TRANSCENDENTALISM
We live in a world where everyone is trying to be perfect. Perfection becomes our ultimate desire because we all know we are not perfect but we still want to become this ideal version of ourselves. We have a fear of facing the truth, people don’t want to accept the fact that they are getting old. For example surgery is very common now, people are allowed to change anything from their body in order to look “perfect”. We as humans aren’t in tune with nature anymore, we go against it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a genius to me because of how he was able to predict the future. In the short story “The Birthmark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Georgiana was convinced by her husband to get surgery because he wanted her to become perfect. He believed that she wasn’t ideal enough. In order for him to see her as perfect she would to take away her birthmark. For example, Aylmer asked his wife, "Has it ever occurred to you that the mark upon your cheek might be removed?" "No indeed” said she, "to tell you the truth it has been so often called a charm that I was simple enough to imagine it might be so (Hawthorne)." From that he responded to her "ah, upon another face perhaps it might, but never on yours (Hawthorne)." Aylmer only sees her beauty as it is perceived from his mind, without a common foundation of her own definition of what idealism should be.
Our world has been drawn to idealism because people believe that in order to be happy you have to be perfect. A world where you have to be skinny for you considered as being pretty. A lot of it is just false advertising because the people we see on billboards and in magazines are all the products of Photoshop. Kanye’s mother Donda West died after getting surgeries (routine liposuction, tummy tuck, and breast augmentation). She was 58 years old, but she wanted to look younger which caused her life. I saw a movie called “surrogate” and it was about the future where humans live in isolation and interacts with human robots. Robots became substitutes for the human race, I feel like that’s something that is going to happen in the future.
