Lookism: the eugenics of modern superficiality
How appearance discrimination degrades the soul
Lookism is a term used for appearance-based discrimination. When people make negative judgments, comments, or act in a hostile manner due to someone else’s appearance, they are practicing lookism and eugenics. It’s a form of prejudice, similar to racism, but more broadly applicable, more socially accepted, and specifically concerned with appearance. It’s archaic and unintelligent; addressing it would be a significant development for humankind.
Eugenics is a practice which aims to bring about conditions that ‘improve’ the race, or the species. History is littered with obvious acts of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and state-sanctioned eugenics. Examples include Sweden’s compulsory sterilization programme for the disabled and mentally ill, and similar programs that ran in Norway, Finland, Canada, Peru, and the USA, among other places.
Most public programs for eugenics have long been discontinued, but support continues in less obvious ways, its adherents largely oblivious about what they’re doing. It’s perfectly natural to act without true awareness. The human brain developed as a tool for navigating the endless, goalless, nihilistic process of random evolution. Awareness did not emerge as a tool for recognizing reality, or understanding itself. So, the fact that the eugenic practice of lookism is entrenched into cultural and social practices across the globe is unsurprising. Despite its normality, it’s still senseless, cruel, and depraved.
My weak points are that I’m self-conscious and often insecure, and my strong point is that I don’t feel any shame about it.
- Patti Smith -
I’ve experienced lookism first-hand. Abusive comments, derogatory gestures, and verbal and physical assault. Due to an autoimmune disease that has caused all of my hair to fall out, including my eyebrows and facial hair, people decide to abuse me assuming I’m homosexual, diseased, on drugs, or just too odd for their tiny brains to handle. On one occasion, some wonderful parent had their children inscribe my car with sad faces while waiting to enter their local school. I discovered it as I went to defrost the windscreen before travelling to my GP to discuss severe fatigue, chronic pain, and suicidal depression; an appointment made in advance, and known to certain staff at the local practice linked to children in attendance at the local school. Just a coincidence, I’m sure. Who’d want to be friends with the sort of unhinged sociopath who gets their kids to do this? Who’d want to be their child, or grandchild?
Such people exist in all societies and nations. They usually hide behind a mask, using excuses to justify their hatred and lack of intelligence. They’re the sort of people who believe that shouting abuse in the street is practicing free speech, and somehow virtuous. It isn’t; it’s an assault, and in no way comparable to spending time learning, contemplating, and elucidating an evidence-based argument in an appropriate forum. Of course, the truth is that they don’t really believe in anything. They’re machines, filled with aggression they don’t understand, incapable of introspection, and bouncing around like jack-in-the-boxes whenever they’re triggered. Their shepherds want them kept that way.
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
- Thomas Paine -
Shouting insults in public isn’t personal freedom, and it doesn’t make a community or a nation free either. It chains both the individual and the public to their basest animal instincts, fostering a regressive, negative society. That’s why reasonable people don’t want it, and don’t support it. However, there are forces at work who recognize the advantage in nurturing petty hatred between ordinary folk. It distracts the masses from what’s really going on, diverting their anger from where it should be targeted, for example, political corruption, fraud-based corporate fascism, super-elite paedophile rings linked with foreign intelligence agencies, economic collapse, toxification of the environment, and genocide. Instead, their frustration and fury with the misery of life is rerouted toward arbitrary scapegoats; the psychological projection of cowards. Social media has become a powerful tool for amplifying this incivility, powering the left-right pincer movement that is disintegrating civil rights and civil liberties. Meanwhile, rights, earnings, pensions, and health systems are eroded, and peace, the environment, and the future that would depend on it, are destroyed. It’s probably just a coincidence.
Lookism is easy to rouse because it taps into basic biology. The ‘reptilian’, or primal, brain centre, which is really a complex network spanning the entire organ, is the reactive control centre that scans the environment and triggers instinctive or learned behaviours. For many, this system holds near-total control over their actions and values.
To know myself, I must reflect on myself by returning to myself from my exile in others.
- Mark C Taylor -
At its most extreme, lookism triggers horrific attacks and murder. People with Albinism living in Tanzania, Africa, are frequently attacked; some have their limbs cut off, they might be set on fire, and are often killed. Such incidents have also been recorded in Malawi, Mozambique, Burundi, and Zambia. Bald men in Mozambique have been killed due to a superstitious belief that their heads might contain gold.
