There are two forms of conventional behavior that have reached the height of irrationality.  The so-called “celebrity” worship by the masses toward certain individuals, and the notion that America is a “democracy” with all the political schemes and strange behaviors these perceptions and their forces dictate.  In this series I won't deviate toward the irrational conventions produced by the current version of "democracy" being practiced in America.  But "celebrity" works to destroy individuality, and individuality is what is needed to get people to take responsibility for their own body wastes when using wilderness, back country, and parks.

What Really Is a “Celebrity?”

A celebrity is a person made important by the media focusing on their life as some sort of ideal.  A fairy-tale come true.  The highest reaches of “the American Dream.”  Wealth and luxurious living.  The good life.  This is the work of advertising.  This is propaganda.  This is made-up.  This is irrational.  Few people are made into “celebrities” for a reason.  And most of those are hopelessly flawed human beings - trapped as if by the gravity of a black hole in the pure fakery of what has been made out of them.  Many simply can’t keep up the facade and end up killing themselves or they deliberately destroy their "celebrity" in order to get away from it.  Many die ignominiously - having out lived their usefulness to those who created them.

Yet the desire to escape the intense feeling of low worth and emptiness produces a steady stream of young people questing for stardom, for that spot above the clouds, for wealth and fame, which is supposed to lift them above their fellow.  Witness American Idol.

Victor Frankl, the late Austrian psychiatrist, writing in his epic work Man’s Search For Meaning, a book that details the day-to-day behavioral requirements needed to survive the Nazi camps of World War 2, suggests that most of us suffer from what he called “an existential vacuum.”  The feeling of an empty existence.  A feeling of being nothing.  Useless.  Unimportant.  Wasted.  And I believe it is this exact scenario that propels the advertising agencies of the world.  “Take these pills...Get these injections...Stay at this hotel...Take these vitamins...These supplements...Put on this skin cream...Use this makeup...Drive this car...Live in this neighborhood” and you will rise above those who don’t take, get, stay, put on, use, drive, live in....etc.

One writer described the masses of mankind as a great black hole.  Just as a literal black hole is theorized to have such a force of gravity within it that no light can escape, most people are held inside their culture, as if by gravity unable to emit their own light.  These masses become subject to the conventions of the culture.  The culture taking on the role of “life's director.”

Much of this, of course, comes about through the school system, which puts each child on a treadmill called “the curriculum.”  The child’s uniqueness is soon held in a state of suspension by the gravity of the curriculum and the propaganda surrounding each child’s “social opportunities.”  Only the rebels and dropouts seem to escape the social conventions all are expected to accept and carry out.

Most kids sense that inner emptiness long before their high school graduation ceremony.  They also deeply sense their inability to shine their own light out upon the world.  So off to college they go.  "I'll get to feel more full there.  It's got to be better than high school."  And of course a great deal more socialization takes place.  The fraternity.  The sorority.  Hanging out.  Listening to lectures.  The professions streaming in and streaming out.  And at each stage, they’re assisted by the media to project out of that vacuum [Frankl speaks about] onto what appears to be a potentially successful life of climbing the corporate ladder and consuming.  “He who dies with the most toys wins.”

The “celebrities” of course are sold to the masses as having an even more glamorous life style with more toys and bigger houses and faster cars.  And the light that could shine out of each person - their own individual creativity - stays dark inside the culture.  And the culture is sick because of it.  So only a few - relative to the size of any population - can become “celebrities” to act as carrots dangling from the end of a stick as the average person rides their donkey through life.

In my next essay (post), I’ll write about Princess Diana, the quintessential celebrity, and how her destruction becomes a symbol for the destruction of wilderness.  The completely irrational conventions of her “celebrity” life points to the complete irrational way in which people view nature and behave in natural settings.