They have more place here than on DeviantART tbh
Sure
The ancient Hebrew language is an entirely ‘concrete’ language. Just about all of its words have a literal, physical meaning, and more abstract things are referred to using concrete words metaphorically. So, when people claim that the Image of God must be our physical form or appearance because ‘tselem’ is used to refer to idols, they’re really making fools of themselves. Twice over, in fact, because despite how it’s used, ‘tselem’ is a direct derivative of ‘shadow’. Meaning that idols are called so not because they’re physical representations, but because, as representations, they are ‘shadows’ of the gods they’re made to represent. This points to the actual meaning of the theological term, not that we are copies hewn out of a different material than the original but that our formation bears the intent to represent something–or rather, someone–else, namely our creator.
The statement that “God is Spirit”, more literally “Spirit (is) the (one) God” does in fact mean that God is not bound or limited to a physical form. The verse does not mean that God has a body “made out of spirit”, as if “spirit” in this case is some ectoplasmic, aetherial counterpart to flesh like you would expect the likes of a Greek god to have, which is a misconception brought on by a misinterpretation of one of Paul’s verses when he says that the resurrection body is ‘raised a spiritual one’.
–A tangent about ‘spiritual bodies’–
When Paul says that our present body is ‘natural’ and the resurrection body will be ‘spiritual’, the word used for natural is ‘psyche’, originally meaning ‘soul’ in most Greek contexts but in the Bible meaning, varyingly, ‘soul’, ‘mind’ ‘earthly life force’, and none of those things are the literal composition of our bodies, but rather what they are centrally ‘running off of’. So when Paul says that we will have a ‘spiritual’ body, he does not, in fact, mean that our bodies are going to made out of 75% spirit juice instead of 75% water, but rather that our bodies will be living off of a glorified essence of conferred immortality, and work in tandem with our inmost spirits, rather than our earthly bodies that need calories, vitamins, water and oxygen, and are puppeteered by the brain through the nervous system.
–Tangent over–
“God is Spirit” means that God is immaterial because, firstly, it is immediately followed by Jesus saying “and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and truth”, to explain that location does not matter in worship compared to sincerity. Location is an inherent property of the physical. So to use ‘spirit’ in an explanation regarding why location does not matter would imply that ‘spirit’ in this case truly does refer to ‘spirit’ as the immaterial. What God’s body is made of, if He has a body, has nothing to do with why worshiping him does not depend on location.
–Another tangent about the location of worship’s importance–
There are Bible verses saying location of worship does matter somewhat such as not praying in public or not ‘forsaking the assembly of believers’, however this pertains to how your worship relates to other people, that is to say worshiping in public to show off that you’re worshiping is done to bear the appearance of piety and so that’s all it’s good for, and worshiping at church is only valuable because other Christians are there, and you’re gathering as a church. Ever seen that T-shirt saying ‘The church has left the building’? That’s what it’s going on about. Thus, these verses do not contradict the statement that location, in and of itself, does not matter in worshiping God, by and large.
–other tangent over–
And this clearly is not talking only about God the Spirit, also known as the Holy Spirit, because immediately before “God is Spirit”, Jesus says “the time is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him.” Not “the Spirit”. “the Father”. And to nail that in, Jesus’ repetition of ‘worship in spirit and truth’ targets both ‘the Father’ and ‘God’, showing that Jesus is referring to the same individual here.
This is in accordance with the verses where God is said to “fill heaven and earth”, and to be in the depths of the sea, in the sky and in the grave (using a word often interpreted as Hell or Hades, but, again, the Hebrew language is a concrete one) all equally. Some people try to blow verses like this off by saying they’re merely about His omniscience, not His omnipresence, but that seems like an off shifting of meanings with no real rationale to it, and with the verse above I’m having a hard time seeing how you’d say this without some kind of ulterior motive or agenda (although what, I don’t know).
