I’m convinced that the human race will never make any progress unless it conquers its fame fetish, or more accurately, the worship of allegedly superior human beings.

Fame-worship exists in nearly every field of human endeavor. People worship movie stars, pop stars, rock stars, rap stars, TV stars, sports figures, writers, artists, business leaders and monarchs. Their every move is catalogued in photos, videos, tweets, interviews, rumor mills and gossip rags. Average people drop the names of the famous with great frequency to raise their own meager status. They often justify arguments by quoting one of these masterful marvels of human evolution.

The primary criteria for worship in modern times is wealth. The logic is that if someone makes a lot of money, they deserve our humbled respect. Beauty helps, or at least the appearance of beauty through various forms of plastic surgery or flattering camera angles.

Still, some people who are spoken of in hushed tones of awe, particularly the icons of the past, were neither wealthy nor particularly attractive. This is particularly true of dead literary figures, whose cult status owes more to mythology handed down from generation to generation than any rational appreciation of value. We believe they are better than us because that’s what they taught us in school. Therefore, Shakespeare has attained near godlike status despite the fact that he is also the author of such crap as Titus Andronicus, Love Labour’s Lost and Henry VIII. The same godlike status is given to artists in other fields such as Charlie Parker, Charlie Chaplin and Pablo Picasso, again despite legacies of uneven work and seriously flawed personalities.

I was hoping that the democratization of communication via the Internet would have weakened this fetish, but it’s actually made it worse. Bloggers and tweeters spend more time adding to the chronicles of the rich and famous than they do producing original work. The ones that do attempt to find their voices are shamefully ignored anyway, because they’re neither rich nor famous, a Catch-22 if there ever was one. The barriers between the common folk and the high-and-mighty have never been thicker, and the odds of breaking through into the stratosphere are similar to the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot.

I’ve personally known many musicians, writers, actors, thinkers and even athletes who were far more talented than those who we have turned into gods. I’ve studied the works of many authors, poets and composers, and while I’ve found some of their works enlightening and uplifting, all it means is that they had a particularly good streak. It doesn’t mean that they’ve turned water into wine or raised Lazarus from the dead, and it certainly doesn’t mean that everything they ever did should be treated as sacred. There’s the Paul McCartney who wrote the great songs on Revolver, and there’s the Paul McCartney who has been making himself wealthy on trivial tripe for the last forty years. Like the rest of us, he’s another flawed human being. The only difference is that he happened to catch a break.

It’s bad enough that the comings-and-goings of the British royalty, who have failed to produce anything of value  since the days of Elizabeth I, are avidly followed by millions of Americans whose country was born primarily because the founders wanted nothing to do with useless, wasteful monarchs. It’s tragic that we worship anyone at all. Our obscene fascination with wealth and power, supported by an economic system that forces us into envious competition with each other, causes us to devalue our own talents and ignore the truly meaningful work that artists, teachers, caregivers and common people engage in every day.

In the end, we worship those who frequently display the worst qualities of the human race (narcissism, greed and the fervent belief in their own superiority) while treating those who represent the best qualities of the species (community, curiosity and the fervent belief in human potential) with relative disdain.

I think we’ve turned the world upside-down, and we need to flip it back into place. Social distances of the kind we are experiencing now always lead to social disaster.

Photo via Dreamstime.com

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Sometimes the stupidity of the American people is breathtaking.

Over the past few years, those on the right have issued dire warnings about America turning into a socialist paradise. They claim that Obama and his cohorts are on a mission (Muslim-influenced, no doubt) to take away our sacred rights of freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the freedom to shoot one another from the safety of one’s home. We hear again and again how Obamacare is a badly-disguised ruse to strip us of our freedom to choose whatever incompetent medical professional we want and to deny us our right to pray that the one we choose wasn’t one of the medical professionals responsible for one or more of the 300,000 deaths caused every year through medical errors.

Okay, so I’ve editorialized a teeny bit here, but what I really want to address is the fact that these pundits and politicians actually believe that the Obama government is hell-bent on taking away our freedoms.

