What Does It Mean To Be Cool?

While the video above does a great job of verbally breaking it down, check out it story on
What Does It Mean To Be Cool?

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein links Stoicism and Hip Hop.
Source: http://philosophynow.org/issue80/What_Does_It_Mean_To_Be_Cool


Here are the highlights from this story that spoke to me:

- What is cool, and why is it so cool to be cool?

- The aesthetics of cool developed mainly as a behavioral attitude practiced by black men in the United States at the time of slavery.

- cool represents a paradoxical fusion of submission and subversion.

- It’s a classic case of resistance to authority through creativity and innovation.

- Today the aesthetics of cool represents the most important phenomenon in youth culture.

- The aesthetic is spread by Hip Hop culture for example, which has become “the center of a mega music and fashion industry around the world”.

- several recent studies have shown that American brand names have dramatically slipped in their cool quotients worldwide

- Often “it is more important to be ‘cool and down’ with the peer group than to demonstrate academic achievement,”

- fascinates the world because of its inherent mysteriousness.

- The stylized way of offering resistance that insists more on appearance than on substance can turn cool people into untouchable objects of desire.

- In spite of the ambiguity, it seems that we remain capable of distinguishing cool attitudes from uncool ones. So what is cool?

- a straightforward, linear search for power is not cool. Constant loss of power is not cool either. Winning is cool; but being ready to do anything to win is not.

- A CEO is not cool, unless he is a reasonable risk-taker and refrains from pursuing success in a predictable fashion. Coolness is a nonconformist balance that manages to square circles and to personify paradoxes.

- Cool is a balance created by the cool person’s style, not through straightforward rules or imposed standards. Coolness implies the power of abstraction without becoming overly abstract. Similarly, the cool person stays close to real life without getting absorbed by it. Going with the masses is as uncool as being overly eccentric.

- The notion of ‘play’ is important to cool, because in games power gets fractured and becomes less serious, which enables the player to develop a certain detached style while playing. For the cool, this detached style matters more than the pursuit of money, power and ideals.

- coolness is a matter of balance; or more precisely, of negotiating a way to survive in a paradoxical condition. It’s about maintaining control while never looking as though you might have lost control. All this is why losing and still keeping a straight face is probably the coolest behavior one can imagine.

- Coolness is control; but the dictator who controls everything is not cool because he does not balance a paradox.

- the aesthetics and ethics of cool fractures and alienates in order to bring forward unusual constellations of ideas and actions.

- the cool person lives in a constant state of alienation.


If any of this hits you the way it hit me, just go read the whole story:
http://philosophynow.org/issue80/What_Does_It_Mean_To_Be_Cool