Now, of course, God can take on forms. God can do whatever He wants. His omnipotence inherently means that His being seen in human or other forms does not prove that He is constrained to any of these. Of course, some are more worthy of being His form than others, such as the one that expressed His glory such that seeing his face would destroy you. But each theophany, as these forms are called, is perfectly suited to the occasion for which God took it, even if He is inherently far above the form of, say, the post-Weight Watchers Santa Claus that the media loves to depict him as. Which, by the way, I think has done irreversible damage to the faith. People take a picture of Moses and call him God and equally ignorant people’s view of incomprehensibly great divinity is tainted with the image of a geriatric. Not that geriatrics aren’t in the Image of God, but it certainly isn’t in their bodies.
Since people, and not animals, are made in the Image of God, we definitely have a start going on as to what the Image consists of. Firstly, if it has to do with our appearance, then it either has to do with our exact appearance, or specifically the few details of our physical shape that are not shared with any animals–the reason being, we look an awful lot like chimpanzees, even if we didn’t evolve from them. So either chimps are especially holy, God made a mockery of His own image, or the physical form is not the basis of the Imago Dei (which is what you call the Image of God if you’re pretentious or too lazy to type out the slightly-longer phrase). However, completely absent from animals is either the presence in general, or the specific level or complexity, of many of the following:
-Intellect
-Emotion
-Moral systems
-Spirituality
-Creativity and art
-Crafting of tools and objects
-Communication
-Communities
-A bunch of other stuff related to our brains
Now, again, these aren’t all absent in animals, but the degree, either of the presence of these things, or of the refinement or complexity, is. Now, this seems to be a rag-tag of various things, but perhaps we can attribute them all to one thing. Now, obviously, they’re all related to the brain, but it could be more. After all, God is spirit, having no brain and not needing it, either.
Well, the Bible says there is a spirit in man, and while there is a verse (Ecclesiastes 3:21) that seems to attribute ‘spirit’ to animals, that verse is firstly predicated on a state of uncertainty, secondly uses a word (ruach) whose concrete/literal meaning is ‘breath’, and thirdly seems to distinguish the ‘ruach’ of humans from the ‘ruach’ of animals. It may well be that it speaks of animals’ ‘ruach’ as a term to refer to their ‘vital principle’, much as ‘nephesh’ does, or that it speaks of them as having a ‘lesser spirit’, but regardless, only the human spirit is said to be 'the breath of God, that gives [humans] understanding". Now, ‘understanding’ is related to the brain, too, and I’m not sure if the ancient Hebrews had a lot of words for talking about thoughts and thinking, given their concrete words, so I’m not certain if it’s all that much of a stretch to say this one word runs the whole gamut of the things I mentioned above.
And, in the beginning, (literally, in Genesis, or ‘Bereshit’ originally, meaning ‘beginning’), in chapter 2, verse 7, God personally breathed into Adam. Might sound a bit gross to hear that Adam’s first breath was someone else’s exhalation, but then again the wind is elsewhere metaphorically called “God’s breath”, so it’s not like a human being’s exhalation. In any case, this ‘nishmat chayyim’ was what turned the clay doll into a flesh-and-blood human. Our life, that which separates us from dirt, is based on a gift from God’s spirit, and that gift is our spirit. Our spirit, though its function is dependent on our body having a brain to house this capability, is what gives us ‘understanding’, that is, all these things which separate us from lowly animals.
In short, to be made in the Image of God means you have a spirit that grants you sapience and an existence above mere flesh.
The way Nintendo treats fanworks is like if McDonald’s somehow managed to copyright chicken tikka masala and then came out with their own ‘tikka masala’ but it was just chicken meat dunked in ketchup and every time an actual chef actually made tikka masala McDonald’s would go “You’re stealing my idea and taking customers away from me :(” and sue the chef into penury so nobody could threaten their sale of shitty ketchup chicken
Listening to the first Harry Potter book’s audiobook, near the end where it said that the Dursleys were angry seeing Harry come home with an owl in a cage, the narrator said ‘an owl in a cage’ so melodically that, for some reason, my childhood self imagined him saying ‘an owl in a cage in an owl in a cage. . .’ ad infinitum.
