Or
perhaps they recognize it themselves as the fashion and therefore
instantly believe that they like it. In both cases the buyer is
hypnotized; he has lost the faculty of finding out for himself what he
really likes, and his mind, being empty of real affection, is open to
the seven devils of suggestion. He cannot enjoy directly any beautiful
thing, all he can enjoy is the belief that he is enjoying it; and he can
harbour this belief about any nonsense or trash.
It is a very curious disease that has become endemic in the whole of
Europe. People impute it to machinery, but unjustly. There are objects
made by machinery, such as motor-cars, which have real beauty of design;
and people do genuinely and unconsciously enjoy this beauty, just
because they never think of it as beauty. They like the look of a car
because they can see that it is well made for its purpose. If only they
would like the look of any object of use for the same reason, the arts
of use would once again begin to flourish among us. But when once we ask
ourselves whether any thing is beautiful, we become incapable of knowing
our real feelings about it. Any tradesman or artist can persuade us that
we think it beautiful when we do nothing of the kind. We are all like
the crowd who admired the Emperor's clothes; and there is no child to
tell us that the Emperor has no clothes on at all. We are not so with
human beings; we cannot be persuaded that we like a man when really we
dislike him; if we could, our whole society would soon dissolve in a
moral anarchy.
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