How Posing Tourists Wreck Everything From Scones to Government

A reader unwilling to click the "further reading" link below my previous posting, "The Posing Tourist, Revealed", graciously and politely requested that I flesh out my point more fully. Here you go.


What I’m criticizing here is not people adhering to tradition, convention, discipline, or even rote repetition. A great baker may bake familiar bread. A great singer may sing within a familiar form. A great speaker may use ancient rhetorical tools. None of that is the problem I'm describing.

The problem is framing.

We've all been to bakeries offering perfectly competent pastries assembled from all the standard shortcuts. Their goal is to seem like a bakery; signal as a bakery; do bakery things. Not one bite delights, because it's 100% presentational. "Look at my bakery! I'm the guy running a bakery!" not "Taste my scone into which I've poured my heart and soul."

There are fewer devastating heartfelt scones today than previously, and more role-filling bakeries, not because people are greedy, expedient, or talentless, but because they're scarcely thinking of baking. They just want to run bakeries.

The issue is framing.

Music can affect and inspire when musicians show up to PLAY, rather than act like musicians doing musician things. Sing a legitimately soulful note without trying to hammily seem like The Soulful Singer.

This is not a plea for originality. Artists who frantically reject discipline and tradition to come off as innovators are the worst tourists of all. “Look! Now it’s me breaking the rules!” is still posing in a plywood cutout. Originality is just another image.

Sing, play, paint, or write something because you actually have something to say, and do so with heartfelt talent and care, and it will seem original — or, at least, personal — in a deep way even if you're working firmly within tradition.

This is also not an objection to inhabiting social roles in everyday life. Human beings naturally adopt recognizable styles and identities. That’s fine. The problem begins when this mentality invades matters of substance: leadership, thought, communication, art. The role-playing has leaked into those areas until there's blessed little reality left. We have leaders who speak entirely in the prefab language of leadership; weak, unserious men snarling about strength and seriousness.

People doing substantial or creative work should aspire to more than merely occupying an image of a person who does the thing. But people lacking any such aspiration have flooded into the spotlight purely to seem like thing-doers. The result is a world drowning in their canned fodder.

Yet reality still leaks through. Sometimes the bakery is awesome. Sometimes the singer truly moves you. Sometimes someone says something in a way that cuts through all the prefab cadence and reaches you directly. If this became a broader norm (even just an enduring 5% slice of the pie), we'd live in a fabulous world.

People do know the difference. Yet society is headed the other way.


My previous posting explained how this happens. How it goes off the rails.

I don't see anyone else out there who's spotted what's happening, and why. And it's hard to explain because 1. it's subtle, and 2. a world of poseurs is ill-equipped to discuss reality. It's like explaining the atmosphere to a fish.