Why the JNU controversy affects someone like me

As someone who is not overly interested in politics, this is a strange sort of article to write. But although I do not ardently follow the political happenings going on around the world, I am still well aware of how directly they affect my own way of life.

                                        

The issue of intolerance/sedition that has been at the centre of debate and discussion for a while now with regards to the JNU controversy is at its core a simple one. My own political views are a bit unorthodox for a student, seeing that I see fascism as functional in some ways, and I’m also in agreement with Machiavelli’s views of politics. I do not think the state owes anything in particular to its people’s sentiments. The state has its ideology and it then strives to propagate this ideology in the most efficient manner, even if it means hurting a few for the good of many. But, this is only alright in a fascist society.

T

he problem we’re faced with is one of self- identification. As long as our nation identifies itself as being democratic, it is this ideology that it is sworn to protect. Regardless of all my qualms with democracy, it is easy to see the problem with the kind of nationalism going about in the country at the moment. Nationalism in a democracy must have no other meaning or connotation than to look out to serve the interests of its people. The moment nationalism starts to denote other ideas such as integrity, then we must as the question “Integrity according to whom?” In other words, what ideology provides these meanings, and in that case, why does the nation support one ideology over another?

I would hazard a guess and say that the notion of nationalism that has been going about is perhaps according to a majority community’s definition. The moment a democracy becomes about simply following the ideology of the majority, it becomes fascism of the majority. True, a democracy does function according to the wishes of the majority, but not at the expense of minority communities.

This brings me to why this issue affects me personally. Well, it’s because most of the time, I have the freedom to not care about these things under the assumption that just saying things couldn’t really get me into trouble. I mean, at the end of the day, most of us “educated” folks don’t really resort to violence because of how firmly we’ve been indoctrinated to uphold the values of peace. But this issue makes me doubt whether I really have a stake even to display my neo-fascist, Machiavellian views safely from the comfort of my bed. 

Snowcap

The two of them sat in a silence so loud that they could faintly hear the music of the flowing brook far below and the chirping of a bird that seemed to be everywhere. The silence was awkward, but less so than when they spoke in an attempt to break it, painfully aware of its awkwardness. Their eyes escaped to anywhere they could, but chance at irregular intervals brought one pair staring into the other during their movements, as if they were two fugitives hiding from each other now facing the thing that each thought was about to corner him.

The older of the two- or rather the old one- made a sound that may have indicated that he was clearing his throat but it seemed more likely that he was gargling his insides like all the words he could never express were there contained in the weight and meagreness of the phlegm choking his throat. The sound unsettled the forgotten awkwardness that now floated quite tangibly above the sleeping dust of the floor.

Owing to a sense of propriety that was an additional pressure on the younger one, he spoke “I’ve searched for you.” Seeing that the old one’s eyes were still escaping, he called out “Job”. Job’s eyes went over to the direction of the sound, but there was a vacancy about their expression, as if they were really still roaming around in the distance atop the snow-capped mountains or maybe they couldn’t remember why they answered to the sound in the first place. He couldn’t tell which was true.

As if in acknowledgement for the younger one’s sake, Job produced a short cough that then went out of his control and had its way with him- tearing apart his lungs and throat and seemingly displacing his insides- for almost two long minutes. He then decided to speak, “Tell me then, Dave.” A silence followed in which each was expecting the other to continue the conversation. But Dave was quite clearly uncertain of what to tell. A smirk formed across Job’s face, and it was as vacant as his eyes, but to Dave, it was a remnant of a thousand scornful smirks that were directed at him before. And as vacant as it was, Job knew that the significance Dave interpreted from it was all that mattered.

Unable to bear the uncertainty, Dave said, “I’ve even mentioned you in various interviews. You would know if you-“

Job, still leaning back on his chair, interrupted him calmly, “Yes, so I’ve heard. I am the mentor you mention, then?” Seeing as there was no response, he said with a snort “A mentor!”

There was something about the way he mentioned it that made Dave’s blood curdle. It was as if Job was disgusted to have to be associated on any terms with him. He’d meant it respectfully, but he knew that in Job’s mind there were a thousand problematic implications associated with it, as with anything he’d ever said or done.

Job slowly shifted his gaze to somewhere in the distance, and said in a half-whisper, “You owe me nothing!” And as if to reinforce his want for disassociation, he repeated the last word with that same blood-curdling tone Dave had heard before, “Nothing!”