With it was a sort of animation in my head starting with owl, then zooming out to see a cage materialize around it, then zooming out further as the cage morphs into a ribcage in an internal view of a larger owl, then zooming out further for the internal view to vanish and a cage appearing around the larger owl, repeating the cycle.
Breakdown of a sentence I heard when I was 9 that made me so angry that it still makes me explode internally:
“How about [pansy-ass suggested ‘correction’ for the thing I heard you just say that my pansy ass thinks is too ‘violent’]? You’ve been watching too much bad TV.”
I’ll break it down bit by bit.
"How about [pansy-ass suggested ‘correction’ for the thing I heard you just say that my pansy ass thinks is too ‘violent’]?
{I think that to be aggressively insipid and afraid of ‘vIOLENce’ is both natural and superior, to the point where I feel the need to be patronizing to you for not being the same and for not being disgustingly wimpy by default, and even more so when you don’t swallow up the pathetically weak shit I just proposed to curate the way you think}
You
{You, who I think, because you are younger than a certain age, that have no will of your own and therefore intentionally-chosen personality or characteristics}
've been watching
{I think any personality you do have is derived from outside–specifically that literally every external stimulus you experience brainwashes you and since, as I stated before, I don’t think anyone under a certain age has any will of their own, you are powerless to resist it because you’re a mindless tadpole}
too much bad TV."
{again, I think being the human equivalent of a timid prey animal is both natural and superior in every way, and the only way you could be any different must be the work of the TV I complain about because, again, I think being a pansy is right, and I’m going to use the fact that you aren’t as ‘proof’ of the ‘bad TV’'s work on you. Also I call it ‘bad TV’ because I stunt my expression to you to the level of a toddler in order to patronize you.}
All of this delivered in this really dumb voice that the person who said this probably thought sounded ‘clever’ but in actuality sounded simultaneously condescending and infantile. Again because they think being a pansy is morally and intellectually superior. Much like stoners on Reddit.
Now, if you’re wondering why I’m posting about this, that’s fair. It’s incredibly petty and nearly as childish as the child I was when I heard it.
The reason is because it literally drives me nuts every time I think of it. It drives nuts into me. It drives a pickup truck into my nuts. It gives me a nut allergy and then Jar Mans me with a jar made out of peanut brittle. If it just roils in my head, it’s probably gonna be bad for me in the long term. But if I can tell myself, “Remember that time you bitched about it on the Internet?” then I can be at peace about it.
3 step guide to making anyone want to swing at you:
- Ask a question with an obvious ‘correct’ answer, the kind you ask to children and imbeciles (make sure it is specifically a question where the ‘correct’ answer is so obvious that even to answer it is to accept degradation to the level of a child)
- When they don’t take your question at face value, instantly assume the most stupid answer, or the most basic one contrary to the ‘correct’ answer
- When they attempt correct your abjectly stupid assumption, yell the ‘correct’ answer with the voice of a brain-damaged cow with a radish up its ass
Example: You and your brother are watching a video of a child trying to consume a cowpat before being stopped by their parents.
- Ask your brother ‘But you know you shouldn’t actually try to consume animal feces, right?’ in an utterly serious voice, while lowering your face down and raising your eyebrows in the signature stupid fashion of a person that doesn’t know how to talk to kids talking to kids
- When they react in any way other than an utterly sincere ‘yes’, act as if they affirmed that they do engage in coprophagia
- When they move to say anything, completely interrupt them by yelling ‘YOU SHOULDN’T EAT COW POOP!’ in the voice that suggests that you are the cow
Bonus points if you do all of this not intentionally in order to make someone angry on purpose, but rather because you actually lack the other- and self-awareness to realize how you’re being
3 step guide to coerce someone not to do anything
- Identify the thing you don’t want them to do
- Invent a hypothetical chain of events starting with the aforementioned thing and ending in some form of harm, especially of some specific group
- Compensate for the leaps of logic, exaggerations of the ‘influence’ that the would-be forbidden actions have on people and minimization of personal agency of said ‘influenced’ individuals that you make with the above chain of events simply by emphasizing the harm and victimization done at the end of the chain, and accusing anyone who doesn’t take your bullshit at face value of being selfish for not having their life decided by said bullshit because doing so comes at the cost of the ‘harm’ you established
Bonus points if you present this as a lengthy and sanctimonious internet post from your corporate pulpit saying “Online harassment causes real harm.” or some dumb shit like that
Whoever made every wireless earbud set have an annoying ‘low battery’ alert every ten seconds needs to be held accountable. (Physically. (In Minecraft))
The purpose is to inform you that the battery is low, I get it, but the righteous goal of making sure I know it’s low is not worth making it unusable. If you think I didn’t hear it the first time, the third time, the fifth time, if you think it’s possible to listen to anything with that grating warning, if you think your warning is SO DAMN IMPORTANT that LITERALLY MUTING THE AUDIO JUST TO DELIVER THE IRRITATING NOISE that I’ve ALREADY HEARD FIVE TIMES is necessary, you should not have the right to design hardware.
