Postmodern culture tends to deconstruct the theories of the past and at the same time obscure the truth. It is inevitable. Even if you try really hard to prove that you are different, that you do care about your roots and about those values that made your parents and the parents of your parents able to make an impact in their era, somehow you find yourself gasping, sucked into what it is the unavoidable tornado of pop culture. After the demolition of the puritan dogma, which stated that ‘seriousness is one thing and pleasure is another’, one cannot help to wonder whether popular culture could make you a better person. Can pop culture awaken your inner instincts and drive you to be a better person?
If we consider pop artists it is mostly clear how incredibly well it all worked out for them. Lady Gaga for an instance constantly claims how stardom and fame has always inspired her to become that mix of fashion-music-art phenomenon of the 21st Century. What it desperately needs to be addressed is the reasons why individuals, a concept that has become so strong within the postmodernist times, lack of single capacity to detect if the values they’ve been brought up with are correct. Instead they seem to passively accept them, becoming part of the intoxicating unrolling of what has become the capitalism lifestyle.
Fortunately not all individuals are the same. Usually the frustrated and sad ones are able to detect the lack of moral values that the contemporary society is filled with, and eventually begin a meticulous research of what is authentic. Where is the truth hiding? What is the truth?
I personally think that it doesn’t take an extraordinary sensitivity to perceive that there is something wrong with modern theories that have been inculcated in our brains from modern society. Just try to spend one day fulfilling the postmodernist keystone rules. By that I mean to visit expensive restaurants, shopping malls, sipping cocktails at the Soho Hotel and flipping through pages of gossip magazines whilst talking to your close mate about the latest TV show that everybody seemed to be getting into: “The Only Way is Essex” a painful and tacky tracking-shot of bad actors and crazy make-up artists. If at the end of the day you won’t be frustrated by the lack of values as well as feeling as sense of emptiness then you are silly and superficial.
And to be honest, I am not sure what is worst: being oblivious to what is really going on, or on the contrary being able to get underneath the surface in order to discover the real, getting to the bottom of human culture, raising questions regarding the unbearable difference between rich and poor, the climate change, technology taking over the world, and the evident economic exhaustion of the financial systems. Terry Eagleton states that ‘innocence and amnesia have their advantages’. Just like a child who is unaware of the realities that surround him, people that ignore tend suffer less than people that actually do realize what is going on. But why shall we be oblivious to what is around us? Isn’t the ability to analyze things and formulate our own thoughts what makes us different and, most of the times, better than animals? So, shall we keep leading our lives with no sense of belonging and community? The answer is obvious to me.
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