The War on Beauty 🥀 escalates in a high-time-preference society. Interesting that Plato already understood 2400 years ago the necessity of beauty to a well-functioning society. Plato on how the aesthetics influence us (The Republic, p.97-98): "It is not only to the poets therefore that we must issue orders requiring them to portray good character in their poems or not to write at all; ...we must issue similar orders to all artists and craftsmen, and prevent them portraying bad character, ill-discipline, meanness, or ugliness in pictures of living things, in sculpture, architecture, or any work of art, and if they are unable to comply they must be forbidden to practise their art among us. We shall thus prevent our guardians being brought up among representations of what is evil, and so day by day and little by little, by grazing widely as it were in an unhealthy pasture, insensibly doing themselves a cumulative psychological damage that is very serious. We must look for artists and craftsmen capable of perceiving the real nature of what is beautiful, and then our young men, living as it were in a healthy climate, will benefit because all the works of art they see and hear influence them for good, like the breezes from some healthy country, insensibly leading them from earliest childhood into close sympathy and conformity with beauty and reason." 🎥 @neuroxart #artstr