People might believe such events are confined to other continents. However, individuals have been murdered in Britain for their looks, including Sophie Lancaster who was kicked to death for dressing like a goth, her boyfriend was almost killed in the same attack. Both had every right to dress as they wished, freely and without interference. Sadly, Britain is a nation, like most others, where countless factions feel they have the right to enforce their dress codes on others. A moronic, vigilante fashion police expressing the opposite values of a free, democratic society.
These problems are global. Between October 2023 and September 2024, 350 people were reported murdered due to their outwardly expressed, non-traditional gender. These killings included stoning, hanging, and decapitation in Africa, Asia, South America, North America, and Europe. More than forty of those murders occurred in the USA, a country where a pro-Israel Jew shot two Israelis because they looked like Arabs. The insanity of this looks-based incident increased when the Israeli victims posted anti-Arab slogans, believing they’d been shot by an Arab not a Jew. Propaganda can distort perception so brutally that reality is inverted. Proof of the power of media to govern minds.
Murder is the tip of the iceberg. Violence draws strength from the commonplace belief that it’s okay to judge by appearance. For the main part, how others look has absolutely nothing to do with you, and has no tangible effect on your life. Being concerned with such matters is petty and idiotic.
Lookism manifests in many ways. On average, people deemed superficially more attractive than others earn $230,000 extra over a lifetime solely due to their appearance, not their merit. Long-haired men in sixties Britain and America were frequently beaten and lynched for forced haircuts. In 2024, a disabled girl was edited out of a school photo because someone thought it didn’t look right with her in it. A large proportion of people who lose their hair during cancer treatment never regain the same sense of self, even after their hair has fully regrown; many report the change to their appearance as the worst side effect of treatment; worse than severe fatigue, nausea and vomiting, bleeding, sores, and nerve problems. It is frequent for patients to be reluctant to undergo treatment due to concerns over their looks. Some have described hair loss as worse than losing a breast.
Sadly, many fail to recognize that the trauma from hair loss, skin issues, genetic disorders, burns, and other visual differences, is caused by other people, and the shallowness of society in general. It isn’t necessary, but it would require wholesale change in how others are valued, and in how people perceive the validity of their irrational judgments. Don’t we want a world where burns victims can shop without harassment? A world where cancer patients can stroll in the park without being stared at or abused? Haven’t they been through enough already?
Do not judge your neighbor until you walk two moons in his moccasins.
- Cheyenne Proverb -
Change isn’t going to happen while lookism is embedded in the entertainment industry, advertising practices, celebrity culture, politics, and journalism. It’s clear that many still cling to brute biology as justification for viewing the world through a superficial lens. For example, Simon Ings, writing in the Telegraph in 2024, suggested that the erosion of superficial appearance-based judgment might be, ‘… steadily lowering the bar on what we think of as a real person.’ This is tacit justification for dehumanizing those who don’t look right. It’s straight out of the psychopath’s handbook, infused with the essence of banal eugenics. To be frank, I’m not really sure what the ‘bar’ represents; humans do the most appalling things to each other, often while wearing suits and sporting gleaming smiles.
Ings was writing about the uncanny valley and robots, expressing fear that a time is coming when we can’t tell the difference between ‘them’ and us. His shallow, regressive thinking misses the point, and utterly fails people with genetic disorders who are refused service in cafes and restaurants because of their appearance. In truth, the danger from AI comes from its infernal adherence to standardized ideals of what humans look like, and its potential to mimic our horrific behaviours. I’ve been identified as a corpse by one app, and trying to get an AI image generator to create a woman without makeup, or a man without eyebrows, was impossible until fairly recently. It’s still hit-and-miss despite clear and unequivocal prompts. Most importantly, if you’re relying on looks to tell the difference between a person and our latest category of non-person, you’ve already failed, and so has your humanity.
Do not judge by appearances
- John 7:24 -
There are many reasons why so many are obsessed with the looks of others rather than minding their own business. A foundational cause, as previously mentioned, is an innate evolutionary drive. A mindless competitive impulse that assesses its surroundings based on reproduction and acquisition. The simple logic running might be verbalized by questions such as: Is it like me? Can I have sex with it? Can I get something from it? Is it hostile? This gaze seeks to own or repel, to encompass or exclude, to extract or destroy; the desperate need for self-validation at its core. But it’s a routine that isn’t usually verbalized, because it doesn’t emerge into awareness for many humans, only the resulting reaction does. You can call it fashion, tradition, respect, or anything you want, but they’re all words that hide what’s really going on under the hood.
