Psst: there’s never been a better time to become a paid subscriber. If you enjoy my work, please consider supporting me so I can keep writing and paying rent.
PS: if you don’t want to give Substack any money (reasonable, understandable, respectable) you can dm or e-mail me directly and we can work something out.
s.sutterlin@gmail.com
I love you!
Discourse or criticism around things like nepotism and fame seem confined to a bubble. The big picture is always obscured, partly because we fail to conceive of fame as anything other than aspirational and desirable. We cannot seem to identify it as a cult or a curse. As I wrote recently, we are trapped in a cycle of liberal outrage. We find ourselves morally appalled at the unfairness or unpleasantness of things like nepotism or billionaires; we infantilize ourselves through limited criticism that is more rooted in envy than actual judgment and assessment.
This restrained perspective provides people with a false sense of blanket unity and hollow class awareness (it’s us against them!), not dissimilar to the mainstream discourse surrounding billionaires, which I wrote about in #17. We can recognize some excess, but we seem unwilling to look at the systems that generate it. There are the acceptable punching bag billionaires (Musk, Bezos) but we seem to have no issue with the billionaires willing to entertain us (Swift, Kroll, Louis-Dreyfus, etc) or the up-and-coming billionaires and shameless multi-millionaires that crowd our cultural landscape.
Okay, some people do take issue with Swift’s wealth hoarding, but most of them fail to rise above the facile liberal deduction that this greed is a personal shortcoming. They cannot or will not acknowledge the collaborative avarice; the systems and structures that encourage this gluttony. Yes, Swift probably is an insufferable bitch, but she does not act alone. No celebrity ever does.
They act within the cult.
Our attachment to the myth of talent and our crippling addiction to entertainment is at the root of these toothless observations; these misguided attempts at class awareness.
I believe it is worth considering the cult-like nature of fame, Hollywood, and media. Through this framework, we can zoom out and judge the collective, count the church of fame’s limbs, and witness—some of us for the first time—exactly how far they stretch out.
To return to nepotism for a moment - I’ve long argued that being born into wealth is a curse, a deep shame, a forever malady. These people go on seeking validation forever because some part of them knows no one should be born into such privilege, that it will always be a stain. There is a heavy awareness of guilt that is impossible to keep away for too long.
Such isolating conditions make them prime candidates for the cult.
Their pathological need for attention or approval keeps them in performance mode. They have little to no other options to consider, they know that to stay safe, they must stay within the confines they have grown up in. The threat of being exposed hangs over their heads like the sword of Damocles. A “regular” job is both unnecessary AND puts them at risk of being found out and correctly judged or dismissed.
Not worth it.
Stay in the bubble.
While it’s not exactly sympathetic, it remains a solid example of the stifling nature of the cult.
It is crucial to see these worlds as they are: sick, and monstrous in both greed and demonstrations of excess. The cult of celebrity may be shiny, but it is a cult nonetheless.
Realism Confidence is a reader-supported publication. If you’d like to support my writing (or help me go to the dentist), please consider becoming a paid subscriber, buying a subscription for someone else, or, if you like what you’re reading, you can send me a tip via Paypal. Feel free to follow me here or here.
LET HER COOK!