Corporate Influence: Engineered Appearance Issues - Soul vs. Body Image Warping

The Perfect Hot Body. Do You Want to Look Like This?

 CRITICAL PROBLEM

Our cultural institutions supported by corporate entities and the interlocking corporate industrial complexes (medical, weight loss, fashion, entertainment, pharmaceutical, food industry, health/wellness, advertising/marketing, chemical) exploit our assumptions and mores about the fat, the thin and the fit. Their brainwashing concepts redirect us from what we should focus on: healing and nurturing our inner selves. The complexes make money from instigating insecurities about our having a completely inadequate outer appearance. The more guilty we feel that we cannot measure up to the images media presents, the more we succumb. Often, we live with discomfort and discomfit others. None of us is exempt from the scourge of the "importance" of outer appearance. The industrial complexes create and feed upon our appearance failures. They promote a homogenization of our looks. They blind us to our immutable soul beauty. They lionize mortal flesh. In their worship of mammon they lure us toward an emotional matrix of images in which we become slaves of our own imagination about how we must look and feel.

THE MISERABLE FACTOR

Corporations' prodigious investment to capture the minds, souls and bodies of the American people in a consumer matrix in order to make trillions of dollars has been successful. The residual has been that Americans suffer tremendously because they have not focused their attention on inner soul development. A side effect of becoming embedded in materialism to the exclusion of the spiritual has, to one degree or another, resulted in misery. To cope folks spend their lives attempting to throw off throbbing psychic aches with medications for various mental disorders. Or they engage and become active in a continuum of escapist activities involving the sports and entertainment industries. Those who are nearest to confronting intense pain self medicate through alcohol or drugs and often totter on the brink of revelation, destruction or oblivion. The more educated and enlightened are less chained to corporate group think. Some who are journalists, writers, artists, musicians, activists intellectually threaten the complexes with their movement to get "off the grid" of corporate social/cultural control. Others succumb. The flexible, untangled consciousness of the critically thoughtful person is more open to alternate mores and folkways. Their path is less culturally dependent.

This is mostly true on an acute level for women. However, even though one may be a genius, women are still entranced by iconic standards of beauty and youth because the images supporting this are ubiquitous as they filter into the arts and media images. Women continually confront an image bondage about which they may be completely unconscious.

How Does Bad Ass Translate to Inner Wellness?

 Despite class, education and intelligence, women are ruled by their looks and the appearance of other women. Whenever females look in the mirror, they are discontent. When they see themselves in photographs, unless they have been handled by make-up artists and hairstylists beforehand, it is even worse. In both instances they often find fault with how they look. "Master-race" images chain mail their feelings about themselves. Mirrors reflect their thoughts back, cautioning against weight gain, wrinkling, puffy-faced sleeplessness, aging, flabbiness, sun damage, double-chins, haggardness and hollow cheeks, in an ever increasing list of flaws. Rarely does their appearance satisfy or bring contentment, though for some, it is an occasion to make fun of themselves and others.

But ultimately, vanity and a sense of attractiveness are gaping holes that must be filled by humor, resignation or cosmetics, enhancers, fillers and/or surgeries to grab and maintain youth and beauty.Self-esteem about appearance is the emotional life-blood of women. In the more enlightened ones, spiritual energy transfusions bring health which supplants and drains the virus that, like formaldehyde, cretinizes and atrophies the soul and psyche. In those captivated by the culture and their own deceptive flesh, old age, weight gain and wrinkles are the devil.
  
Until one comes to the end of oneself psychically in these matters of appearance, competition rages between and among women. If the issue is weight, it becomes a sliding scale of who is the superior thinnest and inferior fattest in a community of friends or a collegial circle. For fit athletes, the balance tips to favor the most fit and disfavor the most soft fleshed and least able. For the beauteous, celebrity icons are lifted up as examples. Celebrities' bad plastic surgeries become the prod to quell the desire to mutilate oneself into youthfulness. But the incredibly insecure and soul damaged jump and take the consequences sometimes becoming addicted to youth enhancing treatments and surgeries. The sad fact is that the apex of existence should be seeking a lifestyle of health and complete inner and outer wellness. However "spiritual wellness and physical wholeness" seem to be the Medusa in the room that no one acknowledges.

Medusa by Carvaggio

A SANE UNITY: FAT IS THIN IS FAT - OUTER APPEARANCE IS IRRELEVANT

The fit, the thin and the fat need to exchange places in an imaginary exercise. They need to walk in each others' shoes. The intolerant, arrogant and self-hating (the fat, the thin, the fit), need to recognize that they have a soul. They need to confront the pain of their own inner misery and darkness. They must be free to forgive their need to hate themselves and their looks by despising and demeaning others or by changing their outer appearance to the point of obsession. We need to grow from within before we reconcile our outward appearance. We need to recognize we are much more than our bodies. Only then can we begin to confront and overthrow the industrial complexes that would keep us enslaved to their profit making, lying, predatory enterprises. And then our thinness and wellness will empower and raise us to a Power of Oneness.