Allah does not look at your appearance or wealth, but rather He looks at your hearts & actions.
(Hadith)
When this judgment program is presented with information it can’t easily process, confusion can arise; a cognitive dissonance dispelled through reactive behaviour such as laughter, eye-rolling, cursing, spitting, or throwing things. This is the program trying to protect itself. Rather than requiring the individual to expend energy and reflect upon what’s happening within them, the validity of an object in the outer world is rejected instead. It’s a fear-based reaction (the word ugly stems from the Old Norse word ‘uggr’, meaning fear). It takes courage to override this and become less of an automaton. While difficult, understanding the fear in the hearts of haters can help; although some humans may lack this capacity entirely.
Due to this maya mentality, people do not look beyond the veil of illusion.
- The Bhagavad Gita -
Bringing awareness to hard-wired behavioural programming is a challenge, but when the society you live in, and learn from, reinforces the unintelligent, it’s near impossible. Outward hostility toward those less compliant, whether their differences are chosen or not, serves entrenched systems of power. Lookism is a form of capital, a means of extracting value from others. Judgmental and unaware individuals are easily manipulated. Profits can be made from their insecurities and lack of self-acceptance. Advertising bombards people with encouragement to value themselves, and others, based on how they look. Not their natural look, of course, but an artificed one requiring products. Whether it’s the colour of your hair, the make of your shoes, the gleam of your skin, or the car you drive, there is an insistent message—you’re not good enough, unless you buy our product to prove it. Self-worth valued through expenditure.
The power gleaned from lookism isn’t solely about financial extraction, it serves political and religious power, too. Division can be aroused quickly. You can get elected based on how sharp your clothes look, even if you’re a criminal and a liar. Opposition groups or individuals can be selected for public attack via simple visual cues. Being identified as holy, virtuous, of the right tribe, respectable, or one of the in-crowd, can be as easy as draping some fabric around your body.
When the superficial wearies me, it wearies me so much that I need an abyss in order to rest.
- Antonio Porchia -
All this makes the world hostile and dangerous for those who simply want to be themselves and go about their lives unencumbered. It means that being yourself isn’t simply a personal choice, a matter of self-confidence, or an issue of self-acceptance. There’s genuine, perpetual risk of becoming victim to the banal social violence of the outside world. Just doing something ordinary, like going shopping or visiting a doctor, can carry a range of disbenefits from being downright unpleasant, elevating stress and damaging your health and wellbeing, to landing you in hospital, prison (for defending yourself), or costing your life.
Feeling sorry for people won’t help; pity stems from a lookism mentality, too. Nor is it about performative tolerance—a reaction to perceived social pressure rather than internal maturity—because that just kettles or redirects the problem. It’s about facing your fear and the judgments that arise from it. You don’t have to restrict your own choices either, you do you. Although, with time, you might find you make different decisions about how you express your self-worth.
It is ignorance which smothers, and it is carelessness, and greed that makes the world invisible.
- Buddha (maybe) -
Cultivating a less unpleasant world can be done. In essence, it’s simply about not judging others based on how they appear to you, especially not your initial reaction. However, there’s a tangled web of programming to pick apart: biological programming, childhood invalidation, ‘tradition’, habit, and the relentless subliminal indoctrination of visual media. Ontological laziness is rife in contemporary culture. There’s plenty of advice on first impressions, elevator pitches, media training, fashion tips, and expressing self-worth through the way we look and the things we buy. They all buy into short-term and shallow ways of being that degrade what humans could become.
We shouldn’t pander to first impressions, but challenge them. The amygdala shouldn’t be ruling our world, nor should the sex drive and the shallow ‘culture’ that preys on it. Simple biology isn’t a god to be worshipped, but a cruel, vacuous despot. A wild, insatiable dog that lives inside all of us. Every person needs to take responsibility for their own. Make friends with it, understand it, and bring it to heel if you can. There are infinite ways you can enjoy yourself without deriding others and obstructing your own development.
The price of shallow sex may be a corresponding loss of capacity for deep love
- Shana Alexander -
You can read more about the toxicity of lookism on my Toxic Treadmill website, and watch some excellent videos by Changing Faces, a charity based in the UK who support people who are excluded, isolated, targeted, and abused due to their appearance.
This article comes at the perfect time. Your insights into lookism and its eugenics roots are so sharp. I was just reading a book about societal norms and thought how dificult it is to truly overcome these biases. It almost feels like a bug in our inherited code, doesn't it?