The liberal cult of ugliness

Yesterday a reader sent this photo of Jamaican gold medal-winning runner Usain Bolt and three Swedish handball players that Bolt had posted on his Facebook page:

If the people known by the author of Genesis had all
looked like this, would he have thought of saying that
man was made in the image and likeness of God?

Patrick H. has further commentary on it:

It’s interesting that the Swedish handball players manage to make themselves look so unappealing despite superficially tolerable feminine good looks. Their hair is dried-out, matted, looks uncombed and dull. None of them seems to be happy or amused or enjoying herself at all. None appears to be smiling. (Speaking of which, have you noticed how it is considered the height of female sexiness to have a blank or even hostile expression on the face?) Perhaps they are smiling behind the gang signs obscuring their lower faces, but notice the slattern in front whose mouth is visible. She is pouting in what appears to be an effort to mimic the everted lips of the negress.

And they look tired. Their eyes are puffy, their skin looks pasty, their foreheads are lined like those of much older women. No doubt they’re drunk, These women do not appear to be the Amazonian type so relentlessly hyped these last long weeks, but they do seem to be trying to look as downwardly mobile as possible. That they are sitting there with this equally repulsive Negro simply reinforces their appearance as trailer park trash. And this, I suspect, is the point of the picture. If women are white and feminine, not Amazonian multi-racial transgendered mutants, they will be shown as lower class garbage, slatternly, ragged, drunk. the concubines of a stupid violent ghetto thug.

P.S. Whether Usain Bolt is stupid, violent or a thug is irrelevant. That is how he is acting and how he looks in that picture. A thug in his glory, surrounded by his harem of drunken slatternly white trash. That is the point of the picture, and of those who celebrate it.

LA replies:

Not for the first time at this site, Patrick has hit one out of the park.

I would add this: that the liberal cult of self-esteem and self-worship, and the liberal cult of messiness and ugliness that we see being celebrated at the Olympics, go together. But how can this be? If liberal humanity worships and glorifies itself, as I’ve argued, why would liberals also be so powerfully attracted to representations of ugliness, unpleasantness, disharmony, meaninglessness, and despair? If liberals worship themselves, wouldn’t they want to be beautiful, not ugly?

Here is the answer. Liberals believe that there is no value, no truth, higher than the self, because if there were a truth higher than the self, the self would not be free. Also, some selves would be closer to that truth and others farther from it, which would mean that all selves are not equal. Therefore any standard of beauty or good behavior, any ideal of harmony, must be rejected and overthrown, since any such standard or ideal would limit the freedom of the self. The very idea of the good must be toppled, since it limits our freedom. Which ultimately means that a world of ugliness, disharmony, and bad behavior, of jangling, unpleasant impressions (as in the dress and demeanor of the Olympics athletes, or as in our nihilist popular movies such as The Dark Knight series), in short, a world of despair, becomes the ideal, because such things express the freedom of the self from any belief in the good.

Thus the liberal cult of self-glorification, and the liberal cult of ugliness and despair, do not contradict each other, but are both part of the same liberal rebellion against truth.

As Jim Kalb recently said to me, a society treats its highest principle as divine. And since the highest principle of liberal society is that everyone has his own “truth” and that there is no objective truth, liberal society treats the non-existence of truth as divine. This explains the increasingly monstrous and perverted culture in which we live.

- end of initial entry -

Edward writes:

You miss the message of the picture. It is a photo of three swedish female athletes preparing to have recreational sex with Bolt and whoever is taking the picture and whoever else is in the room. They didn’t come to his room to play scrabble.

Patrick H. replies:

We missed the point of the picture? How does Edward get that from either of our comments?

LA replies:

Some people just can’t add their own point to a discussion. They have to preface their point by saying that everyone else has been missing the point.

Gintas writes:

Your correspondent wrote: “It is a photo of three swedish female athletes preparing to have recreational sex with Bolt and whoever is taking the picture and whoever else is in the room. They didn’t come to his room to play scrabble.”

They have to work through all those extra condoms.

Terry Morris writes:

Your commentary describes extreme individualism and its destructive, ultimately disastrous, effect on the human psyche.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 10, 2012 11:00 AM | Send