Seriously, the way it mutes while it’s playing is awful. Not only is the designer so self-important about their stupid alarm, but they have the audacity to WASTE AUDIO THAT’S PLAYING! What if you were having a conversation that affected your whole life, a conversation with a dying relative, or with a partner that might break up with you, or the directions home when you’re lost, and every moment, every slightest fragment of audial information could decide your LIFE, and this dumbass alarm that’s already superfluous and present only at the behest of an incompetent dipshit, APPARENTLY TAKES SO MUCH MORE PRIORITY THAT THE OTHER AUDIO HAS TO BE MUTED!
And if that’s not bad enough, the alarm usually sounds like audial torture. You’re lucky if it’s a monotone, dead-sounding robot voice, because otherwise it’s an ear-bleeding tone, or the voice of a whiny suburbanite blonde soccer mom, the kind who will inform you that when her son died, she, rather than letting him pass in dignity, sang You Are My Sunshine to him, probably so she could feel like one of the moms she saw in a Hallmark movie, and she makes sure to tell you this openly because she legitimately thinks it’s ‘meaningful’ rather than being ashamed that she’s openly confessing that she made her son’s death into a cliche in order to feel profound! Okay, that was a messed up tangent, but you get my point.
Honestly, these alarms are like the people who preach to you about health. Like, yeah, I heard you the first time, yeah I’m gonna die before 60 because I don’t care about Zumba, keto or kale, repeating it won’t deliver the message to me more than it has, it makes me care less about it and care more about how annoying and patronizing you are!
tl;dr Wireless earbud alarms are stupid and do less to warn you than they do to make the bottom 20% of your earbud power useless.
The main form of ‘brainrot’ is the memes thereabout. And most of them are just repeating the same stupid depictions of ‘what the younger generation is like’ in the exact same way that geriatrics and Facebook moms are always like ‘ha, PHONE! MILLENNIAL! MILLENNIAL ARE ALWAYS PHONE!’ endlessly, sometimes with more melodramatic or existential variations, the one lowest common denominator being that THEY ALWAYS THOUGHT THEY WERE BEING 100% NOVEL AND INSIGHTFUL DESPITE IT LITERALLY BEING THE SAME SHIT EVERY TIME!
THAT! IS WHAT YOU ARE DOING!
“Ha, SKIBIDI! GEN ALPHA! GEN ALPHA ARE OBSESSED SKIBIDI! CUT MY LIFE INTO PIECES! THIS IS MY GYATT RIZZART! MEW ADDICTION! LOOKSMAXXING, I’M GONNA STARVE IF THERE’S MORE FANUM TAXING!”
AARGHGHHRGHADSI;GHF;OJAGSH’DSpiHGTASOHDG;JAOF YHWIED
'FSLFDKS;
STOP IT!
STOP!
IT!
YOU’RE MORE LOST THAN THEM! STUCK IN YOUR ENDLESS LOOP! THEY’RE CHILDREN! WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE?!
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
“I can’t believe I have to say thi-”
NO. Stop. Shut up. Shut your exceedingly foolish mouth up.