What’s so stupid about that notion is that the corporations who pay their salaries or contribute to their political campaigns have already taken away more freedoms than the limited imaginations of those in government could ever conceive.

Corporate health plans now routinely penalize the overweight and the nicotine-addicted by either jacking up their  insurance premiums or by not hiring them at all.Many corporations have personnel policy manuals loaded with rules that deny all kinds of freedoms: the freedom to wear what you want, the freedom to bring your kids or pets to work, the freedom to eat at your desk, and above all, your allegedly inalienable right to freedom of speech.

Although I regularly read the annual polls that tell us that Americans don’t know dick about their history or their form of government, I’m still astonished by the attempts of some employees to assert rights that do not and never have had legal standing in the American workplace. A short while ago, I actually had an employee defend some comments he’d made that amounted to sexual and racial harassment by claiming his constitutional right to “freedom of speech.”

“Have you ever actually read The Bill of Rights?”

“Of course I have!” he replied, lying through his teeth.

“Hmm. Maybe you missed the introduction. The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. It doesn’t say anything about corporations or other private institutions. Corporations can restrict freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association and freedom of the press within the corporation. They do it all the time. Plus, if you’ve read anything about The Founding Fathers, you’ll remember that most of them were Masons, an organization that has always had strict rules restricting freedom of speech in order to protect their secrecy. Those guys knew exactly what they were doing when they wrote that little phrase “Congress shall make no laws” into the First Amendment.”

I could have gone on to tell him that a corporation’s right to restrict various freedoms is somewhat limited by laws designed to facilitate unionization and by the need to consider an employee’s religious practices in relation to scheduling work, but for the most part a corporation is given a great deal of latitude to do what it takes to manage the business and the people in it. This is why you can’t do certain things in the workplace even if they are First Amendment rights. You can’t tell your boss he’s an idiot or that you’re not going to do the stupid thing he asked you to do: that’s insubordination. You can’t tell someone that their butt looks good in those jeans: that’s harassment. Many corporations forbid wearing religious icons or “offensive” t-shirts with religion-tinged slogans. You can’t publish an alternative newsletter on the company network sharing your belief that the executives are a bunch of no-talent losers. You can associate with others for the purpose of discussing working conditions and the possibility of unionization, but even that right can be limited to specific times and places.

Corporations also have more power to promote social conformity. Despite the press about all the really cool places to work, most companies still have dress codes, fixed work schedules and both rules and norms about how one should behave in the workplace or interact with co-workers. Modern work life imposes a routine; routines become fixed patterns; fixed patterns deaden the brain. At the end of the work day, once you get through a commute that inevitably worsens with the passage of time, the last thing you want to do is think. You want a few hours of escape before the cycle repeats itself the following morning . . . and the morning after that . . . and the one after that.

The worst part of it all is that unlike the government, corporations have real power over you. They control your paycheck. They control whether or not you make your mortgage payment or feed the kids. Of course you’re going to conform, limit your self-expression and behave appropriately—you need the money!

The reason why businesses are allowed to order people around and shut them up in a country that proclaims the inalienable nature of certain rights is because America is a capitalist country first, and a democracy second, third or fourth. Democracy has never really gained a foothold in the workplace, despite various movements and initiatives that fall under the headings of “employee empowerment” and “workplace democracy.” Even those initiatives are pretty limp; I’ve never heard of one that gives the employees the right to vote on who’s going to be their boss or on who’s going to be the next CEO.

I would love to have an intelligent conversation about freedom in America, but such a conversation would force people to look at some fundamental contradictions in American society that people really don’t want to deal with.

Why can’t we just be ourselves?

So many lives to throw before the wind . . .

—Leighton Christopher-Smith

Sometimes a period in your life takes on a theme, as if all the things you’re reading, hearing or seeing have a common thread. Conversations overheard in busy places, the song that happens to be playing when you turn on the radio, a book recommended by a friend who has never recommended a book before . . . you find that many of these apparently random events are connected by some kind of recurrent theme.