And yet, his general manner of speaking was telling of a lack of focus. He might as well have spoken to the mountains just now. Perhaps he was speaking to the wooden floorboards that creaked with the gentle rocking of his chair. Perhaps he spoke to all of them. Perhaps he spoke to none of them. There was no way to tell.

“There’s no one to listen, Job” said Dave sympathetically. Job had heard him, but he continued gazing into the distance. Dave followed his gaze and saw the top of the mountain, and for a moment, he saw the both of them atop it, and the sight seemed peaceful and far removed from what he knew to be real. The two of them were simply standing there as two men, infinitely far from the ones who sat inside the small cottage gazing outside. But clouds soon covered what Dave was seeing and brought him back to the compact space he was in. At the same time, Job turned away from the mountains as well. Dave wondered if he’d perhaps seen the same things. But he knew that that wasn’t possible with them being so different from each other. 

“I breathe regardless,” Job said, the pride in his voice evident; the pride of being forgotten and unappreciated? Or the pride of knowing that the one who was appreciated, appreciated him? He couldn’t tell. Both the breathlessness Job displayed, and the rising and falling of dust each time his chair rocked one way such that there seemed to be  permanently airborne layer of dust about him, betrayed any semblance of serious consideration that could be placed on his words. And yet, Dave knew that to Job, to breathe was to create art. Regardless of the reclusive location of the valley the cottage was placed in, and the inability of the birds and beasts to place any importance on such things because they didn’t need to, and the limitations of walls to being able to tell stories but not hear them, here he was displaying what Dave could only interpret to be supreme confidence in one’s work; so supreme in fact that it seemed to betray a sense of arrogance inherent in anyone being the sole interpreter and critic of one’s work. Yet, Dave knew there would be no harsher critic of Job’s work than Job himself, much like he knew that people were always the harshest critics of their former selves.   

There was something stunted about their conversation, which a stranger might have compared to troubled breathing, but they knew it was more akin to controlled breathing in the way that one who has physically exerted himself breathes or rather holds half his gushing breath, if he wants not to appear to be gasping for air.

 A long silence followed in which Dave felt he must concentrate on important things and recollect important memories regarding his relationship with Job, but his mind wandered to irrelevant things. When he occasionally became aware of his mind’s absence, he would try to force it back from the infinite space of himself that it wandered. Thoughts of his success were brought to the forefront, as if providing an argument for a debate that wasn’t taking place.

Suddenly growing aware of the long moments which the silence fully filled, Dave started looking around the room in- what was to his mind a metaphorical search- an attempt to find a subject. And just then emerged Job’s voice, low and hazy, “Have you wondered what it’d be like to be a mountain in winter?”

Admittedly, the question caught David unawares, and he knew not what mythology Job was alluding to or what deep symbolism was layered in his question. He knew not what tenets were laid down to help him interpret the workings of Job’s mind. But he knew he must answer, and said, “I do not wonder, and I do not want to. What use is there in thinking of things that can never be?”

A pause. Then Job uttered a sound, “Hm” and for a second, Dave thought he saw Job’s disappointment creeping around somewhere in the room, but the emotion quickly ran over and away from the contours and lines of his face that he couldn’t be sure where it had come from or where it had gone to.

“I’ve thought of it; what it’d be like to be a mountain and wear a cap of snow,” Job said, and there was a hint of childlike wonder in his voice. Then, with a helpless chuckle, he yelled in a whisper, “A cap of snow!”

Dave’s face’s immediate response was to twist a smile onto itself without bothering to report to the brain of its actions. It couldn’t be helped. The image of Job’s face superimposed over a mountain, and with him smiling about his treasured snowcap that he now wore made Dave’s face react unthinkingly.  But his conscious mind caught up with the situation tiredly and he felt a certain glee as the athlete experiences when able to finally pant incessantly once he’s reached the finish line and need not run anymore. But he swept the feeling away hastily as a child sweeps away a dead bug under the carpet: both happy at the bug’s state of being, and annoyed by its presence in plain sight. And slowly, he started feeling what he knew he was supposed to be feeling. The right feeling: a feeling of both bemusement and the dawning of a realization so great that it threatened to erase his very sense of identity.

