One might ask: SonomaSage - why do you dislike actors?
To which I reply: I know actors. I was an actor for a few years when I was a teenager. I stopped acting after I played the lead role in my high school’s play. Since then I have attended hundreds of plays because I enjoy them. I’ve written one play already and I’m thinking about writing another.
However, I have seen how acting is a destructive profession. I know the biographies of more than 500 actors and actresses. In general, actor’s lives are worse than the lives of non-actors. If someone tells me, “I am an actor”, my prediction is that they are untrustworthy and they don’t know how to actually do anything. Like all things, there are exceptions. Some actors are very good people (e.g. Paul Newman, Christopher Lee). One actress was a bone-fide genius inventor (Hedy Lamarr, inventor of spread-spectrum radio). The exceptions are real but they don’t shift the average.
I trust performance. I trust a life history of sustained effort in mastering a skill, be it construction, farming, medicine, law, or computer programming. I do not trust actors.
Question: Is Beauty an indication of goodness? Actors are among the most beautiful people alive, are they good people?
The answer is no but the question is very interesting.
The Ancient Greeks worshiped beauty, especially human beauty. They believed - as a best as I can tell - that a really handsome man or a really lovely woman - was blessed by the Gods. Further, they believed that this divine favor of physical beauty was making visible their inner worth. For the Greeks, the connection between physical beauty and goodness was real; beautiful people were presumed to be better people.
One reason why the Greeks created the finest statues that had ever been created anywhere in the world was because of this belief. Everyone at the time knew that the great sculptors based their statues of Zeus, Poseidon, Athena, and Venus on real men and women, epitomes of male handsomeness and female form. To be sure, the statues were even better than the human model, but even so, the statues were closely based on real people.
The Greeks didn’t flat out say, We worship men as Gods, but it is pretty much built into their mythology and ethos.
The Greeks wanted the connection between beauty and goodness to be true. And this desire for beauty to be good and true has come down to us, 2,500 years later. Europeans and Americans still believe in this idea from the ancient Greeks. Note that the Chinese do not believe in this idea in the slightest! The Chinese culture makes no connection between beauty and goodness, though the Chinese do hold to the somewhat-related idea that ugliness is connected with evil.
I note here, that for the Ancient Greeks, the idea that beauty = goodness was broken by Alcibiades. The reason is: Alcibiades was extremely handsome, extremely smart, loved by most everyone who knew him, and yet - he proved in his life to be a rotten, untrustworthy, scoundrel. He betrayed the nation of his birth and education (Athens). He joined with Athens’ enemy (Sparta) and despite all the fleets and armies placed under his command, he was, overall, a failure. Towards the end of his life he joined the Persian empire, the enemy of all free Greeks.
For the rest of the Greek era, his example remained irrefutable proof that human beauty was not always a reflection of inner worth.
Fast forward to modern America and I see that we have, foolishly, returned to the Ancient Greek notion that beauty = goodness and truth. Today, and for my entire life, the most beautiful people are worshiped. Actors, news reporters, and recently CEOs and politicians, these people tend to be extremely attractive and their physical form is being treated as an indication of their moral worth.
The complex thing is: the idea that beauty = goodness is not without some justification. The Greeks were not fools.
Here is why: A woman’s beauty is obvious to her family and friends from a very young age. I’ve known a few very beautiful women and they were very pretty by the age of four. The story of the ugly ducking which becomes a beautiful swan is just a fairy tale. Beautiful women are treated differently by everyone around them for almost their entire lives (when age does catch up to them, it’s a terribly wrenching experience). This different treatment for beautiful women means they rarely suffer from insults, they are usually given help whenever they need it, men will give them gifts unasked, and so on. Given how easy life is for a beautiful woman, it should surprise no one that beautiful women seem to be - on the surface - good people.
As for handsome men, other men like being around them. The words of a good looking man are taken more seriously. If you are tall and good looking, you tend to be nominated for the role of team captain. Sometimes these small votes of confidence encourage such men to aspire to positions of leadership, sometimes, by dint of actual experience these men become good leaders. However, I’ve known a few handsome men who were all surface with no actual worth at all. They looked like good leaders, they sounded like good leaders, but in real situations, they had very little to offer.