2014 – 7th Grade National 3rd Place Winner
Daniel Wolfe, New York.
Truth or Beauty, which has a great impact on society?
On its own, beauty is immensely more impactful and popular in society compared to truth because truth’s impact is expropriated by lies. In society, reasonably everything, from an eating utensil to a building, is made to be a beautiful as possible. Yet, the concept of beauty does not just exist one day, it is forged by society’s ideas of what are desirable traits or, in other words, beauty. However, each society has heterogeneous ideas of beauty and those ideas are used to influence most characteristics of a society, such as the way people dress, speak, and live. Societal views of beauty vary, so some societies are raised to see beauty as something to covet. As a result of this coveting, many people have surrounded themselves with beautiful things.
As more of the world gets engulfed into a vortex of beauty, man continuously alters what things appear as and seem to be. If someone has a part of their body altered to be beautiful they are altering who they are and, moreover, that person is altering the truth about themself. As alterations are made, truth is changed, but truth can never be changed, it can only be transmuted into a lie. Therefore, lies are becoming ubiquitous in society which obliterates most impact or value that truth has. Beauty’s visibility is also ubiquitous because of everyone seeing beauty in different places. Yet, some things have not become popular in society, in fact, truth is continuously masked, because of its occasional ugliness, which has made truth harder to find.
People may search for truth their whole lives and never find it. That happens because people do not always like the truth and they cannot change that truth, unlike beauty which can be made suitable for a person, so they hide the truth. A hairdo can be made to fit a person, but the truth about what type of person they morally are cannot be altered. As a result, most people want others to see and appreciate their beauty, but not everyone wants to promulgate the truth about themself.
Because of the numerous ways that beauty impacts society and its increasing abundance, man sees and wants beauty more because of the fundamentals that orbit around a lust for beauty. Yet, truth is usually filtered and censored in society because it is not always wanted or appropriate. Someone may be mortally ill and they might not want others to know that, so that person would omit that or lie about that if someone asked, “How are you doing?” Because of this, the impact of truth is usurped by lies, hence beauty is more impactful than truth because of societal principles that encourage beauty and expurgate truth. Globally, man must examine society and ruminate, “Do we continually strive to keep the petals of beauty attached to the stem of society or do we accept fate and let the petals fall, only to leave man alone with the truth no matter how ugly it is?”
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