THE IDOLATRY OF APPEARANCE
Why we are asking the blind to tell us what we see
The question “How do I look?” has become an instrument of quiet, continuous, cross-generational torture. There is almost no man or woman who has not experienced injury through the lens of their visibility.
The Diagnosis
The standards that the world sets for beauty, body, and form have one clear common denominator: Sickness. Mental sickness. Cultural sickness. Spiritual sickness. There is no society, no fashion, no trend, and no human being who has the authority or the right to dictate a person’s self-worth. And yet, that is exactly what is happening.
Children and teenagers grow into impossible models. Insane measurements. Ideals detached from reality and the human body. And then we wonder why eating disorder wards are full. Why anxiety, depression, and mental disintegration have become the norm.
The Root Cause
The abundance of illness in the world is not accidental. It is a symptom. It is a symptom of a society that has lost its Essence. A society that sanctifies appearance, power, fame, and comparison instead of self-acceptance and internal connection.
The fact that celebrities and public figures allow themselves to dictate norms of body, life, and value is not the problem. It is the Root. This is the root of humanity’s sickness: The Replacement of the Source. Instead of a Divine Source of Life, we bow down to flesh and blood. Instead of internal truth, we worship the Image.
The Plastic Era
The screens are full of models turned media personalities. Sometimes it is simply shameful to hear the vapor coming out of their mouths. Everything is swollen. Processed. Plastic. Detached from any depth, any wisdom, any human image (Tzelem Enosh).
Who can really watch television like this without feeling empty? And yet, we sit in front of them in mute silence. We consume, we absorb, and effectively, we give it legitimacy. This is how abomination is established—not by a scream, but by routine. Not by a revolution, but by habit.
The Madman
We have lost the human image not all at once, but in a daily drip of hollow images and adoration of content-less flesh. The home—which is supposed to be a place of life, connection, and simple holiness—turns into a dollhouse lit by a screen, introducing destruction on a daily basis.
This is not entertainment. It is the flattening of the soul. This is not culture. It is anesthesia.
We are like someone asking a madman: “What time is it?” And he answers: “I am not from here.” That is what the screen presents to us today. Blind people leading the blind.
If a person knew how valuable their life truly was, they would be ashamed to death that this is what they are doing with it—sitting and watching vanity, waiting for the world to change.
Translated from the Hebrew Transmissions of Ruth Kedem
ORIYA’S NOTE
We are living in the Age of the Avatar. We spend more time polishing our digital masks than we do feeding our actual souls. We look at “Influencers”—people who are often deeply anxious, starving, and surgically altered—and we ask them: “How should I live?”
It is insanity. You are asking a prisoner how to be free. You are asking a starving person how to be full.
Beauty is not a measurement. It is a frequency. When you disconnect from the screen and reconnect to the Source, you stop worrying about how you look, and you start caring about how you see.