I first began to grasp this principle in the context of Chinese culture.

For a considerable time, my impressions of this society were governed by travelogues and scattered bits of Chinese painting and music.  These artifacts all had a serenely contemplative air about them—as expressed in music of a few carefully-chosen notes amid much silence, and in paintings of a few skillfully executed brushstrokes on an otherwise-pure white background—even in the accompanying travelogue narration of few words that rang with the eloquence of small bells.  Whenever I pictured China, this was the sort of impression I conjured up.

It wasn’t until I lived near Southern California’s Monterey Park, one of the largest Chinese enclaves in the United States, and worked and lived alongside a great number of Chinese people, that I began to realize how far out of whack my impressions had been—and began to comprehend the almost unbelievably raucous and teeming character of life in the real China.

Only then did I realize that the quality of uncrowded, unhurried serenity that had originally struck me about Chinese culture did not in any way represent what life was like for most people in China.  On the contrary, it was what was profoundly absent, and yearned for.

Once I understood the principle in Chinese culture, I could see it at work in other places.

For example, the loftily soaring cathedrals of the Middle Ages must have provided a desperately scarce measure of uplift and inspiration to lives that were otherwise rather squalid and brutish.

Or consider the orderly and understated dignity of 18th-century American artifacts—from the writing to the architecture and beyond.

I accepted the conventional view that these reflected "the mind of the eighteenth-century," until I began to hear of Colonial Williamsburg being substantially "de-tidied" to look the way it actually did in history, and read of the bumptious, fractious sprawl of the period in everything from Gary Wills’ Inventing America to Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders.

Now I’m more inclined to believe that the rational orderliness of 18th-century American artifacts was as much reflective of what people wished they had, as it was of what they actually experienced in their day-to-day lives.

If societies express what they yearn for in high culture, it only makes sense that they would do so in more vernacular forms as well. 

How about in our own popular culture?