Identity

To say that people are shaped based on past experience is the classic argument of nature versus nurture. It's undeniable that the everyday events to which we are subjected are essential in crafting a complete view of the wold around us, but the major events in a person's life cause a much more drastic shift in perspective. Witnessing the death of a friend or loved one is almost certain to cause a more substantial shift in personal identity than a general dissatisfaction with choice of employment, much the same way as a "best day ever" will work in the opposite way. Extreme negative events will cause someone to lean more to the side of pessimism and self-deprecation, and an extreme positive event will change a person's image towards optimism and self-respect. Personal history serves as the primary factor in one's placement on a spectrum of good-badmannerisms and self image.

A single event has the potential to change a person's outlook on life entirely. In City of God, Knockout Ned is one of the few reasonable people living in Cidade de Deus. He advocates hard work in the hopes of a payoff and shuns the gangster lifestyle that is so prevalent in the city, but is unable to maintain it. When his girlfriend is raped, two of his family members killed by Lil' Ze, and his house destroyed, he abandons his previous mentality entirely and becomes the head of his own revenge gang. He forgets his stance on killing and replaces it with Carrot's exception rule that it's justified to kill someone who is trying to kill you. This leads to killing anyone associated with Ze, hiring children as soldiers, and protecting the local drug trade. Ned's first encounter with Ze was so life-shattering that he was willing to turn the city into a war zone and used any means possible to enact his revenge, until, as Rocket says, "The City of God was divided. You couldn't go from one section to the other, not even to visit a relative. The cops considered anyone living in the slum a hoodlum. People got used to living in Vietnam, and more and more volunteers signed up to die." (City of God, 2002)

Only a severe shock has the power to completely reverse someone's alignment. We allow ourselves to get into a comfort zone with things that are familiar and non-threatening, and an intrusion into that safe spot is rarely met with praise. By believing one thing, a person becomes attached to that belief and is unwilling to accept the opposite side of the argument. "If you believe something, you're automatically precluded from believing in the opposite, which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of this belief." (McKenna, 1984) By clinging so strongly to one side of an argument, we become conditioned to it, and the other side becomes almost offensive. One person may see war as inhuman and a waste of life, while another will focus on the motive for that war and declare it to be for the greater good. It's a rare occurrence that one side acknowledges the other in any significant way, and after hours of argument both are likely to walk away from a discussion on the subject with the same views they started with and a feeling that they're right. This stubbornness and inability to accept an alternate viewpoint paints the other side as inherently wrong and illogical, and we begin to pride ourselves with an ideal world view where everything goes according to our own plans.

Any deviation from this ideal world view is potential ammo for the other side, and leads to a serious change in self-image if we decide to switch sides. Someone who denied the Holocaust is likely to think less of their reasoning abilities if they decide to give up their conspiracy theory and look at the evidence objectively. Given that they were capable of believing something entirely different not long ago, they write themselves off as being irrational. The choice to decide whether or not something is right or wrong could be looked at as a defense mechanism; a way of avoiding the self-doubt that comes with admitting that your previous stance was incorrect.

Although this system of drastic shifts is a breeding ground for reflective self-doubt, it's still a necessary way of establishing a personal identity. There are many who would espouse the benefits of being open minded, but a subtle suggestion is unlikely to have much impact on the person who is dead-set in their beliefs. It is also a system that's intended to work towards the purpose of self-betterment. Though we seem determined to never admit that we might be wrong about something, we gain nothing by being this way. We may be dead-set in our perception of the world, and that may even be considered to be comfortable, but from an outside perspective it is little more than a desperate effort to be as thick as possible.

This stubborn nature prevents people from accepting the truth in many cases. In John Updike's A&P, Sammy feels justified in quitting his job based on a general feeling of dissatisfaction, but the turning point was seeing Lengel confront the girls in the store for "indecent clothing." The language Updike uses gives the reader the sense that Sammy had grown tired of his job before that point, but the absurdity of the event is what causes him to finally leave. Despite being semi-obligated to maintain the job due to family connections, his manager embarrassing the girls outweighed the potential monetary gain that keeping the job would bring. Looking back at Lengel taking over his post as he walks out, Sammy thinks to himself "His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he'd just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter." (Updike) He sees Lengel as a future version of himself had he decided to maintain the job, and knows that even though the decision may have been hastily decided and based on something insignificant, it was a necessary turning point and an important step in establishing his own identity as someone who won't tolerate what he considers to be an injustice.

