“What really matters is what you like, not what you are like.”
It is one of many keenly gilded observations from ‘High Fidelity’, a great book and a great movie, a love story about lovers of pop-culture. The line is sewn by the protagonist in one of many monologues as he lectures his professorship to his audience. It succinctly frames the value system in which we find ourselves on this planet of idols, heroes, labels, and celebrity judges.
It states that we are all judged, not by the quality of our character or our accomplishments, but by the preferences that clothe our lifestyle, the flag that flies over us, the pastimes and cravings that move us, and idols by which we choose to stand. And it's true for worse and for better.
So now that we know how we are judged, ponder for a moment how you do your judging and how you render your own equivalent verdicts. How do you choose those defining qualities?
For your consideration:
We are what we like, defined by what we want to like.
We all choose the things we like.
Finding a preference is a delicate process that occurs through various facets of both our individuality and our rigid conformity. We merge together varying degrees of what we prefer and what we know others won’t criticize. We like and imprint what we think resembles us, and resembles our personal experience. We like that which we idolize and desire to become. We like what that idol tells us to like, or what resembles what our idol tells us to like. We like what our rival dislikes, what we find arousing, makes us look thinner, attracts attention, elevates our social or professional status, keeps us out of trouble and gets us into some…
...and thus it’s rarely a pure reaction, an objective opinion free of any influence. We don't just like the things we like, we want to like the things we like. We control our opinions and we often do so in the most comfortable manner available.
If on some level we chose to like that which we think defines us, then the fruit of that definition becomes as impure as the seed. When we can really be honest with ourselves we can briefly get the chance to see that our foundations are built on bricks of bullshit… at least where our shortsighted prejudgments about ours and other preferences are concerned.
Have you ever liked a potentially unlikable something involuntarily?
Can you recall the last time you preferred something despite your best intentions or your better (pre)judgment?
It might have been a bad boy your girlfriends told you was wrong for you or a movie that everyone else hated. Maybe you treasure a piece of artwork that has no value, are inspired by a song that has no significance, keep ludicrous mementos or voted for a politician for reasons you can’t now fathom. Perhaps you keep an obnoxious friend that seldom shows a virtue, but does enough that you will always stand up for him. You have liked something at some point because something was stirred in you that had nothing to do with an external expression of coolness.
There have been choices you've made about likeable things, flags, idols, artwork and friends that you have no worthy explanation of, whose meanings and origins escape you, that would never support a debate or merit a following.
But if you can accept it, those are actually the choices that define you. The poster you had on your bedroom wall when you were sixteen tells the people around you far less than the first time you got in a fight to defend that goofball friend mentioned earlier.
I worry sometimes about the things we like due to how much they are affected by the things we want to like. I worry about those things when I consider how often we are told what to like, how often we obey that order, but more importantly I worry when we are told what not to like. It’s when we turn away from our instincts, in favor of another’s more dominant opinion that ‘what we are really like’ can get lost. On occasion, the desire to like a certain something is a positive something. It will carry you through the influence of fashionable trends and social politics.
Though I'm a huge fan, the characters of High Fidelity speak in a language of unlikable people. Qualifying 'what you like' in these lists of ethereal musical coolness whose merits land somewhere between arbitrary and critically elitist, smacks to me of unsecure people taking their opportunity to feel that they've earned some adjacent coolness. Their likes should qualify more like, but really their victims fear an unwinnable debate of personal taste that will end in a slap fight with Jack Black.
I would like to see more people liking unpopular things, even the occasional ugly thing, or detestable thing, or evil thing. The truth is we are indeed so the things we like, and those things we like are becoming so homogenized that actual choice is becoming an elusive concept. Soon all that will be left for you to like will be the things you are told to want to like by the powers that you like enough to surrender the will to like that which might be unlikable.
All that eventually will be left are two options, the thing to like and the thing to hate. Standing next to that thing is the person to like and next the other thing, the person to hate for what they choose to like. Once that opposition is destroyed and the next unlikable thing is then dealt with, which is followed then by the next, there will eventually stand one person with one preference and that one thing that they’ve chosen… that one color, flavor, faith, one Marvin Gaye song, one question and one answer.
I will never deny the insight of the quotation found at the top of this page. What would be nice is to live in a world where we say that though we might be books judged by our covers, the artwork is original. Sadly, books are now getting judged by their shelf, or even the store front their covers are found in.
If we could suspend the want behind the things we like and just follow the tuning fork that finds art and beauty and music, our likes and hates in an unencumbered way, we ourselves become the only thing we are like.
Then what we are will become indefinable…
…a like worth liking.
...and worth wanting.
