The Illusion of Love

There's a meme going around observing how Hallmark movies tend to feature a female protagonist who falls for the quirky, useless but entertaining guy over the steady but boring guy who wants to provide for her (and presumably a family). (Not exactly fair: they also tend to make the boring guy a jerk to boot.) But that's a definite tendency in Hollywood romantic-comedies in general too. Clearly a woman with her head on straight would instead be seeking a depenable man.

So we have entertainers advancing useless entertainers as the optimal lovers.

Then I was thinking about how Plato's Socrates concludes in Republic that philosophers would be the best leaders of the city. People make jokes about how self-serving that is ("if garbage men wrote books they'd be advancing themselves as rulers", etc.), but at least (political) philosophers think a lot about politics and should have some sort of expertise. Assuming they're not as scatter-brained as Aristophanes's Socrates.

What Hollywood's actual expertise is, is illusion. So we turn to Hollywood to give us the illusion of love. Problem is that what we see readily becomes our ideal. They've sold us lies. No wonder our society is so matrimonially confused.

Maybe Plato was on to something in recommending to get rid of the poets.