Unified Theory of Pop Culture and the Pursuit of Truth

Introduction

My name is Josh Dean. I am 33 years old, single (never married), living in South Carolina. I have lived in the three biggest cities in the state (Columbia, Charleston and Greenville) at different points in my life and lived in Boston for about four glorious years altogether. I have an undergraduate degree in psychology from Furman University and a Masters degree in criminal justice from Northeastern University. I like listening to Radiohead, Wilco, Ben Folds, the Weakerthans and the Old 97s. My favorite movies include Miller’s Crossing, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Magnolia, Glengarry Glenn Ross and the Fountain. I read comic books of all sorts (capes as well as slice-of-life) and love reading books by Michael Chabon, Irvine Welsh, Chuck Palahniuk, Kelly Link and T.C. Boyle.
So why, you may well ask, did I start this off like a singles ad? What do my background and the list of shit I like to ingest as a pop culture consumer have to do with my unified theory? By the end you should know. Right away you have already formed a kind of opinion of me and my tastes. Based on your own relationship to each fact I mentioned above, you have decided (if you don’t already know me) whether or not I have anything worthwhile to say. I don’t have a terminal degree in any social science and scant training in philosophy so be aware that this is only researched in so far as I have observed certain behaviors for years and know just enough about the way the mind works to be dangerous. I am also thoroughly soaked in useless pop culture information so expect a few “for examples” from works of fiction.
In the movie (and the book) High Fidelity the main character of Rob states “what really matters is what you like, not what you are like... Books, records, films - these things matter.” He goes on to call himself shallow for thinking like that but my theory is that he is actually onto a deeper truth than he realizes. In all the text that follows, I hope to demonstrate that personal tastes do matter when it comes to choosing a mate (for some people).
First, I will discuss the three types of people in the world that I have encountered. This will provide the framework for all subsequent discussions. Next, I will go into the theoretical origins of each of the three groups to better explain them. After that, I need to delve into the role pop culture plays in the lives of each of these groups. Finally, I hope to tie it all together in my unified theory of loneliness, depression and romance.
After that is done, I may do little side trips to explain things like religion and why women like bad boys or I may just let it stand. The reason I am posting all this online is to encourage readers of this blog to write in and debate me or help me strengthen my theory. As we will see later, the more eyes and brains I can involved, the closer to the truth I will get. Hope you enjoy!

Part 1- The Socrates Spectrum

Philosophy was one of my favorite classes in college. It is completely useless from the standpoint of training you to earn money but absolutely vital as a way to expand your ways of thinking about things. I will get into it a little more later but right now the important thing to establish is a maxim that Plato assigned to Socrates.

“One can either know the truth or be happy.”

To clarify, Socrates was talking about the conventional ideas of happiness: comfort, personal contentment, being at peace. In his mind, virtue could only be obtained by pursuing the truth and making that pursuit your new definition of happiness. That one simple thought has stuck with me for years and informed a lot of my way of thinking about the world.
For fans of the X-Files, you know that Fox Mulder is a gifted investigator and very bright. Had he not chosen to pursue the truth at all costs, he could have been one of the most esteemed agents in the FBI. As it stands, he is often hunted, shunned and cast out for his dogged pursuit of the truth behind alien encounters and government conspiracies.
That is kind of a broad view of the idea but we each make this kind of choice in every aspect of our lives. We can’t seek the truth about everything all the time. For example, I know my car runs on gas, has an engine of some sort (oil goes in it), works on a battery and sparkplugs and has things like an axle and brake pads on it. That is about all I know about cars (although I can change a tire). I have chosen that this is the level of truth or knowledge I need about a car to make me happy. I have no intention of learning every piece of an engine or how the car works in totality. Most mechanical apparatus I take on a kind of blind faith and assume that someone, somewhere knew what they were doing when they designed it and put it together. I could drive myself to distraction by learning about cars completely but I have decided my life really wouldn’t be any better for knowing that crap.
You can think of your own examples, I’m sure. When you have a child, you have to kind of become a mini-expert on what is normal behavior for babies if you want to recognize illness or defects effectively. Before you have (or are going to have) care of a kid why would you bother to know this? How much cooking do you know how to do? How are your geography skills? Wherever you have drawn a line and said, “I know all I need to know about that” you have staked a claim for your happiness and abandoned the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
This leads me to the Socrates Spectrum I have thought of and if this exists elsewhere out in the world, I apologize but I’m not making any money off this so shut the fuck up, let me have my thing here. In the spectrum, there are three points as kind of guideposts: those who have no choice, those who choose happiness over truth and those who choose truth over happiness. It would seem more logical to put the first group last but there is a reason I put them first.
The group who has no choice is, I believe, the majority of people living today. Be they poor and struggling or rich and overwhelmed, these people are so caught up in the mechanics of day to day existence that they have never even realized that there is a choice in life. In the next section I will discuss the origins of these three groups but for now just be aware that this group takes their own form of happiness from completing goals and sustaining their lives (and those of their loved ones). There is little to no element of introspection in their actions but they have clear and vital goals to pursue.
The group that chooses happiness over truth has drawn most of their lines in the sand in regards to the major areas of their lives (relationships, the arts, career). They are aware of the deeper implications of their actions, but they are content with the decisions they have made. Like I said, this is a spectrum, so no one usually hits dead on this indicator. Most everyone, even the peaceful and contented folks, have one or two areas they still want to keep learning about (usually we call these hobbies but rather than pure escapism, these are about enriching one’s life as well).
The group that chooses the truth over happiness is made up of the restless, nomadic types. You all know the sort or may be that person yourself. It could manifest as someone who never can find a fulfilling relationship (see: Seinfeld) or a person who can’t stop traveling to exotic locales. There are many opportunities in their lives for things to be “good enough” but they just can’t stop themselves from looking for the next undiscovered country in one or possibly lots of realms of human endeavor.

