jellyellie takes a slightly different perspective with her Darwinian fame rant...
Fame. What interests me the most about this whole debate is something most people don’t consider.
Forget the whole “would you want to be famous?” or “should we earn our fame?” – those questions are easy to answer.
Instead, what fascinates me is thinking about fame in relation to where it lies in the Darwinian evolution sense.
Everything we do can be attributed to evolution of the human race. For example, health: those of us who exercise are fitter, live longer, and are more attractive for procreation. Education: we strive to work hard at school so we can go on to good jobs, earning more money, buying power. Basic stuff.
So why fame? How does that help us prolong the human race, and weed out the sour genes?
At a first glance, it doesn’t. You don’t have to be clever to be famous. You don’t have to even have a reason for being famous. Going out and getting wrecked, taking drugs – things which surely do not extend your life and make your genes attractive in the pool – are often enough to bring fame.
So why have we evolved so much, with the cleverest basic evolution instincts, only to keep this seemingly rogue attraction to fame?
Maybe it’s more obvious than it seems. If you’re famous, it’s generally because people either love you or hate you. So if you have hundreds of thousands of people that love you, you have nothing to worry about in terms of keeping your bloodline going. You’ll have plenty of suitors throwing themselves at your feet, and plenty of people to serve your every wishand command. But if you’re hated… you’ll be dead, in a country without rules, a country without ethics. Savaged.
That still doesn’t explain why we’re attracted to famous people, especially if they’re so uneducated and self-destructive as so many‘celebrities’ appear to be today.
So perhaps fame as we know it, with It girls and WAGs, is merely a byproduct of our modern age.
Perhaps we’re destroying everything evolution has worked on for us.