both their external images and their cultures and philosophies, and then we assigned them to a box in history - dead - and moved on to ignore the living people. Because our dream of them is pretty and clean and glorious, as dreams always are, and the reality is, well, realistic.
And so we write songs about wolves and mustangs and warriors while children sicken and die.
In another hundred years, if given the chance, I'll bet western culture does the same thing to Muslims and to Arabs.
It's all quite fucked up.
*Because there's no such thing as a pale Native American, or a black Native American, or handicapped Native Americans, or physically unattractive Native Americans and they are all tall, partially clothed, athletically built, attractive, perfectly-skin-toned beautiful people with melodic voices and Spiritually Attuned Minds.
Seriously, the fuck is wrong with our culture that we have actually disappeared an entire continent of nations and cultures because we like the pretty dreams of them more.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth
Aesthetics trick the mind into changing these truths. We want the minds of people to be as aesthetically subjectively pleasing to us as we find their external images. We forget, we idealize, and we make our image of someone's internal based on their external more important to us than their reality.
This is (partially) why all over America, people wear feathers and weave mats and hang flutes and dreamcatchers from their rearview mirrors, while on reservations people die of curable maladies. We internally homogenized* the indigenous Americans into an aesthetically pleasing archetype, both their external images and their cultures and philosophies, and then we assigned them to a box in history - dead - and moved on to ignore the living people. Because our dream of them is pretty and clean and glorious, as dreams always are, and the reality is, well, realistic.
And so we write songs about wolves and mustangs and warriors while children sicken and die.
In another hundred years, if given the chance, I'll bet western culture does the same thing to Muslims and to Arabs.
It's all quite fucked up.
*Because there's no such thing as a pale Native American, or a black Native American, or handicapped Native Americans, or physically unattractive Native Americans and they are all tall, partially clothed, athletically built, attractive, perfectly-skin-toned beautiful people with melodic voices and Spiritually Attuned Minds.
Seriously, the fuck is wrong with our culture that we have actually disappeared an entire continent of nations and cultures because we like the pretty dreams of them more.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth