What things are romanticized but shouldn't be?
Romanticizing poverty.
From any kind of standpoint, it is wrong. Here is a quote from the Stanford Social Innovation Review:
Market solutions to poverty are very much in vogue. These solutions, which include services and products targeting consumers at the “bottom of the pyramid,” portray poor people as creative entrepreneurs and discerning consumers. Yet this rosy view of poverty-stricken people is not only wrong but also harmful. It allows corporations, governments, and nonprofits to deny this vulnerable population the protection it needs. Romanticizing the poor also hobbles realistic interventions for alleviating poverty.
This rosy view of poverty-stricken people was a part of social practice through the centuries and it appeared in religious milieus, educational ideals, socio-political theories, art endeavors.
If we mention literature, we are reminded of Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Hector Mallot, moreover many stories for children that introduce the myth of the poor girl/boy, as in Cinderella or Jack and the Bean Stalk, and many other stories about poverty, whose allusive content seems almost right because all is good when it end is good. And we have to pinpoint the paintings of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and other genre art creators. This rosy view may work well for children but then we understand that art objects present the same view about poverty, in order to equilibrate social injustice with good-natured people or good-natured social roles and statuses.
Maybe these realms will stay like this for a long time and maybe it is not wrong. Yet I believe that in regards to social work, one should assume the truth about such situations and about this bias created by romanticizing the poor.
What are some brutal truths about life that no book will tell you?
They don’t really tell that life is beautiful and worth living. They don’t tell that goodness is better than wickedness, they don’t tell that patience and love and other virtues really play an important role in life, they don’t tell that peace is usually the better path. These things are deemed to be too naive.
Almost the entire literature is sprinkled with evil conclusions and evil characters. It is like an ill-fated man’s sweat and tears. Not to mention famous literature or famous quotes. For the sake of making a profit, almost everything is written in black and only seldom in black and white. Think about every “good” book, dare to give me a famous example of a purposeful good book! Even realistic books tell mostly evil things about life.
Compared with other genres, only autobiographical stories or some essays or philosophical writings seem to tell something good or something logical and neutral and bring into awareness the overall good that surrounds us. Otherwise, many readers value life more after reading a book, because they get rid of different nightmares and they think that they are luckier and that life is bliss compared with the situations portrayed in that book. Real-life is not like books say, it can be seldom worth and it is usually better. Because the book is a kind of media, it acts like television sometimes - I mean that it shows evil facts in the disfavor of good and normal things. That’s why memoirs almost always contain more good facts than fiction in literature.
Good things are much more frequent than bad things, but the media show means no news good news! Books are the same. I don’t deny their real educational purpose. But we must recall that human beings present much more similarities than differences and crime or pure evil are exceptional cases, being sometimes overemphasized in books. Suspicious minds see evil beforehand, while logical thinking tells us that absolute evil is an exception because we are human. Yet I have to pinpoint the fact that books are important because they tell us that some evil things can really happen, they mimic the truth and create an allegory of social life. They would have been boring and less moralistic if they would have told the truth about good and normal life. Maybe writers like Thomas Mann are closer to the dull and real show of life.
Do you agree with Gore Vidal when he said "The unfed mind devours itself"?
I don’t think so.
If one cannot have sensory data as food for thought, then he can still imagine things or just think about what he already knew. I am thinking about acquired deafness of blindness. Anyway, some misfortunate situations like being isolated for many years or being imprisoned provided material for studying what happens when a mind is not fed. Good stories were written while the authors were in prison. Even Robinson Crusoe had a Bible with him.
Prison literature - Wikipedia
Another similar feeding is done by understanding and exercising more complex thought processes. Reading, writing, talking, listening to, composing, deciding, experiencing positive emotions, planning future events or technical solutions are normal and necessary things for one’s life. Their impeachment leads to dismal states of mind. But this does not mean that the mind is devouring itself.
First, we have to define what is the mind and what means the verb devouring in this context. Most disagreements appear because those who communicate don’t have the same map of concepts. But this is the normality of social life and the source of some progress in thought. The unfed mind cannot survive properly, thus it cannot devour itself. But it can age, it can be damaged. Yet this sentence is true regarding the fact that a mind must be alive, thus it uses some of the past data and thought fruits in order to function properly. It does not mean devouring itself till the last drop, it usually means reinforcing old patterns of thought or old memories, etc.
But if we think about the mind as being split, partly unconscious or connected to other people who were present in one’s life, then we can add that the present-day and conscious ego can be submerged by the other parts of one’s self, and it seems like being devoured by one’s self or one’s unconscious mind. But is not devouring, it is just using it the best way possible. The mind has to be busy and to be fed, in order to coordinate the body and her own individuality and personality. Otherwise, what’s left if a body is totally unconscious - like in a state of coma? Can we talk about devouring one’s self?
Marcus Aurelius said: "The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts". Is Marcus correct?