You do not have to deliver whatever condescending statement you were about to say/just said. You do not have to talk down to every person in whatever chat room/comments section you’re in just because there exists some overgrown child or intentional renegade to whom your statement is actually a relevant instruction. Even if they were here presently, you do not have some special qualification to say what you’re saying that obligates you to say it, nor which would make you more compelling than anyone else would would say the same thing to that person as a knee-jerk reaction, if they knew who they were talking to. There is not even a guarantee that the person that should know the thing you’re saying would even accept it if they heard it from you, or from anyone, and they likely don’t even do that much reading anyway, so just put your virtual tongue back in your virtual mouth and we’ll speak no more of this. Capiche?
I hate the word ‘vibrant’ (usually)
Specifically, I hate when people use it as a tacked-on adjective to croon at some city or group like a pair of fifty-year-old church ladies at a slime-mouthed baby. We get how this thing satisfies your generic list of modern virtues that you probably only espouse outwardly because it’s what every Vice writer or whatever must do to show how with-it they are, but you don’t need to cream your journalistic pants with adjective jizz just to spread your gushing enthusiasm about some corner of New York.
This is, of course, part of the more general issue of people who think that adding adjectives for the sake of doing so to their sentences makes for better writing. I think this is what they teach in first grade, and then later, when you’re old enough for them to respect your intelligence, they take it back. But most people seem to get the initial indoctrination into the adjective exalters drilled into them so deeply that when the time comes to pull out the pointless thumbscrews of their original mis-education out, they’re simply stuck in too deep.
I see it on this site, too, especially with those weird guys who will chain four fucking descriptors together before getting to the damn noun, just to emphasize how much they want to croon over the furry lady. It’s sick, and not just because they’re horny, but because they do it with a long procession of words which are mostly vague, ‘nice’ adjectives that serve no purpose except to, again, croon at the object of your affection like a duo of pre-geriatrics bubbling at an infant that is dripping with slime at one end and unspeakable filth at the padded one.
What’s worse is when they do it with words whose intensity goes up and down–‘Gorgeous, BEAUTIFUL, silly, lovely’–like damn it, at least organize them somewhat, if you’re going to keep a whole menagerie of them in each sentence! I get you’re typing this with one hand and your brain is presently addled with arousal at–usually–a figure with circles for breasts, but you could just not comment, damn it! Instead, as if feeling an obligation to pay the artist back for your ejaculation, you drop either what I just described above, or a compliment attached to a basic description of the picture, as if, again, regressing to elementary school when they’d tell you to write down ‘the cat is in the cage’ at some clipart of a cat grasping (unrealistically for a non-anthropomorphic feline, I might add) at the inside of a bird cage which is inexplicably large enough for it, staring down morosely at a bird which is immediately outside the cage, looking up at it.
Now, obviously, the word ‘vibrant’ has its place, like when talking about peacocks, or poison dart frogs, or people’s skin after using your scam cosmetic product, but NOT WHEN TALKING ABOUT THE SEVENTH CORNER OF NEW YORK YOU’RE WRITING ABOUT THIS WEEK!
People who end public apologies by saying that they’re going to ‘be better going forward’ should legally be considered to have no soul
I absolutely hate this phrase.
“Pull 'em out and measure 'em.”
Or just the phrase “dick-measuring”, or the wink-wink, nod-nod use of the word “compensation”, you get my point.
Legitimately, underlying this kind of talk is the insinuation that to be a man is to be an animal whose ego is centered directly around something as animalistic as your reproductive organs. Why? Because a centuries-old dead man who also projected his incestuous tendencies on all mankind told you so.
You baselessly degrade a man to an animal, to puff up your own smugness and self-perceived enlightenment, because you think that what makes a smart person is listening to designated smart person ideas, but in reality you’re just exposing yourself as a mindless follower who’ll accept anything as long as it’s spoonfed to them by an intellectual authority, all while sitting there with your unearned self-satisfaction from talking down revoltingly to people who are probably smarter than you, because despite whatever reason you in your infantile wisdom see fit to talk down to them, they at least aren’t suckling off the ideological teat of a man who wanted to have sex with his own mother and claiming that that makes them refined intelligentsia.