This year’s motif is identity, or “Who am I in a 21st century universe constructed more like a honeycomb than a village?”

One of the manifestations of modern life is that we have multiple identities. Except for self-sufficient hermit farmers, most of us have at least three identities: the “real” self, the work self and the family self. To varying degrees, we hide parts of who we really are when at work or when interacting with workmates, and we slip into various façades when hanging out with family members. No matter how horny we are, we learn to hide the sexual self from people at work; and no matter how proud one is of the beautiful tattoo on one’s right butt cheek, we usually don’t drop our drawers at family gatherings. We are all compartmentalized and we all repress aspects of ourselves in order to retain membership in various groups we value.

Note that it’s not just the real self being repressed: the flow goes both ways. I hate talking or thinking about work when I’m at home. I don’t want my work self to intrude in any way on my personal or family lives. I also don’t want to be my family self when I’m with my wife or close friends, because they would find me an intolerable bore.

The entire nature of identity has become much more complex with the rise of social media in the context of a celebrity culture. There are now firms who will help you with something called “personal branding” so you can own a carefully-constructed persona designed to help you gain money and followers. We’ve seen Beyoncé and Jay-Z trademark their kid’s name, an act I found disgusting but which certainly encouraged the masses to get on board with the notion of person-as-marketable-product.

The underlying message behind this movement is the same old message that has been hammered into kids for years: “You can be somebody!” You no longer have to moan that you “coulda been a contender.” With social media technology (and proper branding, of course) you can attract people from all over the world and from all walks of life to pay you a bit of attention and treat you with a modicum of respect. Sure, you now have a fourth identity, but so what? I’m sure there will be Identity Management firms cropping up soon to help you with that.

This flowering of multiple identities does create absurd interactions with other people. I learned this through my interview with The Alt Rock Chick. We only know each other by our pen names. In her case, she has an identity on top of another identity: she uses the name of a Ringing True character as her web name in addition to The Alt Rock Chick pen name. She is very strict about separating her work life from her other life compartments, taking the unusual step of completely altering her appearance when she goes to work. This is understandable, since she shares erotic photos of herself on her blog, and merging the two identities would present significant difficulties for her.

But the weird thing is that until she decided to meet with me face-to-face, I had no idea whether or not her “real” self bore any resemblance to the online self. The pictures could have been Photoshopped or even a different person entirely. The work story could have been a complete fiction; perhaps her online identity was a way of creating a fantasy life in response to a repressive marriage. What I found, though, was that the pictures were of a very real person who feels tremendous pressure from the need to repress herself in any way at all.

What’s really driving the multiple identity problem in our culture is the belief that we need to repress parts of who we are because we think that other people will judge us and reject us “if they only knew.” While that belief may be true in part, there’s a deeper truth we choose to ignore: everyone feels like they have something to hide. We all have deep, dark secrets; we all do and think things that we’re reluctant to share in polite company or even with close friends. But if we all have these flaws or funny fantasies, then what’s the problem with sharing them? Wouldn’t sharing our secrets represent an act of kindness that allows the other person to share who they truly are?

The speed and frantic nature of the Information Age has caused us to forget many basic truths or dismiss ancient wisdom as hopelessly out of date. I would point out that while the technology has changed, human beings haven’t. “To thine own self be true” has an even more powerful meaning in today’s confusing world of identity-shifting.

The truth is that any form of self-denial creates stress. Having to manage multiple façades creates inner tensions similar to the inexorable movement of tectonic plates. Nature tells us that tension must be released and resolved, so the resultant human earthquake is more likely to create lasting damage to self and valued relationships than the act of simply accepting yourself and giving others the opportunity to do the same.

Reblogged from altrockchick:

Reblogged from altrockchick:

Where are you goin' to?

What are you gonna do?

Do you think that it will be easy?

Do you think that it will be pleasin'?

---Steve Miller Band, "Livin' in the U. S. A."

Answers:

Where are you goin' to? I'm moving to France. As you may have read in the interview I did with Robert Morrow, I've decided to accept the transfer offered by my employer, and I'll start my new job in Paris May 6.

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