I am no different in how I let my surroundings influence my personality. I used to be more trusting, but having a series of friends either rob or attempt to rob me has made me back away from that stance. In one incident, I had let an acquaintance stay at my house for several weeks since he had been evicted from his own and had nowhere to stay. Upon leaving he decided to take with him my mother's checkbook and attempted to steal $2000 out of her bank account. Another incident resulted in a close friend borrowing a large amount of my possessions and then cutting off contact with me and everyone I know. I could try and look past it and think of it as isolated cases of dealing with bad people, but now there's the bit of doubt in the back of my mind every time someone asks to borrow something. Had these incidents not occurred, I would be free of that doubt.

For the most part, mundane events will not do much to change someone's view of the world around them, nor will they affect personal image in any major way. It's more often the case that they lead up to a major event, at which point a new conclusion is drawn which becomes the new belief. Be it death, thievery, or any other revelation-causing event, it is unlikely that you will carry the same mentality after the incident is over. You will cease to be the same person, and continue to evolve your thoughts as these significant events occur. Even the most fanatical devotee to a particular body of thought can't isolate themselves from this.

Anorexia and War Paint

Relating Sut Jhally's "story" to modern day pop culture proves difficult because the characteristics of hair metal and rap music videos haven't been transferred to the modern day. Whereas in Dreamworlds 2 Jhally displays the blatant objectification of women in 1997, looking at the popular videos today shows something entirely different. (Dreamworlds 2, 1997) Instead of the faceless dancing nymphomaniacs, most of the videos I've recently watched either didn't have any women in them at all or focused on a single woman and the relationship with her boyfriend. Even Mariah Carey's "Touch My Body" was nothing more than a joke about seducing a member of the Geek Squad and seemed to be poking fun at the decade-old methods of making music videos rather than glorifying them. Though music may have promoted a distance in equality between the sexes, the current state of the music scene appears innocent enough on the surface that another culprit seems more likely.

The main problem of looking at MTV as some guiding light of the hip world is that it doesn't seem to be very important anymore. I have no idea what kind of music most people listen to, nor do any of my friends or family. The last encounter with popular music I can recall was having to tolerate people singing that "Chicken Noodle Soup" song for several weeks before moving on to the next trendy thing. I listen to instrumental country guitar from 80 years ago and pretentious prog-rock nonsense and had to look at the MTV website to see what could be considered popular today. Tuning in to the MTV channel showed that they don't actually play music anymore, and were instead airing a show about becoming a Maybelline model. Most movies I've seen don't contribute to the negative image of women, all the books I've read tend to take the opposite route, yet there is still no shortage of high school girls strutting around with the word "Juicy" written in pink on the back of their sweat pants.

I blame the phenomenon on advertising. For years women have been bombarded with messages that the only way to be attractive is to coat themselves in a thin layer of various creams and powders until they have straight blonde hair and emanate an unnatural glow. This will draw attractive men to them like a human bug lamp in much the same way that TAG deodorant spray causes every supermodel in relative close proximity to drop whatever they're doing and dash toward the source of the can. They establish a feeling that if you don't "shine" then there's something wrong that needs to be fixed. For the sake of selling their product, they've managed to take characteristics that are unnatural and make them the standard of beauty, such as abnormally large lips or blue paint underneath the eyes. It's at a point when the modifications aren't even pleasant to look at anymore, yet still retain a kind of warped beauty that only exists when looked at from a cultural perspective.

Despite the music video imagery of 1997 not being carried to the modern day, nonsurgical cosmetic procedures in the United states have risen 754 percent as of 2007. 11.7 million procedures were performed in 2007 at a cost of roughly $13.2 billion. The majority of these were for issues dealing solely with appearance, the top five being breast implants, liposuction, eyelid surgery, tummy tucks and breast reduction.(nlm.nih.gov) This is not to say that there aren't cases when there's a legitimate medical reason for performing these surgeries, but when over 90% of the people who undergo cosmetic surgery are women it's evident that the reason is mainly for the sake of self-image. This is a more alarming trend than the sale of makeup, since these feelings of inadequacy go farther than what's on the outside. These are radical procedures that result in a permanent change of the body or face, brought about by feelings that putting on some mascara or lipstick isn't enough to be beautiful. They need bags of silicone underneath their skin and botulism injected into their face before it's going to be good enough to satisfy the aesthetic needs of the opposite sex.