He was bemused at first because he did not know what to make of Job’s words. Was he joking? Was he having a laugh at him perhaps? But no, he seemed sincere. What if that was all there was to Job’s “great” mind? It was entirely possible that he had simply seen Job as having been great then because of his own inexperience, and continued to see him so because of the power exercised over his memories by that tyrannical force called nostalgia.

And now, a smile well under the control of his mind plastered itself onto his face and his very self. The smile was the reflection of the sense of validation he felt. Still smiling, he said to Job, slowly at first, “I owe you nothing” and then laughing a little, he repeated himself more enthusiastically, “I owe you nothing! Haha!” and went on and on, “Nothing at all!”

Job simply grinned widely, and occasionally laughed along with him as well. He might’ve wondered at Job’s glee if not for the self-consuming joy he was feeling.

Still laughing, and holding his aching sides, Dave walked over to his car parked outside without bidding Job farewell. The last he saw of Job was him sitting on his chair and gazing outside.

When the car had gone some way, Dave thought he fell asleep and saw a dream that seemed all too real. In this dream, he saw ‘Mountain Job’- the mountain with Job’s face superimposed over it- as well as two figures on this mountain, one resembling himself and the other resembling Job. Job was near the top the mountain and was walking slowly and leisurely and within some time disappeared over the horizon. Dave himself was near the middle part of the mountain and was heading down at a rapid pace and only barely managed to keep himself from falling many a time, and was soon covered by the presence of another mountain in the forefront.

All the while and even after the two of them had disappeared from sight, Mountain Job was smiling gleefully about the snowcap he wore on his head.

Where I end, Where I begin

                                                      The Sculpted Space

Through the sculpted space of his drugged mind, he contemplated the space that was sculpted in sobriety, and promised himself out of a sense of owing to his awakening, that he would not forget all that he was seeing.

For death, loneliness and the unimportance of crude poetry and bleeding music revealed such a truth of their nature to his devaluating mind.

And he thought then that the deconstruction of all emotion tied to the dying ego should somehow be saved. But such notions only revealed the inescapability of a consciousness from that which it has learned to called its self.

For it was tied inevitably in its detachment to discourses of all things that were within itself, and even devaluation or a subversion still affirms the reality of their being.

And a desire to write and echo the voices of a dead generation that might somehow lend meaning or value to the psychedelia that wished of its own to exist in its own discourse.

And he knew then that it would be reduced to a ‘trip’, but wondered what more it could mean to a mind that believes perhaps unwillingly in the fabrics that cause him to be.

He saw patterns of great meaninglessness, though such values can only be attached through poetic retrospection. And he saw the meaninglessness of all the things he otherwise derived all meaning from, and wondered which was  the illusory notion, and  came to the only answer he could in a postmodern manner of being, which was that either of them only had meaning in terms of the other.

The world that he’d always seen crumbled, and was replaced now with the mad sensibility that appropriated his perception of before as simply a notion of sobriety.

As all things: all notions; all only notions that do not belong to- or do not require believing- in a present moment that is crude existing.

And he wasn’t a man- either in terms of gender or species- but was only a feeling thing. What he was could only be known according to what he wasn’t.

He is however a man now who has desecrated all that he was by doing all that he wouldn’t have done then. But he assures himself with the life- affirming philosophies of Nietzsche that one can only live  in one reality at a time, for all else is only things that are appropriated to discourses of past or future.

He himself is a discourse that is being sculpted on the screen; a concept; a philosophy; the result of an unrandomizing of being.

He is more and less, and anything else that will be sculpted to himself.

He is mine and your suspension of disbelief in the page that is a screen that is a mirror.

He is our child. The gestated being of our imaginings.

                                                                    The Strangered Face

Wandered like a vagabond the next day. Out of body experiences do affect one indefinitely. Thought of having seen the self from an other’s vision, but it was only from the eyes of another within the same self.

The experience of one is always communicable, but the truth of what has been heard will never be known. For all communication is a politics of misunderstanding, a misunderstanding that appropriates power.

But the greatest misunderstanding is of the self when one thinks they are the self. No. They have only made the self. Stranger faces seen in terms of sex or maintaining of the estrangement, though inaction is not seen as consequential.

Estrangement of the grotesque, sex with beauty. And the face in the mirror only seen for how it may be perceived.

Sex of the grotesque is an estrangement of beauty.

