little town it's a quiet village

during tok issue presentation time, lauren brought up the issue of how disney builds up false expectations of life. this then lead to further discussion upon how the capitalist society we live in wants to make us feel sad and inadequate in order so that we buy things, and how we constantly spend time making out our world to be an ugly place.

this topic really interested me as, as a disney fan myself, spent my childhood and even to this day, watching disney movies.

and it really is true. disney tells us things that are utterly untrue and does so through even more false situations. every character is flawless, petite, a wonderful singer, friends to the animals and waiting for their 'prince charming' to come and rescue them. of course, they all end up with their 'handsome hubbies' and live happily ever after.

why?

why do we feel the need to create all these false expectations and ideals if the result is a feeling of inadequacy and failure? and why do we constantly belittle all we have on this earth?

is it not completely strange to be brought up watching disney films with gorgeous heroines, handsome heroes, and perfect scenarios, just to get chucked into the real world and get told ''its what's inside that counts"?

 i guess this shows how conflicting our societies beliefs are, or at least, how different people go about achieving the same goals. as well as showing how little adults value children's opinions, thoughts and ability to remember things. i understand why adults may not desire to smother their children with ''real life'' situations, such as divorces, depression and grocery shopping, but why they need to portray stories through the personas of perfection elludes me. are we not always told "there is no such thing as perfect"

maybe its because people think that what children watch won't effect them in ten years time, that it won't matter in the long run. well i can tell you that it does. my friends and i constantly compare ourselves to the ideals that we were brought up on. we set unachievable standards for guys,

(what do you mean you're not tall, dark, handsome with a thick head of hair, a great singer with style and a magic carpet?!)

and set unattainable goals for ourselves because believe it or  not, your hair will never look like auroras.

what are we trying to achieve? because to me the only ''whole new world'' out there is the supposedly dull and ugly one that we live in.

clear as mud

in theory of knowledge the other day we were talking about how our perception of things can deceive us. how everything we think we know about a situation; our observations, our opinions, our conclusion, can be completely wrong.

i couldn't agree more.

in fact, i knew this person, lets called them gary.
gary and i have known each other for about 2 years now, although we have never really gotten to know each other, it was more a 'knowing of each other' type of relationship. however, i got to know gary. we found each other at several occasions and spent a lot of time getting to know each other. of course i told my friends about gary, they knew him better than i did and gave me some really good advice. my friends and i thought we had the way that gary felt pretty worked out. he was a bit shy, quite reserved, wasn't one to throw people's emotions around. gary was a good guy. then one night, i approached gary to talk to him, this was something we had gotten into the habit of doing so it seemed like a normal situation. but gary was different. gary was blunt, uninterested. gary acted like a complete jerk. so  much so that i was gobsmacked. my friends felt the same. we didn't think that gary was like that at all, everything he had done up until then in fact, suggested otherwise.

our perception of him had been completely inaccurate.

asides from the fact that you can tell i'm probably a bit peeved about the way that gary acted, we can also draw other ideas from this.
maybe our perceptions of events, people and situations are all based on what we want to perceive. of course i wanted to believe that gary was nice, no one would have wanted him to act the way he did. so maybe that's why i perceived him to be like that.
on the other hand though, my thoughts on him were all based on certain things that gary did and said. they were common inferences to make based on what was presented before me. maybe it doesn't matter whether our perceptions of a person are right or not, if the person you have them about disagrees, then i guess that's the thing that counts.
does this mean that we can't trust our own perception though? i would have to say that although our perception may not always be right, they can be trusted; if not as factual and true, then as a direction of how to feel and act.
as to what it says about us as knowers? well thats a perception in itself.