If You Can’t Beat Em…

Is it true that people – paradoxically, for a reason that will be discussed in a moment – consider beauty and intelligence to be mutually exclusive? Yes. Absolutely – and Marisa Miller herself (ironically) is one of them – if her career choice proves anything.

The reason why it’s paradoxical that people assume that if someone is beautiful she must be unintelligent is because what they find beautiful – her particular physical traits – are directly the result of intelligence. Not the intelligence of the beautiful person herself necessarily, but that of the culture which makes such a beautiful person possible. In other words, what’s beautiful about Marisa Miller is not just inherent, as if she’s reached some kind of Platonic, out-of-context standard of beauty, but rather that she’s a living, breathing testament to what intelligence can accomplish (if embraced for enough generations). Statistically, would a body type like that, or unblemished skin like that, or perfectly manicured hair, nails, etc like those have any chance to be as relatively common as they are in modern culture if they existed in an earlier, less intelligent culture? In a foreign culture with different, less intelligent values? No. Of course not. Why, then, do people assume that someone who is the most eloquent physical manifestation of intelligence would be not intelligent herself? Her physical appearance is considered beautiful because it is most perfectly adapted to the environment in which she lives (a modern, intelligent culture), so why wouldn’t her mind be perfectly adapted as well? Why wouldn’t she be exceptionally intelligent, even – just like her beauty?

The reason why this paradox exists is because people have failed to identify the source of all of their values – up to and including beautiful women. The source is the human mind, but because our culture – as almost completely rational as it is – never quite fully shed the notion that somehow the real world is imperfect (as contrasted against the “perfect” Platonic world)… so whenever the human mind is shown to be efficacious (eg: when a beautiful woman like Marisa Miller comes about) there must be a flaw somewhere. If there is no discernable physical flaw, then – in order to satisfy their conviction – they conclude that there must be an intellectual flaw. No one could be both physically perfect and mentally perfect. That would be, well, perfect. Impossible.

Who believes this? Virtually everyone – including Marisa Miller herself. Why did she choose to become a model instead of a scientist or inventor or businesswoman? It could be because she realizes everything that has been discussed here, and knows that she’s at the forefront of the species’ genetic progress, and so she consciously decided that the most valuable and rewarding thing she could do was simply to inspire people to keep moving forward (which would be a legitimate career). It could be, but not likely – and her doing this commercial for Buick proves that it’s not.

More likely, what happened was that Marisa Miller – like all philosophically passive people – simply unwittingly absorbed the premise that perfection is impossible on Earth, and even if she sensed that she was the intellectual equal of most (if not all) people, she repressed it. First out of an innocent, compassionate fear (but a fear nonetheless) of making others uncomfortable through challenging their conviction that “perfection is impossible”, and later as a means of numbing the guilt that she felt for committing treason against her own potential (in spite of their convictions), simply to spare other people their (deserved) discomfort. A means of forcing herself to believe that the culture’s twisted idea – her twisted idea – was true so that she didn’t have to regret succumbing to fear. Her irreversible commitment to a (relatively unrewarding) career in modeling was a way to ensure that that fact stayed forever buried.

But now, here, in this commercial, she is using Buick’s advertising budget to complain about the fact that she is consistently regarded as stupid simply because she is beautiful. That remains true – for the reason explained above – but ironically it is now also true because of her choices. Because it was never true that she was stupid just because she was beautiful, her decision to pretend that it was would (by becoming a model) inevitably bubble up the surface of her awareness. This commercial is simply her latest, most desperate attempt to keep it repressed. An explicit reassertion of her belief that she became a model at the expense of more personally rewarding work was only because she had no other choice, and not because she herself agrees with the premise that she is claiming to loathe.

If there is really much more to Marisa Miller than her good looks, then why didn’t she ever utilize it? Would she have met resistance from people who accepted the premise she claims to have never accepted? Yes. Absolutely. So what? Not only is that no excuse for failing to refuse to sacrifice her potential and her quest for genuine personal fulfillment, but considering that she has one exceptionally powerful weapon, her fight would have been easier (and therefore her choice not to fight is less forgivable). That weapon is, ironically, her physical beauty itself. People pay attention to her just because of that. Should they? No. Of course not. But they do. She could have consistently asserted her right to be both beautiful and intelligent, and eventually people would get it. They wouldn’t tune her out as quickly as they would a less beautiful person saying the same thing. Yes, at first they would just be mindlessly, insincerely listening because they had ulterior motives and merely wanted to flatter her, but eventually – hopefully – even they would have heard what she was saying, realized her point, rejected their twisted Platonic philosophical premises, and allowed her to be not only physically beautiful but spiritually and intellectually great as well.

Unfortunately, what she did instead is become exactly what they said she inherently was and always would be: a pouting, sniveling, supercilious child forever destined to a life preoccupied by the unimportant. She didn’t even think she was worth fighting for, and now – ironically – the bitterness and self-imposed stupidity that conclusion caused in her makes her ugly no matter how pretty she is.

Emptying out our Creed

“Our Creed” is not the equality of all subcultures, but the political equality of all individuals. It does not mean that to be an American you dispense with all of your own personal standards of judgment; it means that you respect the right of others to do things which you judge to be useless or bad. This commercial conflates moral equality with political equality – precisely to justify moral inferiority and political inequality (ie: the vast amount of political favoritism shown to particular groups precisely because their cultural inferiority is – eroneously – blamed upon political oppression).

If people were honest, they would admit that the pleasure derived from experiencing other subcultures that they, oddly enough, don’t already embrace is not from the objective pleasure which the substance they’re experiencing gives them, but rather from the pleasurable thought that they are being “open-minded” and “inclusive.” That they’re “finally living out their creed” (in the twisted way that they understand it [see above]).

The purpose of political equality is not to reach the state of personal “openness” that welcomes any and all elements into one’s life indiscriminantly. The purpose of it (ie: respecting another’s right to live in any style he wishes) is to ensure that the style in which you live is also respected. The value is your lifestyle, and the “creed” of political equality is the means by which you protect it – not the other way around. “Equality” is not an end in itself.

If the value was “equality” for it’s own sake, and throwing your own lifestyle into the mix simply to have something to contribute to the orgy were the means, then what would be the point in advocating for doing that instead of keeping them seperate? It’s logically incoherent. If the “lines and titles that divide us” are arbitrary and subjective, then isn’t it arbitrary and subjective to repudiate them? What difference does it make? If the best the apologists for certain subcultures can do is attempt to guilt people into experiencing them – as opposed to identifying their objective merits – then why not simply “blindly” follow arbitrary and subjective “lines” and remain divided? Both – the blind embrace of “diversity” or the “blind” rejection of it – amount to the same thing: mindlessness. What, exactly, does the individual have to gain from experiencing a wide variety of subcultures?

The purpose of this commercial’s message isn’t to ensure that all “cultures” (read: individuals) have their individual rights equally protected, but rather to elevate inferior cultural elements by capitalizing on the confusion and conscienteousness of those who hail from superior cultures and have something to lose. This isn’t to say that if a given subculture is inferior that all elements of it are (just as it isn’t to say that all elements of a superior one are superior), but simply that it’s irrational – and in fact morally obscene – for a person to be encouraged to compromise his own standards and tastes for the sake of sparing another person his (deserved) socio-economic discomfort as a result of having embraced an unsatisfactory (read: inferior) set of standards and tastes.