Such valuation is deplorable anyway.

The strangered face in the mirror. Seen in terms of sex and estrangement. Thinks to feel aroused by the image.

But the desire only reveals the hope for acceptance.

As with all things, it is easy to believe in the normalcy of anything one sees for too long.

Until the forgetting and one sees in the stranger the strangest things.

And left with no idea of how to make sense of such strangeness once the stranger is known to be oneself.

And an only way is to see the face as belonging to the sculpted space.

                                                                    The Worded Precipice

On a ledge of great significance signified by all that death has come to mean; as an other to life. As an other to the dreary, plundering, slugging through that is life.

Or is it only so for what death has come to mean? Does a knowing of such a thing change anything? For the knowing of anything is full of an uncertainty. An uncertainty that is a characteristic of life. Or at least so it has come to be believed through the ideologization of all experience.

The great precipice that I stand on is one I have created. One I have willed to be a precipice. A precipice for change of some kind. Perhaps change from life to death, or life to another life.

But he had thought then that existence was simply a feeling, and that the naming of things was an illusion. But I do not agree with the attached value to that statement. I say that it is a necessary illusion.

The precipice lets me know of where I end and where I begin

Even though I know of how I only continue

From being to being to being

With a million precipices that I have jumped from along the way

And I almost believe in the reality of the change

When I see the height from which I have fallen

Even though each precipice looks exactly like the last-

-Jump.

                                                                To Continue

And heroes and lovers and friends and strangers and me and him. We’re all a part of what I know to be the self.

All a part of the other.

This is no foreshadowing of change, for change has no foreshadowing. It simply happens. Or simply is. The happening itself only lies in the observation of it.

But to hell with semiotic correctness and ego deaths!

To hell with trying to deny that all things I can only appropriate to a discourse of the self. Even you....

But I will appropriate you as one not to be appropriated as such. For at least in consciousness, I can be better than when not. The psychedelia was real, and it shall be. But it doesn’t have to change things. Or rather, I don’t have to look for it.

Has something already changed?

I think so.

A part of me was erased from somewhere and pasted here-

For you to read,

Friend, Stranger, Hero, Lover, Self.

                                                                      

The issue of class guilt

The act of guilting someone

The issue of class guilt is a relevant one to most middle-upper class sections of the society, especially among a younger generation of people who are "educated". 

It exists because most of us can’t shake away that nagging feeling that we are only who we are, and only think what we think because of an upper class upbringing. And this is true. The importance of context cannot be argued away by any logic of essential identity.

But where this truly gets problematic is in the area of academics or “intellectual” discussion. If you’ve ever been throwing around literary or philosophical jargon casually in some conversation, it’s likely you’ve in some form encountered other people accusing you of your upper – classness. And it’s likely you jumped to defend yourself.

There are two problems with this social exchange though. Firstly, the problem lies with the fact that someone thought to de-legitimize an idea by referring to a discourse of social inequality.  It’s problematic because of an underlying assumption that any idea that isn’t liable to be understood by everyone isn’t probably legitimate as an idea. But such an outcome is inevitable with our system of education. As people gain more expertise in a field, it’s natural that their ideas will become less accessible due to others not having a grasp on basic ideas/jargon that is exclusive to the particular field. 

Secondly the problem lies with the act of defending your ideas. There is no cause to defend such an accusation, because their accusation is true. Your thoughts are the result of what social class you belong to. People of poorer social classes have other concerns and other ideas wholly exclusive to them as well. I don’t mean to equate the two situations, but am only trying to point out that ideas are born out of context. Even poor people have their own societal value and cultural codes just like any other section of society. The feeling of guilt over the fact that high-brow notions are not inclusive of them brings us to our next issue.

To guilt someone about something is to appeal to their understanding of your belief system.

The valuation of Intellectualism

The poorer class of society is one we are constantly reminded of in our arts and education. People everywhere seem to be paranoid that we’d forget about them, or even worse, just not care. In this way, they have become an indelible part of every conversation. I’d say even this very discourse is a result of such enculturation.

The negative side though is that we are all also taught the value of education and knowledge, and over time, it’s likely we ourselves continue to form a scale of intellectualism to different subjects and ideas.