This could easily be related to the relationships between men and women demonstrated in Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand. In chapter one she says that men always try and have the upper hand while the women seek out approval and support.(Tannen) When looked at in this way the instances of "Juicy" seem more in place, despite showing an utter lack of self respect. The given reason will usually be something relatively innocent-sounding like "I thought it was funny," which may be true in most of the cases but doesn't do much to detract from the message that's being displayed. I've never been able to see what's actually funny about labeling yourself as a prostitute, but then again it might be an acquired taste like fine caviar or certain cheeses. "You have the money, I have the time" is less subtle, but even then I doubt that it's actually a conscious decision to advertise one's self as for sale. Perhaps the given response to someone displaying such a message should be "I have ten bucks, meet me at the dumpster behind Chuck E. Cheese in half an hour" for the sake of making them actually question their choice of clothing, but that wouldn't solve the initial problem and would most likely result in injury.

The only real solution is to stop pummeling every female in the country with messages that nobody will ever love them if they don't slot themselves neatly into the makeup cyborg model that we've somehow managed to accept. A six foot tall Aryan with long, straight hair, whore makeup and breasts so big that they'll later result in severe spinal injury isn't a good model for beauty and should be done away with in favor of something attainable and less freakish. If beauty can actually be looked at objectively and not just as a sum of various cultural standards, then it shouldn't be too hard to make the new model look more human. I commend Dove for trying with their Real Beauty campaign, despite that nobody is paying attention to them. The effort would be much more effective if the more popular companies like Revlon or Maybelline would stop implying that their products are necessary to be attractive, but that doesn't fit into the business model. The people that are responsible for establishing a mutant as the standard for beauty should also be responsible for disposing of it, since it's apparently too much to ask of people to stop paying attention to them and being fine with the way they are.

We're All Going to Die

Be it rock music or video games, parents seem determined to cling to any form of media that has the potential to turn their precious little angels into psychotic killers. By means of broken causal thinking, it becomes easy to scapegoat parts of our society that pose no real threat instead of actually looking at the more obvious causes. Eric Harris and Dylan Kebold happened to play Doom and listen to Marilyn Manson, so those are the things that get blamed for the Columbine Massacre, rather than the incredible ease that teenagers can acquire firearms. This line of thinking doesn't require any sort of insight, so following it is significantly easier than actually looking at the real problems in America. Manson writes songs that appear to advocate violence, so naturally he's to blame for the school shootings that occurred, despite the statistical evidence that the vast majority of people that listen to Manson's music don't feel the immediate need to murder large numbers of people.

This is similar to thinking that since the number of people who drown to death increases along with ice cream sales, ice cream is to blame. It's an example of taking two things that might have some sort of flimsy correlation and turning it into solid causality whether or not it's actually correct to do so. Given that the change in blame for teen violence changes every decade or so, you could logically conclude that it isn't actually a cultural problem, but more of an inherent problem in human nature. Perhaps it's difficult to admit that we're actually flawed enough to kill one another without much reason, so instead we block out the thought and turn to something which doesn't make any sense. The current fad seems to be blaming video games more than rock music, using terms like "murder simulator" to describe games like Grand Theft Auto. This implies that if video games weren't around, there would be no intent to shoot each other and no way of figuring out how to do so.

The main argument says that at the very least, video games influence teenagers to commit crimes because everyone between the ages of 13 and 18 is so delusional that they might wake up one day and forget that they're not playing a first person shooter. With this viewpoint present just about everywhere, it's easy to see why so many people believe it just based on prevalence. However, any actual investigation into the matter will statistically show the exact opposite. (gamingsteve.com) As video game sales increase, total levels of violent crimes drop steadily at about the same rate. If anything, people should be making the argument that video games can be used as a means of decreasing violent crime, not arguing that they provoke it. It's almost as if people are desperately trying to be afraid of children, making claims like "The country's youth is out of control and more dangerous than ever," when all data points the other way. These statements sound like they're based on fact, but are no better than something you would read on the average conspiracy theory website. The only real difference between saying that our children are going to kill us and saying that aliens are going to kill us is that you're less likely to see the latter story on the evening news. This is supposed to make it more credible, but that's not always the case.

One supposed reason for all this unnecessary fear mongering is that if you're able to keep the public in a state of constant panicked frenzy, they'll be more likely to consume. If you tell someone that it's "more likely than you think" that their child is going to shoot them, that somehow it's going to stimulate them to rush out to the store and buy a bunch of items that usually go undefined. I'm left wondering how attempting to destroy the family bond can be economically stimulating. What product is there that's going to help people once they're terrified of their own offspring? Maybe by making the general public afraid of their friends and neighbors there will be a sudden surge in the security industry, but the family model doesn't seem to fit into the equation. Unless the intent is to cause parents to disown their children, there doesn't appear to be any actual reason for painting kids as dangerous and unpredictable by nature.

