Embracing Artificiality - A Philosophical Look At RuPaul

Many people whom we refer to as 'awake' (and myself included) have been railing for years about the sheer artificiality of modern mainstream culture. You can imagine the stereotype I'm thinking of, unneeded plastic surgery, no sense of real purpose or appreciation of real art of natural beauty. It does seem like we've been cast into a hyper real hell of material distraction for which we can safely blame the mainstream media. There seems to be less of a place for philosophy or real beauty in our modern world. But something has hit me recently which is making me question my position slightly.

I was watching a show with my wife called RuPaul's Drag Race. For those unfamiliar RuPaul is a famous American drag queen and he hosts a reality TV show where aspiring drag queens compete to be the next big thing in the drag world. I watched this show with curiosity as this is a world I am unaccustomed to personally and after a while something really struck me. Everything about RuPaul seems artificial, when he is in drag he sports outrageous wigs and gowns. Even his music features heavily in the show and let me tell you it has a bland disco pop feel with his voice so auto-tuned it's almost unbelievable.
 

So what am I actually getting at here? Well, RuPaul seems like an intelligent and savvy individual who is wholeheartedly embracing artificiality by choice. He embraces it to such a degree that his artificiality is simply larger than life. This led me to revise my opinion about the whole matter. When I see deluded mainstream masses who live their artificial existences unaware of the fact that their lives are artificial I see lost people who don't seem to have any awareness, they just go along with the culture because that's normal and people like me are weird. But when I look at RuPaul I see someone who had consciously embraced artificiality and to his great success and I can't see anything wrong with it.
 

What I have concluded is that it's not an artificial versus an authentic lifestyle. It's the level of consciousness a person brings to their lifestyle and if someone freely chooses to live such a life then I say good luck to them. I think we have to get away from how a person lives and what their tastes are and look deeper to see if they bring a high level of consciousness to what they do and (I don't know RuPaul personally you'll be shocked to learn) but to my eye that's what he seems to be doing and to him I say condragulations!

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