These two notions mentioned above come into conflict within our consciousness. The issue here is that we’re well aware that the notions we discuss are what could be termed as “intellectual”. We’re aware of the narcissistic pride we get out of discussing these things. The problem though is that we feel pity that the poor do not also get to be like us.

I’m just going to disregard the notion that this is only concern and not cultural imperialism that makes you feel this way.
 I mean, if you only cared about the poor people’s well being, you’d just care about their physical needs. But like Americans and missionaries, you also feel like they should be able to know the things you do. After all, their cultural system cannot be legitimized because it’s only the result of a living condition that shouldn’t even exist, right? If your thoughts align with these lines of logic, then congratulations, you have just successfully removed the poor people’s existence from your mind, except as some thing to be uplifted and pitied from time to time. In order to frame things into perspective, this is no different from Americans having seen every black or Native American person as being a savage.

A personal anecdote

A few years ago, after having first watched Into the wild and having been exposed to other similar streams of thought (Throeau and Tolstoy and whatnot), I had a notion that I’d love to go off and live in the wild somewhere, away from societal conventions and ideas of responsibility, accountability and school and all that.

It was only a teenage escapist fantasy, sure, but when I’d shared this notion with a friend, she accused me of my class being the factor that decided this notion, and that I should be thankful for what I do have, since I knew nothing of meager survival, or how it meant to be not middle class. Back then, I’d just somehow tried to defend my position and thereby salvage my pride, but looking back, it indicates other problems to my mind.

What’s problematic here is that her argument completely denies the poorer class’ culture or their role in society, and views them as a default position when you’re not rich. But such an argument is problematic because poverty is the result of societal conventions. They are a part of society as well, and they hold distinct opinions on things as well, even if they might be completely different things from what I held back then. And it’s not as if I was suddenly poor, I’d become like people who have been poor all their lives. I’d still look at things based on past experience.

The problem here was with the fact that such a line of thought also denies me my own context, and instead forces a thought process of not wanting to do middle- class things onto me. Its powerful (powerful in the sense that it can quickly assert its authority) implication is that if I were poorer, then I wouldn’t treasure such a fantasy in the first place. Such ideas seem to function on a notion that only anything that is equal and available to everyone is legitimate in the first place. It’s an idealist, unrealistic idea that is toxic- albeit perhaps born out of good intentions- to any worldview as far as its agency-denying capabilities goes.

A Reconciliation?

I don’t know if such modes are thought are escapable. It would seem that such prejudices are essential to our identities and to the status-quo. I do not know if it’d be easy simply throwing all that off.

But I think a good start would be to look at the poor as people, who not only suffer, but have things they derive happiness from. They’re not simply objects to be pitied and helped up so that they can be more like us.

Oh, and time for a cheesy insert here to end this article (cue Good Will Hunting and stuff):

It’s not your fault.

Moral Orel and the impossibility of true religious belief

When I'd first started watching the show Moral Orel, I found it to be quite a funny show about stupid religious people being unreasonable and and doing all kinds of hypocritical things. Pretty straightforwardly exaggerated satire. Or so I thought.

Because being moral can be wrong too.

                                                        But then as the show progressed, I started noticing a serious topic that was being dealt with and that did exist albeit subtly throughout the first part of the show as well. For the first part of the show, it seems as if we as an audience are quite removed from what's going on due to how strange each narrative segment of the show usually is (what with resurrecting the dead into zombies and whatnot). But later on, as the show progresses, it becomes more serious in some parts, partly because the characters in the show no longer appear to be objects existing to be merely comedic in nature. What happens is that their human element is made more plain to see. And what we see then are simply stupid people just like the rest of us, acting out a certain way based on a belief system. These people aren't all that alien to us. In fact, if that's all they were, then there'd be little point in watching the show other than just to make fun of those "religious nuts".

 The show makes it a point to not merely criticize the people in this show. What it intends to do however is to criticize the religious belief system specifically.

The entire first season is mostly only about Orel as a character, and about how he goes about doing stuff he thinks his religion tells him to. The problem though is that Orel follows the instructions he receives to a tee. The show realizes this essential problem of religious faith today. They're convenient. The people following these religions have countless unspoken rules about how to make this religious system survive. Because without careful selection and the right kind of interpretation, these belief systems simply wouldn't survive. This is what the show is about. It's about the fact that not even the religious folks truly believe in their belief anymore. 

