The Cult Of Celebrity Has Run Out Of Followers And Is Eating Itself

There is no group that is more impressed by, and enthralled by, the cult of celebrity than the bourgeois and the upper petit bourgeoisie. This makes complete sense when we consider that these are the layers in US, British and European societies who are almost entirely disconnected from the routine material concerns that affect the proletariat and even the lower layers of the petit bourgeois. This is why the democratic party strategists are absolutely baffled that the long list of celebrity endorsements they wheeled out for the Harris campaign completely failed to move anyone other than themselves. The cult of celebrity is now something that is only really believed in by those invested in the status quo. The younger generation of the working class are more likely to be compulsively following some content maker from the purely online world than the conventional stars of the film of music industry. Those who are older may know who the likes of Springsteen are but they certainly aren’t going to let the idiocy of his political views override their disgust with the democratic party.

The cult of celebrity is a creation going back to the birth of Hollywood in the west but really takes off after 1945 in a major way with the mass ownership of televisions and the growth of the mass entertainment industry. Whether it was designed to replace organised christianity in the western this is, in effect, what it ended up doing. By this I mean that the old functions of the official church when it came to ideological reinforcement were taken on by the the culture industry and they did so whilst skillfully managing to seem “rebellious”. The bourgeoisie and their cadre of intellectuals came to really believe that control over the culture industry and major communications systems would equal perpetual control for themselves. They think, to this day, that with the right “messaging” anything can be conjured into existence or banished. In this sense they are as obscurantist as the most backward religious fundamentalist. This is where both forms of propaganda do have something in common though, both state sponsored religion and the culture industry rest on very idealist sets of beliefs. In the end the words of the priests who were tied to the Tsardom or the feudal monarchies of Europe rang absolutely hollow because there was no connection left between their sermons and the living conditions of the masses.

The same is now true for the culture industry. It gained its power precisely at a time when living standards in the imperialist countries were improving across the board so that the celebrity icons seemed at the same time to be absurdly glamorous but also perhaps attainable as a lifestyle. None of this rings true today, actors and musicians at the top of the bourgeois tree are despised, reviled figures who are often revealed as perverted and twisted figures (Diddy etc) or so absurdly out of touch that their creativity has long since bitten the dust (Springsteen). In the end the propaganda system cannot override the real class interests of the masses though it can distort how these are expressed and even delay the reckoning coming for the ruling class. The loss of whatever power this system did have though is now here and that is something which gives us cause for hope.