The Black Sheep LIVE: Beauty Is The Lost Art We Need to Relearn
Salomé's livestream from January 15th, 2025
Beauty was never just beauty; it was always our connection to the sacred, transcendent, inspiring, and uplifting. It's no surprise that a culture attacked by relativism and critical theory-based thinkers has divorced us from the universal, healing role beauty plays in human life. Ask the average young person about beauty and they'll likely tell you it's an "oppressive standard" or that it's entirely subjective. If that's your view of beauty, how could it be anything but an afterthought—or worse?
And yet ask that same young person what they think about the world around them and they'll likely tell you it's also oppressive, depressive, or generally negative. A person who lacks a thoughtful relationship to beauty is doomed to live in an ugly world.
There are plenty of other reasons for why people are increasingly anxious, cynical, and resentful today, but in this livestream I'm discussing the one, blatantly obvious and ugly reason that rarely gets discussed: our modern conception of beauty. We've lost touch with a long, rich history of thinkers who tried showing us the vital role beauty plays both in our individual lives and our society. Plato and Aristotle discussed beauty as an objective reality that could lead us to truth. Roger Scruton argued that understanding beauty was necessary for a culture to flourish.
It's easy to look at our society and be struck by the ugliness of it all (we recently published an essay explaining this phenomenon). Rather than just note how ugly things have become, we need to revive the aesthetic wisdom and traditions that can replace the ugly with the beautiful.
Join me in that revival in my livestream, where I discussed:
Why beauty is more objective than subjective
How beauty exists in more than just art and visuals
Why "oppressive beauty standards" don't exist
How both the Right and Left attack beauty to better control people
What happens to a culture that doesn't understand beauty
Living a life that honors beauty
I’ll be live-streaming multiple times a week to keep you in the loop on all things black sheep, from highlighting examples of groupthink to musings on how to live a freer life. You can join my livestreams on YouTube, Rumble, Instagram, and X, generally every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday evening. Your questions and comments are encouraged, so participate on whatever platform works best for you!
Thought-provoking livestream! I was pretty late to the livestream (40mins in, I think), so unfortunately I might be stating stuff that was already addressed in the video, but here are some of my thoughts anyways :P
Much like anything that’s subject to human interpretation, I think beauty does have subjective aspects, but there are common tethers that allow us to construct a de facto objective-ish standard. To use morality as an example, while I don’t think serial killers are a representation of common morality, there’s something to be said about the historical—and even current—downplaying of atrocities. However, arguably, there’s a *universal* wish to create realities in accordance with one’s values, as subjective as they may be—which begets a “meta” degree of objectivity (ie through negative rights).
It’s definitely a very extended tangent on my part, but I think it’s a helpful way to look at beauty. Of course there's considerable subjectivity to it, but those are still manifestations of innate and universal experiences—we know what feelings of awe, poignance, and disgust are, we can see signs of biological health (or lack thereof), we can resonate with things and find other things dissonant, etc. *even if different things elicit those sentiments*.
I think there’s a distinction to be made between hedonic beauty versus more eudaimonic beauty. Hedonic would be the more superficial and vapid—and thus the one that is capitalize-able—kind, while eudaimonic entails a degree of virtue (the latter appears analogous to spirituality while the former is more like a televangelist / megachurch). Of course, the latter allows room for holism, in that while someone might not look like Monica Bellucci (just to share an example), they might still have a beautiful personality, or could be virtuous through their actions.
To use the livestream’s example of a disheveled torn clothes wearing individual, a genre of music that’s quite near and dear to me is grunge—one that was infamous for killing off the ostentatiousness of hair metal in the ‘90s, and earned a fair share of ire for showing “uncool losers” / “beggar gods” in the spotlight. In that sense, someone might not find ‘grunge’ beautiful, but Alice in Chains’ MTV Unplugged performance of Frogs still reaches through to me in a way I can’t describe, and I think it’s more beautiful than a Sabrina Carpenter song—even if the latter’s aesthetic is pretty and saccharine. I think it’s up to the individual to create or find “beauty in the dissonance” (to plagiarize from a TOOL song), but unfortunately, many have shifted from advocating the individual to spurn the more superficial interpretation of beauty, to wanting collective society to disavow the tether to transcendent ideals (by equivocating them with vapidity).
The former (get the individual to be stronger) requires inner resolve, but the latter (get society to cater) inculcates fragility; funnily enough, the notion of completely subjective beauty is also a bit contradictory with notions of everyone being beautiful, since the latter is *still* an objective assertion—but I think it’s the consequence of wanting both the rush from rebelling against a norm *and* the social validation from being able to meet a standard.
I think one thing to consider might be how for all the ostensible rejection of beauty, there’s an increased premium on shallowness. Aesthetics (think anything with a "core" suffix appended to it) are extremely popular trends that urge people to adopt ephemeral images rather than creating something of beauty (or abiding by a life of it). Heck, even political correctness is a way of ensuring anodyne (or "pretty") discourse by neutering language until any potentially offensive aspects of one’s expression no longer exist—although, there's little edification in something that restrictive, and I think true beauty *is* additive. People search for the latter kind by ascribing grandiose archetypes to politicians (e.g. “Kamala Harris will battle the patriarchy”), while allowing divine aspects to get lost in our day-to-day lives.
This is definitely a long set of ramblings so I do sincerely apologize, but great points in the livestream! And beautiful gown!