Nietzsche had said that Christianity's problem was that it's will to truth would sooner or later render it obsolete, because the truth is not in itself. But more than a hundred years later, we've seen that Christianity's will to survive has trumped its will to truth for now. 

However, there is an undeniable tension that is present. It's about all the ways in which the folk of Moralton have tweaked their religion to try to make it adapt to the changing world around them. This problem is further explored through Orel himself. As stated before, Orel's problem is that he follows the religion too well, which simply won't work out well because it leads to realistic outcomes as consequence to an unrealistic worldview. He has to then be indoctrinated correctly at the end of each episode by his father. 

The colorful cast of "Moral Orel"

Moralton is a town that has one central theme: repression.  It's about the repression of truth, even if truth only an entity that is merely a post- modern construct. It's about how people must fight this notion with all they've got, even if that means not believing in their beliefs anymore, so that they can pretend like things don't have to change. 

After all, change can be painful and uncomfortable, and it's something everyone tries to fight in their own way, and with a belief system of absolute truths, all we see are very non- absolute ways of interpretation. But the interpretation of the religious text is changing along with context, so that then raises an important question in the viewer's mind:

What are they really fighting against? 

Anthropomorphism and Morality in "Fantastic Mr. Fox"

Anthropomorphism in narratives has existed since ages past, but for the sake of this discourse, the only historical context needed is one of the use of anthropomorphism in children's stories, and specifically films with anthropomorphous animals.

Perhaps it is unfamiliarity that makes children so interested in stories involving anthropomorphism, in the sense that although the animals talk and behave, and sometimes even walk as humans do, the very idea itself is one that is strange and- using the word loosely- imaginative and thereby appealing to children's need for newer stimulation for thought.   

This article discusses the historical context of anthropomorphism in children's literature, and this one offers a criticism of such anthropomorphism as being harmful to a child's learning because the child projects humanistic notions of living onto animals.

However, what is the main concern of this present article is what the use of such narratives tells us about the complex thought processes that exist behind the use of such narratives.

Is Anthropomorphism of animals harmful?

Wes Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox" could be called a  deconstruction of such narratives of humanized animals.  It does this not by removing the humanistic traits from its characters, but by exaggerating them. All the animals in this film are very human- like from wearing clothes to having jobs to experiencing  existential crises. 

"Who am I?"

                                   

Mr. Fox asks Kylie, his wife at one point, ‘Who am I?’ and then continues, ‘I’m saying this more as, like, existentialism, you know? … And how can a fox ever be happy without a, a – you’ll forgive the expression – a chicken in its teeth.’

This is Mr. Fox's main crisis: of how he is forced to lived humanly within a humane society, when really, he feels like a "wild animal" as he himself says. He cannot steal chickens from farmers for example, because there is a moral code with a justification (he could get into trouble) behind it that prevents him from acting out in this manner. It is really anthropomorphism that is Mr. Fox's enemy.

 What this offers is a critique of applying humanistic values onto animals, because in essence, this signifies a philosophy of moral absolutism, where morality is not something that is simply born out of societal context probably as a means of survival. In other words, our moral values are limited to context, and are irrelevant when applying to other cultural contexts (or species, in this case). 

This interpretation explains the somewhat unusual ending of the film. Unlike most children's narratives where the character does something wrong and then finally learns from his mistake, thereby resolving his moral crisis, this film ends with Mr. Fox continuing to steal. This is not an immoral end, but rather could be seen as a moral fulfillment in that Mr. Fox has come to terms with his own moral standards. 

Mr. Fox's son Ash goes through a sort of crisis too because of the fact that he is unable to live up to his own societal standards. His own narrative also consists of himself trying to find fulfillment of  the self by negotiating with the societal standards that loom over his life. Ash's cousin Kristofferson on the other hand is valued in society for his athletic skills. This shows us of how these characters' complexes and crises are all in on way or another, driven by similar structures to morality that denote the position of the person (or animal, in this case) in society.

With its ending, the film is not suggesting that stealing may be good or bad. It does not attempt to take up a distinct position, but is rather simply trying to point out that the discourse of stealing is one that should be flexible, and that any absolute position adopted regarding the matter could limit our understanding of the discourse itself and its role in society. 

Without a transcendental signifier such as God, Truth, etc as is the case in a post-modern world, morality has to constantly be re-evaluated according to context because what you consider moral could easily also be considered a prejudice by others, and  may also be an unrealized signified causing harm to the self and to others, without even being necessary in the first place for one's context.  