So perhaps it's a more parental fear rather than saying that the children are the ones to be feared. This is nothing more than the end result of the real dangers of society. These dangers are present just about everywhere: pedophiles, new psychological diseases found in more and more kids, hard drugs, teen suicide, etc. Not only are we afraid that our children are going to be corrupted, but also that they're at constant risk when placed in a situation where they're not closely monitored by their parents. The internet is a useful source of information, but also overrun with child predators who will pose as surfers on MySpace and then lure them into an unmarked van in an undisclosed location. More ADD is diagnosed, so there must be some sort of epidemic. These are fears designed to prey on the occasional parental worries about safety, but blown up to a level where despite being unrealistic, are cause for immediate alarm.

In Barry Glassner's Culture of Fear, he says that these fears are created to obscure the more difficult problems with society. There were statistics are put out by the Times saying that suicide rates in teens tripled between 1952 and 1992, so according to the correlation model of thinking, suicide is the clear problem. The model doesn't allow for the more sensible reasons for this statistic, such as the advent of AIDS, exponential decrease in public education spending, overall increase of the adolescent population, or the increased rates of poverty and divorce.(Glassner, 53) The fear is created, but never examined to determine the real cause. Though teen suicide isn't an insignificant problem, it takes the spotlight rather than the more important and more difficult problems that cause it in the first place.

What usually strikes me first with any of these wide-spread fears is that they tend to be sort of wispy and hard to trace to anyone in particular. They work much the same as the current terrorism scares by relying on an invisible enemy that just happens to be everywhere at once and places us in a constant state of alert. Serial killers are usually described as quiet loners after they're caught, and somehow that equates to justifiable suspicion against all quiet loners. In the case of threats to children, your neighbor or good friend could be a secret pedophile or child rapist and show no signs of it. By making the threat seem real but still keeping it intentionally vague, it manages to heighten the severity of that threat. Since these dangerous people show no signs of danger, you can't go anywhere or interact with anyone without being put at risk.

This is especially clear in the case of adults fearing their children. One definitive characteristic of the generation gap is that older people never understand younger people, so now they have the entire age group of people under eighteen listed as part of the unknown. When you take that basic lack of understanding and apply the current influences like video games and music, the unknown turns to suspicion. Now say that these influences cause the adolescent age group to abandon any form of morality and kill anyone in their line of sight and you have a fear that's solid, but is applied to a group of people that is so expansive that it makes up roughly thirty percent of the population. Saying that people fear the unknown is valid, but when coupled with deliberate misinformation on a wide scale it becomes intensified much more.

What we are left with is a culture so terrified of itself that it runs away from shadows and erupts any time something bad happens. Michael Moore tries to demonstrate in Bowling for Columbine that guns are the real issue behind school shootings rather than trying to further the weak arguments presented by the opposing side, but this goes largely unnoticed. (Moore, 2002) The same stories are still repeated on the news today with the upcoming release of Grand Theft Auto IV, and are likely to continue with every major video game release where you're able to perform acts that would result in jail time if tried in real life. As a society we are so scared of issues that border on insignificant that we don't address and fix the real problems, which only breeds greater frequency of the incidents upon which we do focus.

I Own Five Mansions Because I'm Important

Unless you've somehow managed to become completely cut off from the rest of society, money plays an integral role in daily life. A currency system is convenient because it places a number value on every good or service in the world, which saves us from having to run the economy on a highly complicated bartering system. Without money we wouldn't know how to keep our civilization running, but it has taken a more important role in society beyond simple monetary value. It is a symbol of status, where you can effectively claim that one person is better than another because their net worth is more. The person with the highest number can feel good about themselves and relax, knowing that they have succeeded in life beyond all others. To the others, this will evoke either a feeling of envy, or give a lesser individual a greater sense of self-respect for knowing that they base their significance on something other than a numerical value.

In terms of functionality, money serves its purpose up to a certain point. The average person hopes that they can scrounge up enough funds to live their lives without too much unbearable debt, and with any luck they'll achieve their goal. As class goes up, the required amount of money also goes up to maintain their desired lifestyle. A lower class person can survive with a relatively low annual income, but the richer types need at least a few hundred thousand dollars a year to maintain upkeep. This works well enough up to a certain point. You reach a point where you can't really advance in class, at which point your vast wealth becomes pointless. There's little difference between someone who has half a billion dollars to their name and someone who has ten billion. After a certain point there's nothing left to buy.

Once this point is reached, the super rich tend to start doing things which could be accurately described as "completely idiotic." It becomes a game of one-upping the other super rich people in some desperate attempt to make yourself seem more important even though you're already at the top of the social ladder. A person might use all the excess money to buy expensive cars that they never drive, or buy more mansions that they don't live in. This has no functional use, and the behavior only exists for the sake of being able to own more things than someone else. By owning more things, the billionaire can safely say that they're of greater worth, despite that they have absolutely no use for all the cars they bought, no appreciation of the art they procured, or desire to converse with their trophy wife.