2. The Origins of the Spectrum

To better understand these three groups (and I will refer to them as that for sake of ease but always keep in mind that most people don’t fall neatly into one of these their whole life and can travel up and down the spectrum as needs be) I want to delve into my ideas of why people end up in one of them at any given time.
I don’t want to come across as elitist but I believe there would be a high correlation between education and the people who know there is a choice to be made between happiness and truth. Let’s look at some other ideas first…

Temperament- Our natures are pretty vital to how we approach the world. I recall enough research from school to know that neither nature nor nurture are totally in charge of how we turn out. Our genetic codes set up our boundaries and how we are raised determines where we end up within those boundaries. I believe some people are born to question authority, reality, self, etc. That predisposition towards intellectual curiosity and nonconformity can be suppressed and conditioned out by a strong enough external influence to the contrary. Like the protagonist of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, there is really no one goading him into rejecting the consensus view of the way things should be but he has an innate desire to do so anyway.

Family- Whatever type of caregiver you have, they play a big part in encouraging or discouraging intellectual conformity. Lots of the Baby Boomer generation were the first in their families to have the freedom to think about the bigger picture and raised their children with the desire to think along the same lines. Families usually have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and there is little reward for encouraging kids to abandon the ideals and beliefs of the generation who came before but usually, if predisposed through temperament to question the world, it can take just one “wacky” uncle or aunt or cousin to push you further along your path to becoming an intellectual nonconformist. I have no proof of this but I feel like these encouraging family members are sort of few and far between. I think, in a large enough family, you are bound to find one or two outliers but smaller units and those separated from the larger clans are less likely to break the mold except in the most predictable of ways.*1

Peers- This is the group that I think has the least impact and I’ll tell you why. Your peers are going through the same issues you are at roughly the same time. Maybe one or two figured out sex before you or a few have a preternatural understanding of economics or something but mostly the people at your own age level have very little to teach you beyond occasionally being able to learn from their mistakes. If you are already an intellectual nonconformist you will gravitate towards the same group and encourage each other (which is certainly important) but I don’t think the real origin of curiosity comes from one’s friends.

