Once when I was 14, my younger brother and I were lying in beds next to each other, and I (studying sociology 101 in college at the time) tried to walk him through a thought experiment of my own design about how social context influences aesthetics.

In another world where Jesus was nailed to a giant plastic My Little Pony figurine, would you feel the same weight and reverence when walking into an old Catholic church and seeing their equestrian "crucifix"? Would everything we've all been immersed in since birth to create that feeling about the cross be enough to overcome any supposed evolutionary reactions to the shapes and colors? And could those reactions get conquered and reintepreted to only add to the scene's percieved depth rather than detracting from it? I believed so, and still do with more reservations. I failed at getting him to understand the point, but it was funny to watch, so I didn't care too much.

Back then I was very into nothing being universal or objective, everything being very malleable by society. I'd dream up 4X game designs where the player controls how their tribe culturally interprets the material world they start in as a way of breaking free from Sid Meier brainrot, and so on. Even now that I've developed this big pragmatic material streak that counters that, and have grown more skeptical and disillusioned in general, I sometimes feel this latent moral imperative flaring up to stop people from giving into the idea that shit like this is fixed before they even tried much else, especially when it's fundamentally in the old-timey race IQ eugenics way. It's weak. It's zero imagination. It's anti-life.

You can probably dig up me saying all this 5 years ago, maybe better, maybe worse.