Meno -- an understanding

While working with my group on a project for my journalism class this evening, I suddenly realized I was having an experience similar to Socrates' in Plato's Meno.  I was creating circle-graphs, and I was thinking in my head that they were kind of silly, unnecessary, and just for aesthetics, when my group member looked over at what I was doing and was like "Nice! Awesome! Those look great!"  I felt good that he had finally said something I was doing was "great" because they all seemed to hate the slides I made for the powerpoint presentation, but then I realized that he was saying that merely because making graphs looks impressive.  They didn't mean anything, really.  All the stuff I had made for my powerpoint slides was actual meat and material, and they hated everything I did until I made something simply for the looks.  (Hated is an overstatement....they just totally criticized them and we ended up throwing them out and making new ones...great.)

This is exactly what Socrates experiences from Meno in Meno.  Meno is delighted by impressive shows of "knowledge" like when one quotes poets or uses big, extravagant words or ideas to describe something.  You know, displays that are largely fluff and showy-ness...superficiality.  I have a hard time working with these people because none of them seem real...they're all bar-going, money-spending, self-absorbed, gotta-get-the-A, gotta-do-what-teacher-likes college students.  Hell, they're whatever, I don't care.  They can be how they want to be and I will be the way I am.

When I voiced my opinion about something I had one person (the above guy; other two groupmates are girls) against me, saying no no no, and it was like his word was the last word.  I was trying to convince only him...but he ended up saying no to me and my opinion wasn't taken into consideration.  Whatever, not a big deal, but I still felt weird.  It was like, why do I have to convince him?  Why is HE in charge?  Why does HE get to say "NO" and I just have to live with it?  Fuck, I can't wait until this presentation is over.  I just hope we don't sound like idiots up there because we started putting it together at the last minute.