So this gets me back to education. Say the seed of intellectual exploration is there in your temperament but your family has done nothing to nurture it. Your peers will be the group of people you feel the most comfortable around. Maybe some more base factors like finding a nonconformist attractive will lead you to pursue a social relationship with them but it is hard to catch up to peers who have lived their whole lives questioning their surroundings. Really, the last ditch method of kickstarting that sort of thought process is through the inspiration of a teacher or mentor figure of some kind.
Granted, education can take a lot of forms so I’m sure you can think of Mr. Miyagi teaching Daniel about seeing the world in a new way through karate or something similar. The truth is that the “inspirational teacher” genre is an enduring cliché because almost all of us can relate to it. If any of us have ever questioned our places in the universe or pursued a fulfilling talent, it is probably through the efforts of an encouraging teacher at some level of the traditional educational system.
This is why I said philosophy is such a vital class to take in college. If you have never been challenged in your beliefs at any point, philosophy is pretty much your last chance. The other liberal arts can kind of open up specific areas of exploration to you but philosophy opens up the bigger issues most people don’t ever question like religion, political leanings, identity and morality.
So, all that was to say that the people who don’t know they have a choice between happiness and truth are the majority for a big number of reasons. They could have been born without the temperament for intellectual nonconformity in the first place then no amount of family, teachers and peer influence is going to make them think about these issues. Maybe you are born curious but you have it conditioned out of you by your family and then maybe you never get one of those teachers who really change your life.
At that point you are pretty much a survival machine. You complete enough school to get a job to earn enough money to support a family and you just live out your life (some would say blissfully) unaware that there was any other way to live it. As the world gets smaller and people become less bound to the system of replacing those who came before in their home town, I imagine this group may shrink by necessity or just kind of wander to another location and lead exactly the same life they would have lived had they stayed home.
The people who don’t know about the choice may also be intellectually curious as all get out but life has conspired to keep them in pure survival mode. Let’s face it, introspection is a luxury. If you have the time to think about your role in the universe and which muse to follow, you are not usually scrambling to find money, keep shelter, feed your child, not get shanked in the workout yard, etc. Food on the table, money in the bank account, transportation, clothing: these are the things you must focus on so that decisions you could have made about truth and happiness are kind of taken out of your hands.
In the movie Winter’s Bone, the young protagonist is smart enough to have graduated high school at the least and risen above her station but her negligent father and mentally impaired mother have left her with two younger siblings to care for and the idea of her carving out some time to ponder her place in infinity seems unlikely at best and downright dangerous at worst because, who is going to chop the firewood and cook dinner if she indulges in such mental exploration?
The other two groups are exactly who you would expect if you were paying attention. These are the intellectually curious who have not gotten trapped by circumstances or beaten down by their upbringing in some way. Now, one gap in my theory so far is why, exactly, one group would choose their own happiness and one would choose knowledge. I imagine it must come down to opportunity and drive.
Say you are a pianist. You are aware that you can study and practice for hours a day, forsaking a social life and better paying jobs to follow your art. However, there is a person out there who loves you and wants to spend their free time with you, you have a non-horrible office job and you have gotten a gig playing piano in a bar every other weekend to give you an outlet for your creative impulses. You can decide to keep pushing and perhaps fail or be happy where you are at and enjoy your life.
Popular media has kind of conditioned us (especially in America where rugged individualism and a desire to be the best “no matter what” is an inescapable aspect) to think that the second option is “settling.” We see stories where people are haunted by the lives they could have lived and the people they could have been but there is no guarantee that those people would have ended up as anything. As one of my professors liked to say, “The top 10% only holds 10%.” Not everyone in the country is entitled to be the best ever at something. The No-Choicers (as I shall call those who didn’t know they had a choice) don’t even have time to consider being the best at something and usually any ambitions they had are more realistic in scale (“I sure would love to win first prize at the state fair” not “I should win American Idol”). For the Happy Choicers and the Truth Choicers, the difference between the two comes down to knowing when they should quit.*2 One’s decision making process is based off of so many complex factors from good old temperament to what you just ate that I can only look at the choice and the after effects rather than how the choice was made.




3. So, Where Does Pop Culture Come In?


I am not making anyone’s monocle fall out by saying the primary function of popular culture is escapism. All of us have troubles and, while those of us with little money may scoff at the “troubles” of the wealthy (“the caterer for my fundraiser brought chicken with almonds instead of trout”) it still causes them to feel the same stress hormones we feel. Our bodies react the same way even if the external causes vary greatly. Therefore, we all need to sometimes turn off our brains and just get swept up into a dance or a funny movie about people pooping.
For the No Choicers, I would argue escapism is about the only function pop culture serves. I would like to point out again, it isn’t that the No Choicers don’t have the capacity for critical thinking, it just doesn’t hold any appeal to them. If you manage to carve two hours out of your busy week between home, family and work do you want to be reminded that the universe is a cold, unjust Holocausty place? Or would you rather see Bruce Willis shoot some shit? You have enough money after paying the bills to buy a CD, do you want to hear something that makes you happy or a millionaire with floppy hair sing about how sad he is over the sound of computers humping each other?
For the Happy Choicers I propose that they have found the music they like and they stick with it. Almost by definition the Happy Choicers had to have had a period of exploration in their lives. In addition to the mainstream stuff that makes everyone happy, they probably have some stuff in their collection that helped them see the world in a new way at some point. They don’t go looking for a paradigm shift anymore, they just want more of what they already like that will reinforce their comfort. This goes for movies, too. Directors they trust from their explorative years will still be welcome but don’t expect a lot of film festival attendance to try new things unless it is a festival of older movies.
The Truth Choicers are pretty annoying to their Happy Choicer friends because they can be opinionated and are always seeking that new thing that will push their understanding further.*3 Again, a catchy mainstream song or a fun-filled popcorn movie shouldn’t be seen as a guilty pleasure as they are designed to please but Truth Choicers can easily become hipsters by denying the pleasures to be found in the mainstream. Decent Truth Choicers can pursue their own progressive tastes in pop culture and still enjoy a wide variety of works.