In this sense then, the film deals with perhaps the most relevant issue to people from since ancient cultures, which is one of negotiating  the self's identity (morals and all) with the culture it belongs to. 

Does Society find your "intelligence" attractive?

You know how films since some  time ago consistently feature protagonists who are total geeks? Even shows like say, The Big Bang Theory does this. It's a reversal of the times when a lot of the protagonists were Jocks who were well- built and athletic. Of course, if it's  Spiderman  we're talking about, then Tobey McGuire gets  to be both a nerd and athletic-looking(obviously looking the part is all that matters) because well, a spider bit him .

And then there were all these people talking about how smart is the new sexy. Is it true? Are your days of loneliness numbered?(You're obviously an intelligent person! You  tell that to yourself all the time!)

Eh, I don't think so. Because contrary to what people would have you believe, societal standards are never about living up to the standard, but rather about appearing to live up to the standard. Now, when it comes to physical attractiveness, the idea is fairly straightforward: "if you look the way we want you to, you pass". But it's easy to make the mistake of thinking that this means that the standard of smartness means  being smart is what is required to be considered attractive. Let me rephrase my earlier statement to explain: "If you're intelligent the way we want you to be, you pass."

You see, when society has a standard of intelligence, it is not that this standard means that everyone within a certain range of IQ is attractive. Because society defines intelligence on its own terms. What really makes you attractive is appearing to be "intelligent", because appearances are all that matters in this scenario. We're not talking about if you get to fall in love that beautiful woman or that beautiful man(let's assume such things require more than mere appearances), but rather if these people would even find you attractive in the first place. But to get to how people perceive you, let's first discuss society's definition of intelligence.

One of the most common traits I've seen that are shown to be possessed by "intelligent" people is a certain degree of social awkwardness(Sheldon from TBBT, Sherlock from 'Sherlock', House from 'House'.....am I the only one thinking this or do these latter two shows' titles sound suspiciously narcissistic? Not implying anything!). This social awkwardness is explained by the idea  that intelligent people have a hard time communicating with people of lower intelligence(pop-science at its best!). But this is nothing  more than a stereotype. Yet,  it matters. Because now that this one characteristic is attached to intelligence, it is important that you act socially awkward to be intelligently attractive. It was never the intelligence by itself that made Sherlock or House attractive, but  rather the many characteristics attached to the intelligence associated with these characters. So, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that that shabby looking  person is actually a genius who does not care for societal standards. Except, he is following the standard for a non- conformist.

Another important way in which the system dictates what is intelligent is by having you dismiss things that a lot of people like as "mainstream" or"mediocre", and pursue some vague obscure works of art that more than anything helps define your taste. Regardless of whether you know it or not, those books you read, or the arthouse films you watch, are important to you primarily because they make you appear intelligent. These are all standards. If you even think that acting a certain way makes you rebellious, it's because a system has laid down the tenets of what makes a person rebellious. Of course, buying into it makes your ego feel all warm and fuzzy, so it's all fine, right?

Well, it is fine...until the system fails you. Because all of this is a lie. No one is really going to perceive your rudeness to be symptomatic of a genius' behavior, like that of House's. They are just going to perceive it as straightforward rudeness. Because it's easy to forget something: that characters like House and Sherlock act the way they do within specific contexts set up for them by the narrative so that they are perceived the way they are. So, if you're socially awkward and justify it in your mind by thinking that House and Sherlock are that way too, it is only you who makes this comparison of yourself  and no one else. To them, you're just socially awkward. You might not be liked  by other people, but you may comfort your ego by thinking of the narratives of all of these people who are not well-liked either but are highly successful anyway. You might think it's only a matter of time before people notice your genius and you end up successful, but yeah, keep dreaming...

It only matters to you: the artsy stuff you like, the justification for your behavior,etc. Just like the people buying all of the different varieties of make-up in the hopes that they will live up to a standard, you behaving the way you are is also only because you're trying to live up to a standard. And like all standards perpetuated by impersonal systems, the people in these systems care little about whether you live up to any standard. But you, or your ego, or your subconscious mind does care very much about these things.

And that's why you'll try so hard. But here's the kicker: It was rigged to fail you from the start.