Aesthetic contemplation is a consumerist activity. Conscious depictions of reality are entertaining, but forgettable, and not art. Intellectuals are just as indoctrinated by industrial consumerist society as everyone else, but what makes them perhaps worse is that they willingly create a crowded marketplace of ideology by participating in the technological apparatus and its mass-production of art and information. They willingly pound dissent into obscurity. This makes dissent more difficult, and the pseudointellectual profit from it. They talk about indoctrination, but do nothing to resist it. They choose to be slaves when they could choose to be free, while others are never offered a choice at all. It is hard to blame people for their small beliefs when a vast industrialized market encourages them to have such things, but I find no difficulty in criticizing a sector of people that recognize the suppression of their individuality and resign to doing nothing about it, but just to contemplate it.
orchidorchidorchid, let's not be nihilistic, either, which is what "truly, everything means nothing" suggests to me. Something may be devoid of a single, clear meaning, but who's to say that its meaning is nothing? Couldn't it have many meanings?
Aesthetic contemplation is a consumerist activity. Conscious depictions of reality are entertaining, but forgettable, and not art. Intellectuals are just as indoctrinated by industrial consumerist society as everyone else, but what makes them perhaps worse is that they willingly create a crowded marketplace of ideology by participating in the technological apparatus and its mass-production of art and information. They willingly pound dissent into obscurity. This makes dissent more difficult, and the pseudointellectual profit from it. They talk about indoctrination, but do nothing to resist it. They choose to be slaves when they could choose to be free, while others are never offered a choice at all. It is hard to blame people for their small beliefs when a vast industrialized market encourages them to have such things, but I find no difficulty in criticizing a sector of people that recognize the suppression of their individuality and resign to doing nothing about it, but just to contemplate it.
orchidorchidorchid, let's not be nihilistic, either, which is what "truly, everything means nothing" suggests to me. Something may be devoid of a single, clear meaning, but who's to say that its meaning is nothing? Couldn't it have many meanings?