The Dark Truth About Celebrities

BY SOFO ARCHON

This is the transcript of a spontaneous talk.

Celebrities are lost souls.

And those who are following them are lost too. But they don’t see that. They see in celebrities images of perfection, absolute beauty, absolute success, wealth, and happiness. But those images are all fake; they don’t represent reality.

Reality is far from that. Most of those celebrities are far from happy. They are, in a sense, successful, yes. They have all that our culture tells us is what we should search for: money, fame, beauty, youthfulness. They do have this kind of success, but they don’t have success of the inner world. They’re not content. They’re actually depressed and anxious, and many of them are suicidal.

And it makes sense if you think about it, because they’re living fake lives. They have created an image around themselves to present themselves in a certain way—in a way that sells to the public. Not all of them, but a lot, if not most of them. They don’t know who they are, they don’t know what they’re doing, where they’re going, what impact their behavior has on others and the planet.

Yet that’s the image that people glorify. Most people see celebrities as the pinnacle of success. And due to the loneliness that prevails in the world nowadays, and the human curiosity to get to know about the life of somebody who is so different—like a celebrity—celebrity worship comes into existence.

So many people are obsessed with their favorite celebrities. They know who they sleep with, what kind of makeup they’re wearing, what kind of shoes they bought, and they feel that they have a relationship with them. But in reality, this relationship is parasocial. It is one-sided. The attention that they give to the celebrities is not reciprocated.

So they remain lonely, yet they have this illusion that they have a connection with their favorite celebrity. And celebrities know that very well. And so they are selling them stuff because they know that those people are following their every move and are willing to do so many things they’re being told.

If you think about it, celebrities are, for the most part, just marketable commodities. They are selling their very selves and their very lives to the market. And corporations know that very, very well, so they are exploiting celebrities to make profit through advertising and whatnot. And once those celebrities become irrelevant, they just discard them and use other ones.

Politicians exploit celebrities as well—whether to promote themselves, their political party, or their ideology, or to distract people from the problems of the world, the real issues that should concern us all.

You see, people are suffering, and through celebrity worship, through following their favorite celebrities, they kind of live in a fantasy world of entertainment, and they forget about their problems. They forget about the state of the world that we’re living in. And politicians know that so well, so they try to distract us as much as possible.

We know more about who our favorite celebrity sleeps with than about how much economic inequality exists in the world, or how much environmental destruction is being caused every day.

So people are avoiding their problems this way. In fact, they worsen the conditions of their lives, because not only do they not do anything about them, but through comparing themselves with celebrities, they feel inadequate, worthless, unimportant, incomplete. And this, in the long run, makes them depressed and anxious and socially dysfunctional, and that insecurity makes them more vulnerable to exploitation by the political and economic elites.

So many people want to become celebrities themselves. Living in a materialistic culture, in a culture that values the superficiality and money and material possessions more than anything else, people want to become like their favorite celebrities.

I was reading about a survey that was conducted a few years ago in the UK that showed that about 50% of UK teenagers intend to become celebrities, not realizing that that’s one of the worst things that one can try.

People want to become famous for the sake of fame, not because of their talents and skills and intelligence and creativity.

This is the sick world that we’re living in, where people are placing more value on their superficial, egotistic gratification over true contentment and honesty and healthy relationships and peaceful coexistence with other people and the planet.

Celebrity worship reflects all that’s wrong with society today. It reflects our egoistic mindset and superficial values that are reinforced by the socio-economic system that we are living in, which is consumption-based and profit-driven, and has us fight constantly with one another and show to the world how superior we are to the rest of the people in order to get validation, in order to feel that we are somebodies. And until our mindset changes, until our value system becomes different, we will keep letting the world burn—and ourselves along with it.