tuberman
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Okay, we've had "Ugly Betty," the TV series, and "Shallow Hal," the movie, all explaining to us typical guys that we're mere dupes to are own visual preferences. "Beauty is only skin deep," the old cliche is revived many times over.
Yet on a more scholarly, and nerdy, level we have books by the likes of Christopher Lasch and his "The Minimal Self," an interesting follow up to "The Culture of Narcissism." Just think Madonna when she did her female version of Shallow Hal in the video where she sings, "I am a material girl," and celibrates her surface based intentions. By the late 70's, early 80's people not only lived on the material surface of things they shouted their enjoyment of being two or one dimensional skimmers of life.
Now there is a book out called "The Bond," by a female guru, Lynne McTaggart that suggests strongly that this has all gone too far and pits everybody against everybody in a competetive, anxiety and fear driven world. Yet everything is connected to everything else and there is "the space inbetween," and that's what really counts. Individuality, capitalism, western civilization are all bundled together as what's wrong with our poor earth. Lynne is sort of a new category of guru, she's a female socialist/new age spiritualist. Although she's very vague often she seems to imply that all this shallowness started when Calvanist industrialists began the machine age. She would certainly have a field day on AM with a few of the throwback guys looking to put another notch in their caveman clubs. You know the ones that would have made Archie Bunker look smart.
What I want to cover here is that I feel that a lot of this crap is one sided and misses the point that there is intelligent narcissism, and there is many forms of individualism that are quite sharp. Of course, energy connections are real too.
Yet on a more scholarly, and nerdy, level we have books by the likes of Christopher Lasch and his "The Minimal Self," an interesting follow up to "The Culture of Narcissism." Just think Madonna when she did her female version of Shallow Hal in the video where she sings, "I am a material girl," and celibrates her surface based intentions. By the late 70's, early 80's people not only lived on the material surface of things they shouted their enjoyment of being two or one dimensional skimmers of life.
Now there is a book out called "The Bond," by a female guru, Lynne McTaggart that suggests strongly that this has all gone too far and pits everybody against everybody in a competetive, anxiety and fear driven world. Yet everything is connected to everything else and there is "the space inbetween," and that's what really counts. Individuality, capitalism, western civilization are all bundled together as what's wrong with our poor earth. Lynne is sort of a new category of guru, she's a female socialist/new age spiritualist. Although she's very vague often she seems to imply that all this shallowness started when Calvanist industrialists began the machine age. She would certainly have a field day on AM with a few of the throwback guys looking to put another notch in their caveman clubs. You know the ones that would have made Archie Bunker look smart.
What I want to cover here is that I feel that a lot of this crap is one sided and misses the point that there is intelligent narcissism, and there is many forms of individualism that are quite sharp. Of course, energy connections are real too.
