Tag Archives: Celebrity

Let us now stop praising famous men (and women)

Posted on by
1

By David V. Johnson

Source: aeon.com

After the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris nearly burned down in April, the French luxury-goods magnate François-Henri Pinault was celebrated for committing €100 million to reconstruct what he called ‘this jewel of our heritage’ and ushering in a flood of donations from other benefactors and companies. Though an impressive figure in the abstract, Pinault’s commitment reflected only 0.3 per cent of his family fortune. If he instead had the average net wealth for a French household and donated 0.3 per cent of his fortune, his commitment would total about €840. Not an insignificant sum for an average Frenchman, but who would refuse to give that sum if it garnered the praise and notoriety that followed Pinault’s donation?

We live in an age of excessive praise for the wealthy and powerful. The upper echelons of society bathe in a sea of honours, awards and celebrity. We see it in the glossy magazines and at the so-called ideas festivals, where billionaires are fawned over for their bons mots. We applaud philanthropists for their largesse, even if their charity will do little ultimate good for society, and even if their conduct in acquiring their fortune was reprehensible. We commend them for dabbling in politics or pushing school reform, before we see any results, and even if we have reason to doubt the good that they will do.

To criticise our praise for the wealthy and powerful as excessive inevitably raises the question of meritocracy. To what extent do we live in a meritocracy, and is that a good or a bad thing? Meritocracy is a form of social organisation that is founded on praise and blame. People signal who deserves power and status by praising them for their character, their talent, their productivity and their actions, and who merits demotion in status and power by blaming them for their vices, their ineptitude and their failings. Insofar as people’s assessments of praise and blame are accurate, they will promote those deemed better up in the hierarchy of power and status, and demote those deemed worse down. Better people will do better things with their superior power and status. When the system works, we have an aristocracy – rule by the finest people. Or so thinkers from Aristotle onward have thought.

This system doesn’t work and can’t work on its own terms. Assessments of praise and blame tend to reflect existing hierarchies of power and status, thereby reifying them. This is because praise and blame have as much to do with the person judging as the person being judged. If everyone in a meritocracy wants to get ahead, assessments of praise and blame will be influenced by whatever helps people to get ahead – namely heaping praise on the powerful and respected, and castigating those without power and status. This is obviously true with meritocracies that most people explicitly reject, such as white supremacy and patriarchy – hierarchies drawn along racial and gender lines. These systems have persisted despite the baseless moral judgments on which they are grounded, because those living within the system are incentivised to see such judgments as legitimate. Meritocracies in general convince those within the system to echo the moral assessments on which they are based as objective and justified, when in fact they are shaped not by objective criteria but by the qualities of the powerful. Praise and blame are ideological blinders that uphold the legitimacy of the meritocratic hierarchy. If we take a more critical look at ourselves and our moral assessments, we will be better able to remove those blinders.

The smog of praise that permeates the upper echelons of society is a product of perverse incentives. As individuals, we tend to praise others and to court praise, because we want to win good will from others and receive confirmation of others’ good will. What’s more, we have an even stronger incentive to praise people who are wealthy and powerful, because winning their goodwill secures their premium support, and the wealthy and powerful are, in turn, more readily able to court praise from others. The more elite someone is, the more likely he is to crowd-surf on the praise of the many lesser folks seeking his favour. And insofar as our age of massive inequality creates people who are wealthier and more powerful, to that extent will the wave of excessive praise swell. We can even anticipate this tendency generating a negative feedback loop: praise of the wealthy and powerful affirms that they are good people deserving their fortune, which can, in turn, augment their wealth and influence, which thereby attracts even more praise.

The effects of excessive praise on conduct are also worth concern. Praising people, even those who deserve praise, can actually have a negative effect on their behaviour. There are many psychological studies demonstrating that people are susceptible to moral compensation. That is, when people feel that they have engaged in good behaviour, they also feel that it gives them licence to act badly in the future. The converse also holds: when people feel that they have engaged in bad behaviour, they also feel that they should make up for it by acting better in the future. If these studies hold up, they appear to upend the social consequences of praise and blame: praising people excessively can lead them to act badly, while blame puts them on notice and reinforces good behaviour. And insofar as this effect is more likely to influence wealthy and powerful people – those who can, thanks to their resources and influence, do more – it magnifies the harm of their bad conduct.

