POPULARIZED is the gradual surrender of internally examined identity and judgment to the external rewards of acceptance, belonging, status and approval.
And Tony's answer to it is:
Know who you are. Know what you know. Know what you don't know. And never let the crowd do your thinking simply because standing with the crowd feels better than standing alone.
a philosophy capable of standing entirely on its own.
Are you popular—or have you been POPULARIZED?
POPULARIZED
A Philosophy of Borrowed Identity
Human beings want to belong.
We want acceptance, recognition, affection, status and approval. There is nothing wrong with that.
The problem begins when the need to belong becomes stronger than the need to think for ourselves.
That is when we begin to become POPULARIZED.
Being POPULARIZED is not the same as being popular. It does not mean enjoying PopCULTure, following fashion, belonging to a political party, practicing a religion or agreeing with other people.
Influence is unavoidable.
Surrender is not.
We become POPULARIZED when outside approval begins replacing internally examined judgment.
When:
“What do I believe?”
becomes:
“What am I supposed to believe?”
When:
“Who am I?”
becomes:
“Who must I be to remain accepted?”
And when:
“Is this true?”
becomes:
“Will my people approve if I say it?”
That is the line.
Nobody creates himself from nothing. We are all influenced.
Family fills the glass.
Experience fills it.
Teachers, friends, religion, advertising, entertainment, politics, media and culture all pour something into it.
As I have said:
“You drink whatever you fill your glass up with.”
But POPULARIZED asks another question:
Who is filling the glass?
And an even more important one:
Are you deciding what stays in it?
The independent person is not somebody who has never been influenced. That person doesn't exist.
The independent person can say:
I learned this from my mother, and I kept it.
I learned this from the street, and rejected it.
I believed this for twenty years, and discovered I was wrong.
Everybody around me believes this. I still don't.
That is not rebellion.
That is ownership of judgment.
And there are no absolutes here.
Nobody is completely independent. Nobody is completely POPULARIZED.
A person can think independently about politics and be completely controlled by fashion. He can reject one crowd and immediately surrender himself to another.
Sometimes we don't stop following.
We merely change crowds.
That is why SELF-WORTH matters.
If I need the crowd to tell me that I have value, the crowd has enormous power over me.
But if:
I AM ME
then disagreement does not destroy me.
Neither does being wrong.
Self-worth does not mean:
I am always right.
It means:
I can be wrong without becoming worthless.
I can say:
“Well, I'll be damned. I was wrong.”
Learn.
Adjust.
Move on.
That brings us to another Tony question:
How do you know when you KNOW?
Did you see it?
Experience it?
Reason it out?
Verify it?
Or have you simply heard it so many times that repetition began feeling like truth?
That is one of the dangers of becoming POPULARIZED.
Repeated becomes familiar.
Familiar becomes normal.
Normal becomes accepted.
Accepted becomes unquestioned.
Eventually somebody says:
“Everybody knows that.”
Maybe.
How do you know?
PopCULTure, Media-Ocracy and POPULARIZED are connected, but they are not the same thing.
PopCULTure influences what is cool, desirable, embarrassing, fashionable and acceptable.
Media-Ocracy influences what gets attention, what gets omitted and how events are framed.
POPULARIZED is what can happen inside the individual exposed to those forces.
And nobody is immune.
Left or Right.
Rich or poor.
Educated or uneducated.
Conservative or progressive.
Even the fellow yelling:
“I DON'T FOLLOW THE CROWD!”
may simply belong to a crowd where everybody says they don't follow crowds.
The opposite of becoming POPULARIZED is not becoming unpopular.
It is not isolation.
It is not rejecting something merely because other people like it.
It is:
I AM ME.
You may agree with ten million people.
You may stand alone.
Neither proves you right.
The question is whether the judgment is actually yours.
Did you arrive there—or were you delivered there?
That is the philosophy of POPULARIZED:
POPULARIZED is the gradual surrender of internally examined identity and judgment to the external rewards of acceptance, belonging, status and approval.
The antidote is not rebellion.
It is SELF-WORTH, independent judgment and the willingness to examine your own glass.
Know who you are.
Know what you know.
Know what you don't know.
And then ask yourself:
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