The West's Obsession with Appearances Explained by Contrast

When somebody goes to North Korea and takes a picture, the thing that elicits the greatest response is not the man picking grass for lunch, but the haircutter who can only give you state-approved haircuts, and the state approve clothes everybody wears, all exactly the same. Never mind the fact that those people are starved, beaten and tortured day and night for the sake of one egomaniac and his friends, Western onlookers see the clothes, and decry this, the outward appearance of collectivism.



This is very telling; perhaps western culture doesn’t believe in the individual so much as it thinks. Perhaps western culture doesn’t care about the individual and westerners even doubt he exists. But Westerners do know one thing, appearances, clothes and haircuts. We are alarmed and appalled at the idea of having the same clothes and haircut as somebody else, and I wager it’s because we can’t help but notice our own emptiness and unoriginality under that exterior. If we were all clothed the same perhaps we’d all feel equally naked. Perhaps we believe in the Voodoo of clothes, and that your soul can be stolen by the conveyor belt at the airport sending your clothes to Madagascar or Nairobi and meanwhile you’re going to New York. Nobody is indifferent to clothes and haircuts, so you think maybe we should be! But even the attempt at indifference to clothes, and to avoid judging a person based on first impressions, while seeming serious, is pure idiocy because the indifference itself is a statement when you colour your hair green and wear the same pair of track pants all bloody week. Also it’s impossible to avoid split second decisions about people upon first encounter, and virtue signalling that you don’t doesn’t make you into a better person, it just proves that you are more willing to be openly dishonest and everybody knows so already.



The crime here is not the regimented clothes, it's the regimented minds 

So the observation that clothes are more for covering up some lack or deficit of character, rather than the utilitarian aim of covering one’s physical nakedness or keeping warm, should obviously lead one to dress for other people — you’re never going to fool yourself after all. Be more like the North Koreans when it comes to clothes since it follows that you wouldn’t need to look different if you really were different. It’s spoiled and childish to “rebel” with how you look and it looks as unserious on the face of it as it is unstable and uncentered in fact. If you really want to rebel, read and be seemingly indifferent to the impositions of the so-called liberal democratic state and watch it work. 

Notice our peculiar western kind of totalitarianism requires compliance yet gives you petty choices among which is the choice to “rebel” so long as that rebellion diverts your interest away from real non-compliance and the commission of thought crimes which really threaten its stability. The fact that these thought crimes are today labeled “right wing” has little to do with the substance of the matter. Both right and left are separate heads of a hydra made out of a once sensible order which, in the process of slow death, is not averse to strangling its subjects. The real heart of the matter is that the right wing has lately been overthrown by sensible people no less than the left was overthrown by good sense during the Vietnam War, hence the present confusion of both heads of the hydra. The present society is one of false order which is always one step behind in imitating the real and inchoate order that people act out and that is from above insofar as it proceeds from nature which is a higher and more real thing than society. It is from our corrupt and bloated society’s unsuccessful imitation of order that the need of rebellion is derived and which makes the so called “liberal” society oppressive and necessitates historical distortions and memory holes so the picture remains coherent.