"The things you own end up owning you" or "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

I've been thinking a lot the last couple days about simplicity and aesthetics. That is to say, I've been considering why there seems to be a human imperative to make things that are beautiful or why we create things at all. It's weird that so much of our lives is wrapped up in how pleasing things are to the eye and we revere art highly in society, whatever form it takes, and yet this desire for things that are appealing to our physical senses, our aesthetes tastes, are often things that lead to the basest and most sinful of attitudes.

Indeed, if we really look at what the new testament is saying closely, there is evidence that Jesus is preaching that we really need to give up these desires for physical pleasures, stop gaining our sense of love and joy from them and put our joy in God and each other, but there is also a contradiction there because is God not in everything and has he not created everything? Indeed I would argue that the Bible says God is love, but is he not also creation? I always believed that Man being made in the image of God was a reference to our ability to both love and create, but if that is so, why are we left in a physical world with our senses being our primary means of interacting with it, if we are meant to deny those senses or for them to be subjugated and ignored?

It's confusing.

I think it has something to do with man's ability to choose. It is sort of like God wants us to deny our desires for the physical and choose him, but there are problems with that logic, too. It needs more thought and reflection.

Setting that aside for a moment though, let's look at how our aesthetes tastes really benefit us, one, they distract us from really seeing each other, two they keep us focused on the next great sensual pleasure, indeed they keep us in a constant state of desire to produce create and make MORE stuff to satisfy the unending desire of physical stimulation that we gorge ourselves on a non-stop continual basis. Why? Why do we do it? Why do we have a need for it? Let's talk about a lack of one of these senses for a moment, indeed the sense which some might consider the most primary to the human condition (although that is debatable) - sight.

There is a book called Blindness by Jose Saramago which is all about an epidemic of blindness that occurs, and centers on the one and only character in the novel who can actually see. There was a rather crap film made of the movie not too long ago as well, but the novel is in fact one of the best books I have ever read, and shows how without sight, society slowly digresses into chaos. It makes an interesting point about "seeing". There is an old saying, "In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king" but indeed in this book, the one person with sight is cursed, because she realizes that if the rest of the world knows she can see, she will be burdened with care taking for everyone else around her, and she is forced to witness and live through the same atrocities that those around her perpetrate on one another, and being forced to see is far worse for her than if she were blind like them in some ways, but the deeper meaning of Blindness in the book is the meaning as it is referred to in the bible in which Jesus cures the blind man and he can now "see", it is not so much about the physical act of seeing as it is about having a new and higher awareness. In the book Blindness, the woman who sees,  understands the horrors of the world in which the blind have fallen and created for themselves, and attempts to lift herself out of it. It is a metaphor for understanding, not for actual sight. In the same way that Plato's character in the alleghory of the cave is considered blind when he "sees" the truth, so the woman in the book must pretend to be blind because her sight will cause her own destruction. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is most definitely NOT king. Unless we assume being "king" means being the subject of envy and responsible for the masses.

What's my point in all that? My point is that because of our sight, we are often blinded from SEEING. We think we see things that are important and true, we place value in certain things, but what we find and what was found in the novel as well, is that when physical sight disappears, the things we once valued and understood, and believed important, disappear. We are a world dependent and designed and focused on the aesthetics of our lives, but if that were stripped away, what would we be? We would be helpless, reckless, and rough with one another, more than likely (at least this is what the novel implies). Indeed, perhaps the bible is suggesting that to truly SEE, that which lies beneath the surface of things, we need to stop being distracted by the appearance of things, we need to give up placing value in aesthetics and focus on seeing the truth of a thing, placing value in the righteousness and goodness of its essence. There is truth in Tyler Durden's statement that the things you own end up owning you.

But yet again I come back to the question, if we have created a world of distractions for ourselves that rests on a sense of what is pleasing to our senses and what is not, WHY do we have this need? WHY do we structure our lives this way? And what happens if we attempt to strip it all away?

I don't have an answer to this yet, but it is something that deserves greater study and pursuit. I sense there is a hidden peace there.