The same thing applies to thinking that ‘haha you have small penis’ is a clever insult and not a middle-school throwaway line, only that is also usually compounded with the kind of mindless Buzzfeedesque ‘you go girl’ support that in and of itself also is an infuriating combination of 1. infantile and 2. incomprehensibly lauded as the absolute pinnacle of wit, bolstered with smugness that elicits the desire to peel skin and crush bone.
The trifecta is the same: Unjustified degradation, unearned self-satisfaction, absolute vacuity of the head. One of those things is bad enough, but multiple just squares the blistering anger it makes anyone who isn’t lobotomized off of Reddit or yaaas-queen-slay-ery feel. To be stupid is one thing, but to be stupid and smug as if you’re Sherlock Holmes is miles worse. To be needlessly condescending is worse than either stupidity or unearned smugness on their own, but to be all three makes my veins want to erupt like Mount Vesuvius.
Not every ‘smart’ thing is ‘pseudo-intellectual’
At some point, people have gone from calling pretentious things pretentious to calling anything that has a ‘smart’ sound to it ‘pretentious’ or ‘pseudo-intellectual’, as if, because pseudointellectuals try to sound smart, that means everything that tries to or does sound smart/profound/eye-opening/etc must therefore be only pretending to be that.
The worst part is that seemingly, in the eyes of most, to call something pretentious/pseudointellectual is to be correct, and to be proved wiser or more mature than the person you’re ‘calling out’, or at least whoever doesn’t share your cynicism about that person. To most, as soon as someone says you’re ‘pretentious’, they are right, and you are pseudointellectual, and they are very witty and cool for saying that, and you or anyone else that disagrees is either salty or a blind thrall of your idiocy.
The thing is, while an actual pseudointellectual might try and make people feel dumb to cover up the lack of substantial meaning in what he says or makes, the pendulum swings the other way. People can actually fail to understand things because they lack the ability to understand them, or because they disagree with them and are biased, or literally just because they want to feel like a big boy calling out the stupid speech/essay/art piece for being ‘pretentious’. It’s just that anything that looks high minded is eligible to be called pretentious without question.
Yes, a smart person can make a hard concept easy to understand, but that’s a sign of excelling both in understanding and in communication, and not every idea can be dumbed down without losing information or meaning.
It’s not a matter of
"sounds smart = stupid baby trying to sound smart
sounds like baby = actually really smarty pants"
it’s
"smart thing sounds smart and hard to understand
simple thing sounds simple and easy to understand
increasing the difficulty of understanding = stupid baby trying to sound smart
decreasing the difficulty of understanding = actually really smarty pants"
and also
"some things are just dumb and can be made to sound smart yet still have holes in their logic when they do
some things are deep to dumb people, whether or not they’re true"
Fake geniuses making people feel dumb for not getting nonsense and people who are actually dumb trying to cover for the fact that they can’t understand or appreciate something with an actually deeper point by calling it ‘pretentious’ are two sides of the same coin, but only one is mocked and/or held accountable.
There’s just as much unearned smugness and self-aggrandizement in receiving an impression, not even thinking, and smugly declaring ‘oooh, are slash eye am very smart!’ and having your fellow Kindergarten class’ worth of R*dditors cheer you on and talk over the person that you haven’t even woken up your brain to try and understand. In fact, not only do you get that, in that case, but so do every one of those manchildren cheering with you at having dethroned another counterfeit guru, because they’re proving their infinite wisdom by assenting to yours. Meanwhile something actually valuable has been lost on a gaggle of impaired toddlers from Reddit who mutually affirm each others’ genius while being too stunted to do anything else.
Even now I’m sure someone who will read this is making assumptions that I myself must have been called out by someone and am writing this essay to seethe & cope, because again, most people conceive of the ‘caller out’ as always shrewd, and any defense of what they’re berating is coping/impotent attempts at recovery/outrage at being called out.