4. Loneliness, Depression and Groups

I am not going to reproduce it in all its glory but there is a bit in the movie Blade Runner where one of the replicants (think really advanced robots) is trying to make Harrison Ford’s character understand why it believes it is alive. He gives a nice speech about the variety of amazing things he has seen since being activated and how, when he ceases to function, all of those specific memories will go with him. If you think about it, he is absolutely right. Every single moment we are alive and experiencing things, we are the only ones. Let me explain…
Say you are standing in a park and staring at a tree. Let us also say it is 3:14 PM on July 2nd, 2010. You are having a completely unique experience. This is going to sound a little like stoner talk but I swear I have never been high. You are the only person seeing that aspect of that tree at that exact moment. Even if someone is standing beside you, or with their chin on your shoulder so that your heads are remarkably close, you both are seeing that tree from a slightly different angle. Every second of your life has been a solitary, unique experience. Even if you stand in the same place the next day at the exact same time, the planet itself is in a different position or maybe you have different food in your stomach now or your clothes have changed or there is slightly more wind. If someone were a really hardcore Truth Choicer, they could decide to try and empathize completely with everyone they ever meet all the time. But this would not only be impossible but probably drive you insane.
From that perspective, your life can be seen as incredibly isolated. The feelings you feel at any given moment and the dirty jokes you think of are uniquely yours but that also means that no one can ever really understand anyone else 100% of the time. Through lots of time and exposure we can get better and better at guessing how someone will react to something but there is never an absolute degree of knowledge.
I think loneliness comes from the awareness that, not only will no one ever know us, sometimes it seems like no one wants to even try. Depression likewise stems from the frustration between our hopes and reality. We hope we are worthy of getting to know, we hope work or school will go well today and we hope our grandmother recovers from her cancer but we have little to no control over how we are perceived*4 , what the boss has in store for us and how well the chemo will go.
Our pains and our triumphs are very difficult to share but we gravitate towards people who are most likely to understand aspects of our unique existence. Social scientists have dubbed these “In Groups” and “Out Group.” In Groups are people with whom you share something and Out Groups are those with whom you don’t relate at all. If you made a Venn Diagram of the important people in your life and plotted how you knew them, the better friends would probably overlap in several areas.
For example, One In Group is everyone in your town you are in. You are all bound by geography to one location, so that is one circle. Next, your race is another. Say you are Caucasian living in Pensacola. There is an overlap between the Caucasian circle and the Pensacola circle and anyone in that overlap has two things in common with you. Now, add in circles for your economic background, political affiliation, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, pop culture tastes, belief systems, intelligence and whatever else you can think of. Most of the people you know should fit into the space where all these various circles overlap. Your family shares their genes, their race, their physical location (when you are younger at least) and their socioeconomic background with you. The circles can even be weighted so that the sharing of genes becomes a huge factor in your continuing relationship to your family. Now, this isn’t to say you won’t befriend people of other races or socioeconomic standing but you must have something in common (usually at the least geography but social networking is kind of killing that) to start a friendship.
I have also heard the theory of the Monkey Sphere. This is a reference to the idea that monkeys observed in the wild will freak out if one of their group is hurt (even if they are not related) but don’t really give a crap if a monkey they don’t know gets hurt. It works the same for us. I read it illustrated once like you think “Oh, that’s sad” when you hear about a busload of orphans exploding in Nicaragua but you are devastated if one of your friends is run over. Like not being able to ever achieve the 100% truth of every situation you are in, you likewise would shut down if you reacted equally to deaths inside and outside of your monkey sphere. So already we, as a species are fighting off the isolation of our existence by surrounding ourselves and forming attachments to those who have the best probability of knowing us.
This is why pop culture matters. Not just so we can agree on a movie to watch on Friday night but because we are hoping and betting that if we meet someone who also thinks Kid A is better than OK Computer it is because they reacted to the works the same way we did. Our internal reactions to works of art are amazingly difficult to explain and justify but they inform our opinions of the work. Therefore, if we can meet someone with the same opinion, we have bridged just that extra millimeter of isolation and come closer to making two parallel lines meet.
All three groups can feel depression (who honestly hasn’t been the victim of thwarted expectations?) but I would argue that loneliness works like an inverted bell curve with No Choicers being lonely but not knowing why and Truth Choicers being lonely and knowing exactly why. Happy Choicers may also feel loneliness but their lives are calculated to minimize it.


