By Jason Lim
Around two weeks ago, a 47-year old Scottish woman named Susan Boyle, unique in her frumpy ordinariness, stepped onto the stage of ``Britain's Got Talent" and blew the world away with her singing. The fact that netizens worldwide have now ordained her as the ``hairy angel" should tell you what kind of an underwhelming TV image she cut at the time of her audition.
If you are one of the 50 million people who clicked on YouTube videos of her performance, then you know what I'm talking about. I know that I've single-handedly added to that view count more than 10 times. Although I was forewarned to expect something special, I was still surprised and deeply satisfied when her astonishingly obvious talent managed to turn the sneering judges and impatient audience into her instant fans before she had even finished singing her first verse.
As I read some of the comments left behind on YouTube, I knew that I wasn't alone in feeling this way. We felt her embarrassment when she confided that she lived alone with her cat and has never been kissed before. We soared along with her triumph as her rendition of Les Miserable's ``I Dreamed a Dream" made everyone do an incredulous double-take. We actually shed tears as we wholly identified with this unattractive stranger with the voice of an angel.
What about Susan Boyle's story made us feel this way?
World pundits have been discussing this very question for the past week. Some have argued that Boyle's story inspires us because it's a Disney fairytale in the making. Others have opined that we're rooting for the underdog, as we naturally do. Still others say that it's the guilt that we feel for making a snap judgment based on her appearance and then trying to overcompensate.
All these diagnoses have something in common; they all deal with our tendency to judge people based on their looks.
It's already been proven through various social research studies that tall, good-looking people earn more money, have happier marriages, and generally lead better lives. Although we all pay lip service to how a person's real worth is in his or her inner beauty ― morality, character, talent, etc. ― we also want to be like the ``pretty people" and support a whole industry of celebrity worship by tracking and emulating how they live.
In Gordon L. Patzer's ``The Power & Paradox of Physical Attractiveness," he provides examples that ``despite professed ideals, people do judge others by their looks. Physical attractiveness is a more powerful determinant of a person's fortune and misfortune in life than people admit. No matter the words, thoughts and ideals proclaimed by people, these same people judge, assume, infer, believe, act, treat, decide, accept, reject and behave toward or against individuals in patterns consistent with their own physical attractiveness and that of others."
Does this mean that we are fated to live as we look because the world's expectations and opportunities are arrayed according to how attractive they see us? This is not good news, especially for someone like me, who tends to experience severe challenges in these very departments. Are we truly what we look like?
But the answer is an obvious ``no.'' Does any one of us, even those who are extraordinarily perfect in every way, believe that we are only what we look like? Of course not. But here's where the visual hypocrisy and fairness comes in. Although we don't believe it's fair for people to judge us only by our cover, we often judge others by their covers, making excuses for our shallowness.
Admittedly, the overwhelming evidence is that subconscious, powerful prejudice based on what a person looks like is instinctive to the human condition. However, if we allow our biological instinct to overwhelm our sense of what's fair and right in our relationships, then we are, in effect, collectively conspiring to create a society that exists only for the pretty and rich to show off how they look and what they have to those who are not so blessed. It would be a society of superficialities where conspicuous, material consumption is the overwhelming process that crushes any deeper sense of what it means to be a human being with the God-given gift to think, judge, and reflect on the deeper meanings of life.
In fact, it would be a society where cosmetic surgery is considered a prerequisite to getting a job, sexual favors are considered fair play to advancing one's ambitions, marriage partners are screened based on their family wealth and schools, and corruption is justified as long as it gets the job done. It would be a society without an essence, spirit, or soul to create something valuable, authentic and truly human. Could anyone be happy within such hollowness, no matter how pretty and rich they are?
Sure, instincts are a natural part of us, but it's not necessarily our destiny. We have the ability to rise above our instinctual prejudices and aim for something nobler that lay within our soul. I think that's why I cried watching Susan Boyle's video: I found renewed faith in the fathomless possibilities of a person that goes beyond what he or she looks like.
If Susan Boyle can help me find faith, she truly is an angel, hairy or not.
Jason Lim is the managing editor of the Korea Policy Review published at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He can be reached at jasonlim2000@gmail.com.