The caller out is forever without need for proof or qualifications. The called out is forever without hope of retort or contradiction. Against the one that decides that I am, or that anyone is ‘just trying to be deep’, there is no defense for anyone, because the moment that arbitrary branding has been made then any other words or expression are absorbed into it. My rhetoric is the rhetoric of a pretentious person, it is thus pretentious and thus whatever I say or do can by no means defend against the charge of pretense. Whoever has called me pretentious has made a triumph, their triumph is guaranteed whether they make it in ignorance or in a genuinely justified manner, because through whatever line of logic they reached to make that statement, victory and a projection of wit will be assigned to them, spoonfed to them.
In the end there comes a point where people will call everything pretentious without being able to say what they are pretending to be, because any idea which could be brought forth will, too, be called merely pretentious, all pretending with nothing to pretend to be, all because people are so hell bent on riding out this cheap path to gratification and feeling smart by accusing others of the same solely for sounding smart.
Death of the author literacy crisis
Everyone who claims we have a ‘media literacy crisis’ displays not what they intend to–that people are losing the ability to ‘get’ the meaning of media.
Rather, they attest to their own inability to comprehend actual free thinking, because (I suspect) they themselves never developed past the kindergarten stage of intellectualism, where the ‘agreeing with the teacher’ is equated to intelligence. Only now, it’s evolved to whatever intellectual authority mentally chews your food for you. ‘Education’, to such people, is being branded on the brain with whatever you were taught to think, and however many of them may call themselves ‘free thinkers’ actually are just regurgitating from those who called themselves the same. They either have no actual concept of thinking for themselves, or, if they do, they only understand it as a concept, rather than putting that idea into practice in reality.
In such a mind, the only ‘right’ way to interpret any work of art is ‘how the author intended’, because again, their definition of intelligence or intellectual ‘correctness’ is ‘agreeing with whoever is in a position of intellectual authority’.
That’s not how this works. Not only can a person naturally just perceive something and see it in a different way than it was intended, but some ‘messages’ in media are built on pre-assumptions that certain aspects of the reader’s/viewer’s/player’s beliefs are the same as that of the author. Actually, most ‘messages’ are predicated on at least some pre-established beliefs. So if a person’s beliefs differ from those upon which a message is built, they’re not going to ‘get’ it, unless they somehow know how their beliefs differ from the author’s, and that in itself requires information beyond the medium.
Also, I should add, I do really think that anything that can only be interpreted one way has strayed from being art and towards being propaganda. Art (at least, most art) should be something in and of itself: If a piece of art is solely there to be a vessel for rhetoric, it’s less art, and if not propaganda then a parable, or an overcomplicated metaphor, or just a husk of art wrapped around a statement. But if art is ‘something’ in and of itself, then its message is something attached to it, but not the art itself, and in that case the art must therefore be able to be interpreted in some other way than was meant, intentionally or unintentionally.
Yes, some people can be unaware of what was meant by a story, character or event within a story. Some people, however, can sense an author’s intent and disagree with it, and intentionally manifest their disagreement by intentionally seeing the work in a different way based on how their views on the underlying message differ. And, some people can be edgy contrarians and want to disagree to be ‘rebellious’. And some people just don’t care.
All of these differences completely fly over the heads of the ‘muh media literacy crisis’ people, because in their minds, either you agree with ‘the teacher’ and are right, or you don’t, and are wrong. And since nobody would ever choose to be wrong, (or suggest that one could be right while disagreeing,) it must obviously be due to an inability to understand what ‘the teacher’ is saying, so they patronizingly hand out gold stars to people who ‘are able to understand the teacher’, and pat people on the head for having no opinion of their own on the message of the story, but instead repeating what they were intended to think.
Of course, maybe I’m wrong, and these people are, in fact, aware of differences in opinion and the ability to make up your own meaning of a story, but are just turning a blind eye to it so they can feel superior by being condescending. That’s not much better, but I don’t see a third option.
I completely agree with this. There is a deep anti-intellectual current in our society, and this game that they play is really unfair. Too often people will look at a work that’s actually trying to say something original and try to explain how non-original or pretentious it is.
I started this forum because there weren’t any serious intellectual spaces. People only want to post memes or gossip.
Wait, did I make this in Metapolitics & General, or did you move it there?
I moved it