Quality

Quality is an assembled value in our minds which combines a string of other values we perceive from nature. The more values pulled in through our understanding that are harmonious and reliable, the more quality.

For example, the quality of a sunset comes from the associations to familiarity, color, connections to related experiences, understanding of the science of color, and how we feel about it.

When we interpret a value as something higher than another value, we’ve assigned a type of comparative quality to it. When we say “quality work”, we usually mean “high-quality work”.

We find qualities when we remove extra information. With all that information, it’s simply static or noise.

Quality gives us tremendous insight into the world around us. By elegantly portraying patterns that exist in the universe, we have the means to implicitly understand many domains that we’d otherwise not be able to comprehend.

One specific type of quality is beauty, which we frequently communicate through forms of media. Beauty is when the patterns allude to things that travel into implication and allusion in a way that pleases us.

Each combined work is greater than its components. A car, ecosystem, or person is more than a list of its parts. It ends up having something greater in it through the constructed elements that make it what it is.

Animal

Beauty resonates with our animal essence, which is why this concept is a “lower” layer than values. However, beauty requires values for us to perceive it. Modern and post-modern movements have tried to divorce beauty from values, but all they’re left with are abstractions and feelings.

The only response that we can say when we witness beauty is a feeling that, in a nutshell, says “wow”. It draws many connections to many associations at once and usually showcases tremendous skill if it was created. The feeling is, in my opinion, a short-circuit by the brain where we’ve purposed to understand the entire breadth of the experience but are overwhelmed by the quality of the thing, all within a few seconds.

Beauty floats within the animal essence, so there’s a limited scope of what we can classify as beauty, which is mostly patterned on how we feel about nature around us:

  • Most things, including stories, incorporate a type of symmetry (like with plants and animals).
  • Everything uses a rhythm, repetition, or recursion (like with the life cycle, habit, or a heartbeat).
  • In music, songs only transition in one of 3 possible ways from one tonic to the next (like with the limited tones we use in our language).
  • Visual representations almost always honor geometric patterns and contrasting triad colors (like we see in naturally occurring landscapes).
  • Most man-made patterns employ variations of specific numbers like 3, 7, and 12.
  • Things often scale upward or downward with a similar form, which is the symbolic essence of fractals.
  • Often, elements interconnect with other elements (like the way we think and understand).

Some things are never beauty, and we have an easier time detecting them than beauty. Poop or a murder scene, for example, are universally interpreted as disgusting. But, with the right creator’s direction, vulgar or wrong things become connected to a beautiful idea if they float back to a desirable human universal.

Relative

Most people like to imagine that beauty is relative, and a large portion is. Cultures define beauty in vastly different ways, and people are frequently influenced by others to change their minds on their opinion of beauty.

All art references nature, so poorly made media can still draw feelings that remind people of experiencing the original thing. When people use media in that fashion, the creation itself doesn’t need any beauty of its own.

But, if a person is valuing the beauty of the thing itself, irrespective of what it references, that’s a universal beauty that likely could exist in the essence of the thing itself. For those things, they are worth consuming over and over, especially across different stages of life.

Not all attributes of a thing are inherently beautiful. Often, something can be beautiful in part but not in its whole. For example, a film with dubious moral qualities and a disturbingly evil source reference may have artistry that expertly captures the intrinsic art of acting, videography, lighting, and so on. Its parts are beautiful by themselves as strictly a reference to the respective crafts that made it, even if it’s a bad creation in its entirety.

The realm of understanding various varieties of beauty is known as “taste”. Our tastes are flavored by moral disposition, personality, and prior experience, so each person’s taste will differentiate wildly.

We have a constant need for novelty, so we find tremendous value in “remixes”. A remix is creatively combining existing elements into a new form:

  • A story that ends differently than we were expecting.
  • Media in a genre we’ve explored, but crosses into other genres.
  • A new friendship with someone who has a personality similar to someone else we knew.
  • A climate like the one we know, but with a different atmosphere or ecosystem.

Because of their inexperience, less skillful creators will have an easier time targeting young people, which is how most media for mass appeal is marketed. The simple reason for this is that older people are harder to please:

As we gain awareness of what we’re consuming, we discover more of the interwoven patterns placed in created things. By understanding a creator’s historical context, perceptions, and what that creator was unaware of while thinking of those things, we can understand into far more than just that media and what it alludes to:

  • We learn about the human condition and its universals as it proceeded to build that thing.
  • We connect with others’ perspectives, most notably the creator’s, to derive further understanding of the world around us.
  • When other people observe it, our conversations with them add even more meaning to the experience.

Hubris

We see connoisseurs of beauty arise in every form of media, from wine-tasting to Star Trek. They form a group around the subject, with its own unique culture that includes specific terminology and required recreational activities.

However, the leaders of that group are typically addicts of the subject, with their identity closely intertwined with whatever they advance. They frequently demarcate their interest as a sign of social status, usually with some implication of “only a true [lover of the interest] can understand the [positive attribute] of [marginally popular media]”.

They’re often skillful in maintaining their reputation in their clan, though, so conflicts with them are rarely worth the exchange.

Application

There is an inherent beauty within many things, to the degree they reference nature and reality. We can gain tremendous happiness by finding it.

Beautiful art always has a purpose for its existence, and that purpose will be obvious because it’ll tie to human universals. For that reason, if the created work’s title has more meaning than the work itself (e.g., post-modern art, crayon drawings), it’s a badly made work.

Beauty is relative, but not entirely. Its staying power comes in how much inherent quality it has, which is mostly based on the creator’s raw skill.

When someone desires to explore a media, they can unveil a remarkable amount of potential truth through consuming the commentary of another creator. They’re essentially receiving a second perspective on the same subject, but arranged into a meticulously crafted story. The insights can both be of the subject and the creator!

The culture surrounding a creation is not the creation itself, and often builds a story around the thing to give it a false reputation. Don’t condemn or venerate a creation just because everyone else seems to be.