5. Can You Land This Fucking Plane Already?

Now we get to romance and choosing a significant other. With all 4000+ words I have already typed in mind, let us see how each group handles their search for a mate. Keep in mind that every single one of us is still controlled by desires and impulses we were born with and conditioned into. I am operating under the assumption that attractive people are called attractive via consensus reality and I understand that for every 10,000 women who want to ravage Brad Pitt there are 5 who could take him or leave him.
The No Choicers are kind of defined by the lack of time or resources to really put deep thought into their life decisions. Almost all initial attraction comes down to physical appearance. Unfortunately for most people, they kind of just run with that. Differences like having vastly different ideas of parenthood or a woman’s role in the house are glossed over because…oh my God, those abs…or boobs, whatever floats your boat. Society isn’t structured today to keep shitty couples together. Since the church doesn’t control the state, marriage is not inviolate anymore. If you make a bad decision, you can unmake it but how much of your life was wasted on the wrong person? Not to say these things can’t work out. No Choicers can stay together because they don’t even imagine being apart. Real problems come in when a No Choicer marries a Truth Choicer, oy.
Happy choicers may have moments of doubt but they have made the conscious decision to stop looking, that this person is as close to perfect as they want to get. They recognize that two parallel lines cannot meet and have decided to set up camp at the point where they run closest. Maybe they never get to play Carnegie Hall but they figured out that, by having a kid, the two of you have created another unique person and only the two of you will share what it was like to create him or her. Once again, the isolation is lessened by this shared experience.
Truth Choicers are never really satisfied with the people they date. Yes, she’s pretty but she isn’t very bright. Yes, he is caring and loving but he is so fat. The logic goes, “If I found this one, surely I can find another that is just slightly better, right?” At some point you decide to keep seeking out the Aristotelian ideal of romance until the day you die (perhaps looking back and saying “Yes, that fifth one was probably the closest I ever came”). Beyond having a hard time settling down, Truth Choicers have a need to keep exploring certain facets of life and if others have stopped (or never really started), the journey can be filled with frustration that leads to depression.
The takeaway of all this is: if you have the luxury of being able to reflect on your romantic decisions (or any of your decisions), ask yourself what your priorities are. If they are survival, find someone who turns you on and doesn’t make your life harder. If your priority is being happy, find someone who makes your other priorities seem less important than being with them (and keep in mind the long-term, not just the first flush of love). If your priority is finding the truth know that the closest thing to a perfect match is someone who wants to explore the world and life with you because there are limits to what you can learn by yourself.
Other things to keep in mind: No matter your group, if you find someone enjoy the trip together as long as you can; remember that life circumstances can put even the most cynical Truth Choicer into a No Choicer role; and couples are rarely matched by their types but it would help.

End Notes:
1) It is here I would like to point out that I am not just talking about conformity to staid traditions and boring workaday lifestyles. One can conform to being a free spirited artisan just as easily and never see the world from the other side.
2)See, just using the word quit made you cringe a little inside, right? Like quitting is the worst thing you could ever do. But ask yourself if you are in a happy relationship right now, are you glad you stopped or “quit” looking when you did? You can apply the same logic to any area of your life you are happy with that is based on a personal decision.
3)When I was in middle school, U2’s Achtung, Baby album sounded like nothing I had ever heard before and expanded my perception of what rock music was about. Why I loved them for so long was that they kept pushing their sound further and further away from what was commercially viable. They were losing money on big tours filled with music most of their old fans found weird and off-putting. They were living the Truth Choice lifestyle. Another big impact quote on my life was Bono saying around the time of the Pop Mart tour that they were “shopping for a new sound in pop music.” It was, in retrospect a calculated bit of self-fluffery but it stuck in my mind as “if music doesn’t do something new for you, why are you listening to it?” Long after U2 retreated back into middle of the road schmaltz to get their ledgers in order (and likewise lose me as a fan), I still lived by that idea that I need to hear people try something new (if even to them) to keep me interested. Bands that don’t evolve therefore bore me to tears or sometimes evolve into something I don’t like. Other media is the same, I’ll always respect someone trying to find their truth even if I don’t care for the product itself.
4)I would argue that those who try to alter people’s perceptions of themselves are altering superficial aspects that have no real bearing on whether another person will ultimately accept them.