We don’t really understand that as social animals, everything is social. Our deepest, most intimate likes or…

We don’t really understand that as social animals, everything is social. Our deepest, most intimate likes or tastes too. Take interior design. For many years now minimalist greys and whites have dominated in homes. Why is that? Why do we have fashion trends? /1 https://t.co/QX1hwgm9NL

It’s because while we think we like things because of some intrinsic properties of the thing we like, in reality what presses our aesthetic buttons is conformity with what others like. That’s what a fashion is, everybody doing the same thing. How do we not notice this? /2

The things we swear we love with a deep passion, because that’s our ‘taste’, a decade later we may find appalling and ‘outdated’. All the home renovation shows that tut tut at how unfashionable the before home is. /3

Not stopping to think that it may once have been the ‘height of fashion’. The obvious fact is that what drives the aesthetic desire in both cases is conformity with what everybody else is doing. Like those who claim that the best music or art is ‘purely subjective’. /4

If so, why do we always end up with a hierarchy there too, of value? Why do a small number of artists do obscenely well, and most live off 2-minute noodles? Our ‘personal taste’ is where we’re least likely to recognise our deep attachment to social ties, to conformity. /5

But fashions make a lie of that every single day. Humans are 100% social, in everything they do. Not political, not economic, not anything else. Social. We’re social animals. Stop paying lip service to that basic fact. /end