The case of Chris McCandless is a prime example of how money is only useful in the framework of society. (Into the Wild, 2007) Most people seem to classify his thorough abandonment of his previous life as a mistake while ignoring the possibility that he wasn't seeking to return to it. As a society, we place so much value on our money that when he burns his along with all his identification our gut reaction confusion. Chris sought to be entirely dependent on none other than himself with an eventual trip to Alaska, a plan that had no reliance on a number value. The fact that he burned his money even seems to serve as a distraction for people trying to analyze his plans, where they focus on the money more than inherent ideological problems such as boundless arrogance and a tendency to ignore the feelings of his friends in most cases. The same could be said for Sam in Updike's A&P, where a lot of attention was diverted to the observation that quitting his job was an end to his income, rather than looking at why he decided to do so. (Updike)

This isn't to say that money isn't important within the framework of society. Chris had no use for it because he intentionally placed himself in a position where he wouldn't have anything to buy. Unless he decided to use it for bedding, it would serve no functional purpose. To the average person, it's an entirely different story. In society, it becomes the primary focus on most occasions. There is constantly someone who needs to be paid, so it's necessary that Joe Sixpack spend most of his life in a cubicle doing repetitive paperwork so that he can pay his bills. You need food, water, and shelter, and we've advanced to the point where it's become more difficult to find any of these if you don't have a source of income.

This isn't a matter of choice, rather necessity. The need for money is fundamentally matter of basic survival for most people, but the problem arises when it becomes the focus. When the desire for more money becomes a want rather than a need, it can be safely referred to as greed. My opinion of the ideal state of being housed within the framework of society is lucrative self-actualization. In most cases this is not a possibility, but at the same time I think it's at least something to strive for. In the same way that there's some abstract model of perfect beauty floating around in our heads, there should be a perfect method of survival that's unreachable, but should at least be considered. This doesn't allow for the possibility of giving money more significance than base survival. If people are unwilling to take a less tolerable job for the sake of unnecessary financial gain, it's more likely that they'll enjoy life a bit more. In terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the model of "more stuff = more fun" rarely extends beyond the base of the pyramid. (not2.org)

Though this is my model, it's hardly the widespread model. Given that we live in a consumer based society, money is given far more importance than it deserves. It is the primary objective in life, because the more money we have, the more unnecessary crap we can buy. I would argue that the allure of luxury is similar to a Siren Song, but there's no shortage of people that think they would be genuinely happy if they owned a yacht. It's a sort of false happiness that's based entirely on the dollar value of personal property rather than anything even remotely significant. Once you climb up to the top of the social ladder the happiness isn't even remotely derived from the actual objects the own, but the dollar value alone. There's no point owning the newest Ferrari when there's a 65 mile per hour speed limit on the freeway, unless you feel like being an outlaw.

I would instead attempt to derive my happiness from creativity, be it my own or that of others. Such an approach is unlikely to be praised by the money-minded individual, but that's none of my concern. I have the tendency to take my view of money even further beyond the need of necessity, into a kind of objective hatred. While most look at their bank account as a source of survival an possibility, to me it resembles a chain. There's an omnipresent opinion that more money is the equivalent of greater success, but that's strictly limited to a business sense. When asking the same people who value their money above all else who their personal heroes are, they're unlikely to name the owner of their insurance company. Not only is it a source of false happiness, but also a false sense of meaning. All my heroes have done something that I admired, though most of them probably only made enough money doing so to place themselves in lower-middle class at best. To me, Bill Gates is not the model of success by any means. I could be the richest man in the world, but still feel utterly worthless if I achieved the title without actually accomplishing anything. If I were to spend the rest of my life as a stock broker for the sake of income, I would likely spend my death bed weeks thinking that I might as well have died at the start of my career.

Money should be a secondary objective at most. If personal income is enough to guarantee survival, it should be put entirely out of mind and your time would be better spent doing something you enjoy rather than seeking something you don't need. It doesn't breed any true satisfaction, only the delusion that you're existence has been worthwhile. If you're able to do something significant while making money doing so, you're a luckier person than most, but even if that's not the result of your efforts it should at least be the attempt. I will envy the starving artist any day over the billionaire arms dealer.

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WALL OF FUCKING TEXT. You're some kind of strange mutant if you actually read all of this. I still didn't use up the character limit, god damn. I'll add an irrelevant video link at the end, just to fill even more space.

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