Just wondering people's thoughts on the subject but it seems like the human world as we know it is full of arbitrary concepts. Smart, dumb, pretty, ugly, good, evil. All these are based on some standards that someone made one day and they managed to stick. But is there really any point to labeling things as such. I mean we don't like being called ugly so why have a word for it? Then again without it everyone would be pretty by even pretty would lose its value and just become another word. I find it strange that much of our world is "constructed" based on our say so.
We, humans, aren't pure biological. A big part of us is constructed based on society. The very fact that we are discussing this, right now, is based on our social concepts. I think we reached a point where it is impossible to just deconstruct everything. There are lots of problems that come with the concepts and social interaction, but they also give us, humans, more power, compared to other species. But, of course, "with great power comes great responsibility".
I think a lot of what you call "arbitrary" is actually "relative". They mean something, as you said, compared to a standard. You're also right that if everyone were pretty (to everyone), pretty would become average, and the word would cease to mean anything. But that's not the world we live in. Attractiveness is measured on several continuums (only few of which seem to be without reason), as is pretty much every other description we can imagine that isn't purely factual. What's the point of it? Classifying things, pretty much. We assign value to things with positive descriptions (we have judged to be as such) and try to express our judgments to others as accurate to share our experiences. Same with negatives. It's how we interact with each other. For an individual, the entire vocabulary of opinion words means a lot less, because you have the ultimate decision of what you do or don't want in your life, and to what degree.
I agree. Essentially, "ugly" could be "pretty" and "smart" could be "stupid", all these words and definitions were just designed by a random person who decided to assign words to certain traits. If you think about it, they're meaningless. Labels only tend to make people more self-conscious, or feeling isolated and trapped beneath a label pre-assigned to them by someone else.
So you don't have a sense of pleasing or displeasing traits and would cuddle a lamprey as readily as a teddy bear? Obviously it's ridiculously oversimplified to say this, or that one person is "smart" and another "stupid" as if you can boil down a human into a reading on a scale, but I wouldn't say they're meaningless. The OP said he sees them as arbitrary because there is no objective reality saying one thing is prettier or any such trait than another. It's all based on perception over our evolutionary and cultural history.
God I hate society. It's like all people are goddamn puppets. Everybody's doing whatever the hell they're told to... It seriously makes me want rip their heads off so much.
