I will start with the earliest time that I can personally remember, the 80's. Also this is what I was thinking about when I decided that it was worth trying to contrast different ideas from the past and other places, to now.
I was wearing an oversized pink shirt with a black line drawing on it I had mainly bought because it reminded me of something I used to have when I was 4. Some old eighties music was playing, like early Madonna tunes and that sort of thing, and there were some retro looking disco lights. It was strange being in a kind of recreation of something that didn't exist anymore, and made me also realise that the reason that it didn't exist anymore wasn't because the music or clothing wasn't around anymore. The music is overplayed, and the clothing is oversold because fashions are recycled and they have been really pushing sales of the eighties over the last few years. However this wasn't really the eighties (or otherwise you could say they are around way too much recently, and there would be no reason for anyone to miss them or say they had ever left). People experience a place or time as a philosophy more than as a material artefact like clothing or commercial music. By philosophy I am thinking of a mindset, way of social interaction, widely held opinions and so on.
The second problem I thought of was that the eighties seem inaccurately remembered by the media. The kind of "eighties clothing" they sell now are thick tights, over long fitted t-shirts, plastic hoop earrings. The same streamlined and self-conscious look that fits in with today's fashions in general. When the eighties philosophy is mentioned by the media, that seems even more inaccurate. Every time an article mentions an eighties mindset, words like "excess", "greed" come up.
Then there are the people that are enshrined forever in my mind in the time that they were young and beautiful and I was small and easily impressed. Their mindset seemed exceedingly carefree, glowing from coconut tan oil and wandering in small groups without seemingly any goal except to be present, with any disheaveled clothing thrown on, the more messed up the better. Back before people were endlessly programmed in prolonged education, they who had roamed at will since childhood had become adolescents with all the self-assurance of an adult and all the freedom of a child. Their golden years were endless. Jeans were torn, below the knee and along the thigh, but most crucially on the butt cheeks. To complete the look, ideally the hand of the partners walking side by side would be in each other's back pockets. This spoke for some of the important values at the time, such as that pleasure was more important than self-consciousness, and that being seen or noticed (no such thing as positively or negatively- there was no distinction) was an aspiration.
Some echo of some of these ideas exists in media interpretations of eighties mindsets, such as the tag of pleasure-seeking, although given a totally different meaning in the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Those were the ones who made it into the magazines and onto tv at the time- in later times, their contemporary equivalents warped even that original misinterpretation further. The idea of buying pleasure from purchase of luxury brands and jewellery and cruises- in more emotionally deprived times like today, these excesses might give rise to anger and indignation, but how could it have been anything but a sad and pathetic failed attempt back then to imitate what they could not even understand, chained to a status made vacuous by a population who did not respect it? The idols were the local teens that seemed forever locked in a time warp, esconced in a hedonist paradise from which they would never awake.
But who will praise the idols now, who automatically deserve praise for being idols, the inspiration for all that saw them including the powerful and rich who tried to emulate them, failed even to understand them, and then wrote their own incorrect version of events which the future generations are now subjected to consuming? What could ever be a more inaccurate depiction of them than that they desired economic status?
So what am I supposed to do when I am reading about a philosophy that is thousands of years old? Even where writings exist in close to their original form, isn't it likely that there was another, greater philosophy behind it, that was lived everyday by some groups of people but was never written down for their illiteracy or was written in bits but lost over time? A greater philosophy that inspired the scholars who are given the credit, but the true essence of which mainly eluded them?
I was wearing an oversized pink shirt with a black line drawing on it I had mainly bought because it reminded me of something I used to have when I was 4. Some old eighties music was playing, like early Madonna tunes and that sort of thing, and there were some retro looking disco lights. It was strange being in a kind of recreation of something that didn't exist anymore, and made me also realise that the reason that it didn't exist anymore wasn't because the music or clothing wasn't around anymore. The music is overplayed, and the clothing is oversold because fashions are recycled and they have been really pushing sales of the eighties over the last few years. However this wasn't really the eighties (or otherwise you could say they are around way too much recently, and there would be no reason for anyone to miss them or say they had ever left). People experience a place or time as a philosophy more than as a material artefact like clothing or commercial music. By philosophy I am thinking of a mindset, way of social interaction, widely held opinions and so on.
The second problem I thought of was that the eighties seem inaccurately remembered by the media. The kind of "eighties clothing" they sell now are thick tights, over long fitted t-shirts, plastic hoop earrings. The same streamlined and self-conscious look that fits in with today's fashions in general. When the eighties philosophy is mentioned by the media, that seems even more inaccurate. Every time an article mentions an eighties mindset, words like "excess", "greed" come up.
Then there are the people that are enshrined forever in my mind in the time that they were young and beautiful and I was small and easily impressed. Their mindset seemed exceedingly carefree, glowing from coconut tan oil and wandering in small groups without seemingly any goal except to be present, with any disheaveled clothing thrown on, the more messed up the better. Back before people were endlessly programmed in prolonged education, they who had roamed at will since childhood had become adolescents with all the self-assurance of an adult and all the freedom of a child. Their golden years were endless. Jeans were torn, below the knee and along the thigh, but most crucially on the butt cheeks. To complete the look, ideally the hand of the partners walking side by side would be in each other's back pockets. This spoke for some of the important values at the time, such as that pleasure was more important than self-consciousness, and that being seen or noticed (no such thing as positively or negatively- there was no distinction) was an aspiration.
Some echo of some of these ideas exists in media interpretations of eighties mindsets, such as the tag of pleasure-seeking, although given a totally different meaning in the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Those were the ones who made it into the magazines and onto tv at the time- in later times, their contemporary equivalents warped even that original misinterpretation further. The idea of buying pleasure from purchase of luxury brands and jewellery and cruises- in more emotionally deprived times like today, these excesses might give rise to anger and indignation, but how could it have been anything but a sad and pathetic failed attempt back then to imitate what they could not even understand, chained to a status made vacuous by a population who did not respect it? The idols were the local teens that seemed forever locked in a time warp, esconced in a hedonist paradise from which they would never awake.
But who will praise the idols now, who automatically deserve praise for being idols, the inspiration for all that saw them including the powerful and rich who tried to emulate them, failed even to understand them, and then wrote their own incorrect version of events which the future generations are now subjected to consuming? What could ever be a more inaccurate depiction of them than that they desired economic status?
So what am I supposed to do when I am reading about a philosophy that is thousands of years old? Even where writings exist in close to their original form, isn't it likely that there was another, greater philosophy behind it, that was lived everyday by some groups of people but was never written down for their illiteracy or was written in bits but lost over time? A greater philosophy that inspired the scholars who are given the credit, but the true essence of which mainly eluded them?
