We truly believe in the ideal. All of our actions show this. People are amazed when a family doesn't contain two parents of opposite gender and two kids. If they held up a mirror, they would quickly see that their lives don't even come close to the ideal that has been created in the collective unconscious and with media's assistance. Yet there are so few people prepared to take that journey of discovery. Is my life authentic? Am I yearning for an ideal that doesn't exist? Where does the ideal come from? Why was it created?
More and more we are presented with the antithesis of the uniform world that dominates our ideal images. Yes, there are people of every colour. Yes, there are gay people. Yes, disabled people exist. Yes, people are single. Yes, many people choose other options over marriage. Yes Yes Yes. This is not a world that contains a single image. We are everything and everyone. The human race has so many facets, sociologists and psychologists spend their lives trying to note them down.
Yet still we persist in our dream world. There are people that so strongly want to believe in that ideal picket fence world, they cover their eyes and minds to any reality that shows them different. The preacher that dictates commitment, love and a higher learning. The same one that is arrested for paedophilia. Or the husband that tells the world how he painted his white fence and then goes home and beats his wife.
The world of fifty years ago is not the world today. White America is not the only existence. But people feel safe when they have clarity.
"Oh this is how it should be."
"This is what I should work towards because it is what is right."
We are fed these images as a means of control. If you want people to be sheep, you show them the ideal sheep and the imagined rewards for that ideal sheep. You teach them to make sheep noises and you point them in the right direction. You explain how being anything but white sheep is wrong. You come up with expressions like "black sheep".
People can be surrounded by a multitude of images and experiences that negate the ideal sheep
image but still they choose to believe in the imaginary. Why? Will looking at their own lives and understanding that difference is the norm destroy everything? Or does it mean they may have to think for themselves, create a reality that is individual rather than force fed?
Thursday 10 April 2008
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