I do believe that Marcus Aurelius was right. I agree with philosophical standpoints about abstract ideas like happiness, freedom, moral choices, and I believe that happiness is an inwardly directed attitude. Happiness points within and cajoles our conscience. Thus, happy people are prone to help and love other persons. Happiness can lead to actions. Happiness is the perception of reflective subjective values in our psyche forum, and sometimes, just like in the Roman forum architectural display, the environment helps in overhauling our inward values, e.g. our self-esteem or overall vision of the human world.
Happiness depends upon the quality of our thinking and less upon its quantity or thematic content. We can think about seasons and climatic properties that affect humans or we can think about the ecosystem or about the history of civilizations, or simply about the everyday struggles and transient goals. In each of these cases, one can assume the right conclusions instead of the wrong doubts or ideas. The concordance between our thought and actual reality results in a better mastership of our lives - both in action and in feelings. Like this, one can be able to enjoy life better and to agree with reality, through understanding. And if he must do changes to the world, then he knows which path of action is better, projecting happy moments into the future.
When it comes to external harmful circumstances, the quality of our thoughts is very important in order to equilibrate the whole of our psychological life with the over-demanding regnum of necessities. There are many so-called mechanisms of defense, but I think that what matters the most is keeping it all within a frame of calm and realistic happiness, e.g. thinking about the way we did our best and the way we fulfilled our duties (specific for Stoic thought) or the way we faced them avoiding fleeing, which is not a permanent solution. More emphasis upon the joy of being useful - at least a little bit - to others or to oneself. It is about responsibility like ”you’ve made your bed, now lie in it”, but there is a danger of intolerance in applying this idiom because in some situations we cannot build our future by ourselves. Still, we can have a better knowledge of the whole situation.
Elvis Presley's song quote: “The man who can sing when he hasn't got a thing, he's the king of the whole wide world.”
What is your favorite form of art and why?
I begin with the lyrics from the song With A Little Help From My Friends:
Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song
And I'll try not to sing out of key
The arts are talking firstly with the senses of the public, and only secondly with their mind or soul/emotivity. Thirdly with their attitudes, values, and ideals. The importance of these realms of one’s personality regarding the reception of the artistic object may vary from person to person, but their magnitude or visible effect relies upon the psychological conversion from sensory perception towards mental associations and interpretations and then towards the judgment of their aesthetic, moral, educational importance.
The artistic process usually comprises a communicational order of things - the artist is the emitter and the public is the receptor, and it is a specific communication differing from art to art because the different parts of this dialogue are different and differently engaged in his process. That’s why we talk about visual arts for example.
Thus every art is a close dialogue between two persons, intending to nourish and cure or to specifically develop socially accepted and socially desirable skills and visions about things within the consumers’ bodies and minds. I think that everyone knows that every art serves only the subjective individual although it addresses larger parts of the social world. Art, just like education is a form of communal eucharistic communion, it intends to organize human beings on a larger scale, making them fitter and more productive and harmonious as social structures by sharing the same informational content within their bodies and minds.
Art is a synergetic process, a kind of telling it all at the same time - resounding in people’s psyches. But, just like it happens in every communicational context, people don’t end up having precisely the same images or ideas about some object of art. When we communicate with others, we cannot transmit the intended meaning of our message, but only the verbal form of the concepts with their intonation and sound properties. Taken as smaller unities, even the words themselves cannot be entirely understood by others the way that we do this, let alone the vast differences between our inner felt sense and emotions triggered by them. This art is a public domain, but a very particular and idiosyncratic experience. Apart from a particular mother-tongue being common to a larger group of people, art is another kind of commonality, feeding the senses of one embodied individual in an intense manner, giving a little bit more input for thought than the habitual sensory processes. Literature is slightly different because it uses mediating words, though it can act in a direct manner in order to engage the brain in this over-stimulation or over-feeding our senses and minds.
Like this, the brain is deftly overstimulated or forced to engage in a special dialogue with another world of images, sounds, ideas - and different vectors departing from one sensory cerebral area are aiming at arousing emotions and ideas, agreement or anger within other parts of our brain and sometimes even the will to react. And all these things happen in a huge common temple of culture and civilization.
That’s why, having to choose between the different main stimuli, characteristic to different forms of art, I pick up music as my favorite art. We lend our ears, that is our sensory areas in our brain, in order to become the instruments in this gigantic orchestra of things - where our own brain is connected through senses, imagination, and memory with the rest of the world. We are the soft grass bending under the summer wind just as much as we are the sound of the cars speeding on on a highway. We are a part of others’ people psyche as well. We are connected with the rest of the living beings.
Music is the best form of reenactment in my opinion, and the best form of catharsis too. It is about learned vibrations, it is about ourselves, maybe the only thing that can express raw feelings or emotional states. Words bring to life feelings in an indirect manner while the beauty of music resides in the way it unravels feelings directly from their flowerbed within our brain. Whilst listening, we too are playing at the same time, because our world resonates with the sound of music, it internalizes and externalizes the music. Just like a bunch of sunrays, the music fills our room and our bodies. It is like heavenly bliss to me, a wonder, especially classical music.
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