Meritocracies try to establish objective criteria to justify social hierarchies. Nowadays, entry into the elite often has to do with having the right résumé: Oxbridge or Ivy League degrees, a stint at the best consulting firm or investment bank, service in politics or government, writing a book or giving a TED talk about your work. These résumé items are supposed to establish the talent, judgment and character of the people in question. People with such résumés receive respect and esteem – even though their accomplishments are the predictable consequences of being born into the right family, knowing the right people, and swimming with the current. For the ambitious – and meritocracies feed ambition – these résumé items are primarily credentials for acquiring greater power and status. There is no reason for the public to accept such credentials as being an objectively valid base for praise.

If we want to foster a truly democratic society – a society in which we treat each other as equals – we must rein in such excessive praise and the perverse incentives that encourage it. We should aim for the opposite extreme, toward withholding praise and being more circumspect about the wealthy and powerful, to restore balance. As Justice Louis Brandeis, who witnessed our previous Gilded Age, might have said: ‘We may have democracy, or we may have praise showered on the heads of a few, but we can’t have both.’

Smashing the Cult of Celebrity and the Disempowerment Game

Posted on by
Reply

By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

At the dark heart of corporate consumer culture lie the social programs that mass-produce conformity,  obedience, acquiescence and consent for the matrix.

The cult of celebrity is the royal monarch of these schemes, the ace in the hole for mass mind control and the disempowerment of the individual. This is the anointed paradigm of idol worship and idol sacrifice, a vampire’s feast on our individual and collective dreams. Who do you love? Who do you hate? Who do want to be like? 

Combine this paradigm with the technology of social media, and the individual is flung into oblivion, never fully understanding the importance and value of their own life, instead always comparing themselves to phony ideals and well-designed, well-funded marketing campaigns.

‘The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge – broadband tipping the Web from text to image; social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider – the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves – by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity.’ ~William Deresiewicz

Marketeers and propagandists are skilled at leveraging human psychology to exploit human nature. They utilize the study of the psyche to gain inroads into your behavior, and they employ this science as a tool for stoking insecurities and triggering urges.

They may be selling an idea, a lifestyle, a product, or a war, but, the pitch is the same: a false idol rises from the wastelands of the American dream, and is presented to the hordes as a well-packaged product. The celebrity’s life is a projection of a niche fantasy, and a following is built up around this fantasy, and the cult followers are steered toward whatever point of purchase.

And that’s what a cult is: “a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.”

This kind of externalized validation serves as a power transfer. Your personal power is extracted and foisted onto a manufactured image in the matrix, and without realizing it, you’ve forfeited your power to influence the direction of your own life.

“The Fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to drain us emotionally, confuse us about our identity, make us blame ourselves for our predicament, condition us to chase illusions of fame and happiness, and keep us from fighting back.” – Chris Hedges

This is about usurping individuality in order to foster groupthink and hive consciousness. It’s also about creating a barrier between what you believe is possible for yourself and what chances you are willing to take in order to manifest a unique vision for your life.

You see, human beings are energetic creations, partly made of matter and partly made of spirit, but wholly malleable to the direction of the mind. We are affected by subtle energies, body language, electromagnetic energy, frequencies of light that we cannot see, sounds that we cannot hear, and a thousand other hidden cues. We are beings of energy, and much like a battery, we can can give or receive energy.

But the mind is at the center of it all. Whatever the mind entertains, the being creates.

When the mind fixes on an external idol, this innate power to form ourselves is transferred outside of our own locus of control, and where the mind could be centered on creating and expanding the self, it is instead focused on the fantasy of achieving an impossible ideal.

As journalist Jon Rappoport notes:

“If perception and thought can be channeled, directed, reduced, and weakened, then it doesn’t matter what humans do to resist other types of control. They will always go down the wrong path. They will always operate within limited and bounded territory. They will always ignore their own authentic power.” ~Jon Rappoport

The end game here is to keep us from accepting ourselves as worthy and perfect divine beings, and to disconnect us from our own potential. This is deep stuff, reaching far beyond the push to convert us into greedy, materialistic consumers. In a metaphysical sense it is a transfer of energy, and where once we were strong and full of promise, we are now helpless and content to observe as the world flits by.

What’s most dangerous to any system of control is for the individual to know their own strength and to speak their own language, as Chris Hedges puts it.

“That’s why I don’t own a television… and I work as hard as I can to distance myself from popular culture so that I can speak in my own language, not the one they give me.” ~Chris Hedges