POPULARIZED — A Philosophy of Borrowed Identity
Human beings want to belong. We want acceptance, approval, recognition, status, friendship, community. There is nothing wrong with that. The problem begins when the need to belong becomes stronger than the need to think for ourselves.
We like to believe we outgrow peer pressure. Most of us do not. We merely change crowds.
The schoolyard becomes the workplace.
The neighborhood becomes the social circle.
The cool kids become celebrities, political movements, parties, professions, causes, religions, tribes, and IN Crowds of every kind.
Popularity is a number.
POPULARIZED is something else.
POPULARIZED is what happens when acceptance by the culture becomes more important than your independent assessment of what the culture is asking you to accept.
It is the gradual surrender of internally examined identity and judgment to the external rewards of acceptance, belonging, status, and approval.
To BE cool is one thing.
To BE cool by Proxy is something else.
There is a difference between having an identity and borrowing an image.
My Mother, bless her soul, gave me MY Identity.
SELF Image sustained me, not Image.
SELF Image comes from inside.
Image needs an audience.
That distinction became more important to me the older I got. PopCULTure did not invent the human desire to belong. It industrialized it. Media-Ocracy did not invent influence. It learned how to manufacture, repeat, frame, reward, and distribute it.
The question is not whether you are influenced. Everybody is influenced.
The question is:
WHO is filling your glass?
And are YOU deciding what stays in it?
You drink whatever you fill your glass up with.
Influence is unavoidable.
Surrender is not.
This is why I keep coming back to:
I AM ME.
Not I AM what my crowd expects me to be.
Not I AM what earns applause.
Not I AM what makes me fashionable.
Not I AM what gets me admitted to the newest IN Crowd.
I AM ME.
And if I AM ME, then YOU are YOU.
That does not mean refusing every outside idea. It means examining the idea before adopting it. It means asking whether I arrived at the conclusion—or whether I was delivered there.
How do you know when you KNOW?
Did you think it?
Did you test it?
Did reality tie it down?
Or did you JOIN it?
POPULARIZED does not necessarily mean stupid, weak, or evil. Smart people can be POPULARIZED. Educated people can be POPULARIZED. Successful people can be POPULARIZED. Conservatives can be POPULARIZED. Liberals can be POPULARIZED. Religious people, atheists, rebels, intellectuals, celebrities, professionals—anybody can be POPULARIZED.
The mechanism does not care which crowd you join.
The danger comes when belonging becomes evidence.
Everybody I respect believes it.
Everybody around me says it.
My side knows it.
Our people do not question it.
Only bad people disagree.
At that point the crowd has begun doing the thinking.
That is why POPULARIZED is not really about popularity.
It is about borrowed identity.
It is about the point where approval from the outside becomes more important than examination on the inside.
So the question I keep asking is not:
Are you popular?
It is:
ARE YOU POPULARIZED?
If they stop applauding, are you still YOU?
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