Friday 23 December 2022
Either you think —
Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender Is the Night (1934)
It’s an interesting word to have used - pervert. Which is the easier course to take though? Obviously the path of least resistance is to have others think for us. That’s the easier, inconspicuous and superficially virtuous path.
For a huge part of our lives, this is what we must do anyway - imitate behaviour which is accepted, including the behaviour we call ‘thinking’. We must do it simply in order to understand each other and foster social cohesion.
Imitation is not thinking though - not what Fitzgerald meant by thinking. We don’t have to make a deliberate virtue of imitation, but people do. Sometimes they even end up watching the BBC or reading the Guardian which take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes. As we know.
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2 comments:
I think the modern preoccupation with the difference between authentic natural activity and that which is socialised and inauthentic was started off by Rousseau. It relates to his idea of the "Noble Savage", and the claim that "man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains". What makes it particularly potent these days is that authenticity and rugged individualism are marketed in order to sell or persuade. Note how the BBC seem to want us to be a nation of educated middle-class rational thinkers, yet how narrowly they draw the boundaries of acceptable opinion.
Sam - I have a suspicion that authenticity and rugged individualism may be escaping from those who use them to sell or persuade. As if it is becoming more complex and possibly more genuine. Not easy to define though.
I've been scanning the BBC news website lately and yes, the BBC does draw those boundaries very narrowly. For years I've just picked up various BBC news stories as they pop up in Google or Bing, but now I find the site itself quite odd and definitely narrow.
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