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Wilson McMillan

Professor Schuchardt

Digital Society

22 February 2020

Down With Beauty. Long Live Beauty.

The defining search for the youth of the digital generation is the desperate hunt for a sense of

belonging while grappling with their culturally mandated individual faith, truth, and conscience. In

the modern day we have as a culture praised and deified our individuality, from trivial offhand phrases

such as “you do you” , all the way to successful movies such as The Breakfast Club. All of culture is

telling us that we are unique and that remaining individual is of the utmost importance, but as the

public embraces their individuality they become depressed, eventually craving the group identity

they’ve been taught to scorn. Throughout all of human history our avenues of communication have

defined where we place our identities. Looking far back to the ancient times of pre-literacy, we see that

group identity was the standard, as the only way of communicating was in community. With the

advent of literacy independence came about, for the first time we were able to learn, read, and write

without the presence of another. This embracing of individual identity with literacy was then

amplified with Gutnberg’s printing press and we didn’t look back… until now. Individual salvation is

an intoxicating idea, especially to creatures with innate self-centered tendencies, but the dilemma we

are now running into is that the same technological advancement that spurred our focus on

individuality is now making us insecure in that individuality. Within the past few decades with the

arrival of the digital age our technological progress has cocktailed with our societal tendency to doubt.

Due to social media and an ever-increasing online world that perpetuates unhealthy comparison we
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have become increasingly more insecure with the personal responsibility that is steeped within the

embracing of private truth, faith, and identity. And in response to this instability we have gone full

circle, just how the technology of A.I. voice assistants returned us to orality, we have cyclically returned

to our group identity as well as our religion, only this time our faith isn’t in God, but rather in the

solidarity of uncertainty. Unity is now found in the collective insecurity we have in our culturally

necessitated individuality. We’ve decided to unify as a community once again, but this time we’re not

holding hands singing the doxology, we’re holding hands having a group therapy session. This

solidarity in uncertainty is seen perpetually in society through multiple mediums, including the vast

growth of self-deprecating humor, as well as the now culturally accepted and encouraged act of

attending therapy. What our species-wide experiment to desert God in favor of individual conscience

taught us is that no matter what ideology we subscribe to we are broken people who need guidance

navigating life. So having turned our back on God we sought guidance from ulterior places, exchanging

our priests for therapists, and our Bibles for self-help books. Our modern religion is a series of various

structures that we have erected to support our individual conscience’s place as deity. One such

structure is the gospel-tier veracity now associated with personality prescribing tests.

The transition from the praising of private identity to the desperate search for belonging in

group identity is pictured clearly in the recent revival of personality quizzes. Tests like the Myers-Briggs

and Enneagram have gained fresh popularity in recent years as the modern digital generation—a

generation raised without experience of a pre-internet existence—attempts valuing their individual

identity, but is left scrambling for a number or series of letters that gives them identity outside of self,

because as culturally assured as we are in the general value of individuality, we are utterly lost when

attempting to positively apply the minuche that makes up self to the broader society. Similar to
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Winston in 1984 we completely understand how things are the way they are, but we don’t understand

why. We have no clue as to why our individuality is important apart from a community, and the truth

is that it isn’t, yet we still do as we’re told. The only way to justify individuality apart from community

is to assume that personal gain outweighs the gain of others, to fall victim to greed.

Modern society’s uprooting and bastardizing of traditional religion was not only an outcome

of increasingly individual importance, but an increase in individual desire. As humanity shifted it’s

faith in God it shifted its fealty to private desire, AKA greed. The public is now submitting to lives in

service to money. Now it’s easy to hear tales of corrupt money-hungry men and immediately envision

wolves of wall street dressed to the nines in suits and coked out of their minds, but in actuality financial

obsession has seeped into the lives of all walks of life. According to a study from GOBankingReports,

about 50% of Americans report that they think about money or work the most on a daily basis. And

just to be clear these aren’t people wondering where their next meal is coming from, these are U.S.

citizens living in the world’s largest economy who are spending their days worrying about money. To

get a clearer picture as to why this is the case one has merely to take a look outside and perspect the

larger context. Clearly most U.S citizens’ financial poverty doesn’t come close to that of impoverished

countries such as South Sudan or Burundi, so the problem can’t be lack of. Which means that financial

obsession has to stem not from necessity, but from desire. As our culture declares the importance of

individual identity, personal gain and greed have consumed humanity, we’ve grown entitled, seeking to

create a lifestyle worthy of our narcissistic self-perception. This near-constant greed and stress about

money is due to a belief that we can control our financial intake, and therefore we are responsible if our

funds can’t keep up with our desires. This stress has plagued humanity since the creation of money way

back with the bartering system, and the dilemma thus ran into when attempting to attain more
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financial liberty was that money is inherently rare and limited, or at least it used to be. There is a finite

number of cows, and a finite amount of gold on Earth, and since value is a function of scarcity these

inherently valuable commodities of the world had and always will have value. So to reconcile our

covetous eyes with our empty wallets we attempted to circumvent the scarcity of value. We decided to

manufacture our own value, thereby replacing Earth made value, or more accurately, God made value

with our own feeble placeholders for value. As technology progressed man’s ability to emulate natural

value grew. Metal forgery enabled the production of the Mesopotamian Shekel, the printing press

allowed for the mass production of cash, and finally the advancement of surgical equipment generated

the world of plastic surgery, the manifestation of man’s attempt to reproduce beauty.

Initially, man sought solely to separate God from value, but along the self-paving path of

technological progress, man separated God from that which is most valuable in a broken world: beauty.

Now man didn’t simply strip God from beauty, because stripping the creator from the created is

impossible without a ground-up reconstruction of the creation i.e. artificial intelligence. Recognizing

this, man chose to redefine beauty altogether, twisting beauty from nature with every airbrushed,

anorexic supermodel they could plaster on culture’s psyche. Culturally beauty is no longer natural, and

it’s definitely not in the eye of the beholder. Modern “beauty” must be the exception to the rule, one

place where individuality can no longer apply. What is beautiful, or what is most valuable, cannot be

individual, because as much as society loves to preach individuality it can’t give everyone a unique

definition of beauty. Because if everyone has their own concept of beauty, it is no longer scarce, and no

longer a commodity that can be made in China and bought in Paris. If modern “beauty” is allowed to

be individual and thereby omnipresent, then man-made value cannot compete with the scarcity of

divinely made value, and God is no longer dead. In pursuit of individual salvation man endeavoured to
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manufacture their own value and supersede the last bastion for modern Christianity: natural beauty,

but they failed. In the film American Beauty the character Ricky is describing “the most beautiful

thing” he has ever filmed, saying that as he watched a plastic bag blow in the breeze he realized, “that

there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know

that there was no reason to be afraid.” Ricky saw the beauty in the world. The beauty that culture’s

narcissistic man-made value couldn’t desacralize. The beauty that empowers the individual. And the

beauty that fulfills man’s desire to have a group identity, to belong, and to reform our twisted self-help

religion to what is natural, or rather, what is supernatural.