I love this fragment from Alain de Botton’s The News: A User’s Manual:

1.

WHY DO PEOPLE want to become famous? It’s easy enough to mock celebrities, but where in the psyche does the will to fame spring from? Few of us ever become famous by accident or at little cost, so what is it that inspires the deep sacrifices that fame demands?

2.

AT THE HEART of the desire for fame lies a touching, vulnerable and simple aspiration: a longing to be treated nicely. Whatever secondary impetus may be supplied by appetites for money, luxury, sex or power, it is really the wish for respect that drives the will to fame.

If this hardly seems like a fuel powerful enough to propel a lifetime’s worth of the efforts that becoming and remaining famous require, we should never underestimate the negative stimulus provided by fame’s opposite, humiliation. We may come to want fame desperately because of just how searing is the pain of being overlooked, patronized, left alone in the corner, ordered to go to the end of the line, thought of as a nobody or told to call back in a few weeks. The wish to be famous is a bid to have our dignity fully respected in a world where it almost certainly won’t be unless we are prepared to take extreme measures. We may be equal before the law and at the ballot box, but there is no guarantee of dignity in the treatment we receive at the office, in our social life or between the wheels of governmental or commercial bureaucracies. Especially in big cities, those centres of unkindness towards the ordinary, where life is unmediated by the beneficial influence of vast skies and huge horizons, respect is a scarce and tightly rationed commodity, and indifference is the norm. One would be well advised not to set foot in Manhattan or Los Angeles without having at the ready a fairly snappy and impressive answer to the inevitable enquiry about what one does for a living.

3.

FAME ALLOWS CELEBRITIES to leverage kindness and respect from others. A famous name alone can accomplish in an instant what its bearer might otherwise have had to beg for over years with his or her whole personality. This saves a lot of time.

Other people have to be nice to the famous because they appear as emanations of the whole world, of the judgement of millions of their followers. Fame is power backed up by an unseen army of admirers. To refuse to laugh at a celebrity’s joke, or to express scepticism as to their talent, is to take on not just an individual but also the whole system that anointed them: the clever judges who gave them the prize, the legions of people who bought their album, the venerable magazines which put them on their covers, all of these are part of an invisible but highly effective force which the famous person can command whenever he or she meets someone at a party or has to deal with an official at a check-in desk. Fame staves off tendencies towards opportunistic meanness; it saves the famous person from being left at the mercy of strangers.

4.

BUT NOT EVERYONE needs fame equally badly. The appetite for fame tends to depend on both what sort of childhood one had and what sort of society one lives in.

In the early years of the archetypal famous person, there is — almost inevitably — rejection; there can’t be any kind of sustained longing for fame without it. One parent or other had to have been uninterested, emotionally absent, more concerned with a sibling — or dead. In the most desperate cases, where there is no question but that fame will become an obsession, the parent omitted to notice their own child because they were themselves engaged in trying to become, or in consorting with those who already were, famous.

When attention and kindness most mattered, when they were defenceless and weak between the ages of zero and ten, when they had no sophisticated tools for attracting the love of others beyond their mere existence, the embryonically famous could not spontaneously convince a much-needed parent of their own importance, a slight catastrophic enough to shape the trajectory of an entire life. How invisible one was once made to feel determines how special and omnipresent one will later need to be.

Unfortunately, of course, achieving fame rarely corrects the early slight, for the real wish is not to impress through achievement (singing, sculpting, deal making and so on), but to be loved simply for being. The moment of achieving fame is hence likely to be accompanied by feelings of hollowness, for it can’t in itself correct the humiliation that ignited the original wish for fame. The self-destructive behaviour often seen in the famous is the confused articulation of anger at a pyrrhic victory, a desire to destroy an adulation of the many which has been unable to compensate for the neglect of a primary crucial few.

By contrast, the happily anonymous adult, who needs no acclaim and can be satisfied with a modest job, is the true person of privilege in this scenario, for he or she has luxuriated in one of the greatest gifts available to man: the sense of being central in the affections and care of a parental figure. A decade of parental love can give a person strength enough to cope with fifty years of insignificance. The only childhood properly deserving of the epithet ‘privileged’ is one in which the child’s emotional needs were adequately met.

This analysis has a side benefit of providing us with a litmus test for how good a job we may be doing parenting our own children: we have only to ask whether they have any wish whatsoever to become famous.

5.

THE INTENSITY OF the desire for fame depends also on the nature of one’s society. The more dignity and kindness are given only to the very few, the stronger will be the urge to avoid being simply normal. Those who pin the blame for ‘celebrity culture’ at the door of the immoral young are hence missing the point. The real cause of celebrity culture isn’t narcissistic shallowness, it is a deficit of kindness. A society where everyone wants to be famous is also one where, for a variety of essentially political (in the broad sense) reasons, being ordinary has failed to deliver the degree of respect necessary to satisfy people’s natural appetite for dignity.

In so far as the modern world is celebrity-obsessed, we are living not so much in superficial times as in unkind ones. Fame has become a means to an end, the most direct route to a kind of respect that could otherwise have been won in different, less renown-dependent ways — through kindness rather than magazine covers.

If we want to decrease the urge for fame, we should not begin by frowning upon or seeking to censor news about celebrities; we should start to think of ways of making kindness, patience and attention more widely available, especially to the young.

[…]

The Injuries of Fame

1.

THOSE SETTING OUT to be famous dream of securing a particular kind of attention for themselves: high-grade attention, by which they imagine an audience sympathetic to their talents and forgiving of their faults, an audience that resembles a loving parent, an ideal teacher or an all-seeing and generous God.

Then, once famous, they realize that they have become the recipient of a most perplexing kind of attention: one where intense love is followed by sudden hatred, where their most minor lapses are treated with violent intolerance, where weaknesses are pounced upon and never forgotten, where a prurient interest surrounds matters entirely unrelated to the talent that initially earned them public notice, where journalists go through their rubbish in the early hours and where embarrassing pictures of them appear online and within hours attract the ridicule of millions. If they were to complain about this kind of attention, what might be termed low-grade attention, they would quickly and sanctimoniously be put in their place and informed that someone who courts attention cannot choose which version they are accorded and must be ready for, and even deserve, any sort of attention whatsoever.

2.

CELEBRITIES ARE SO unusual and so privileged that it takes a little effort to remember that they aren’t a different species in every respect and indeed that they are especially like you and me in one area in particular: they get hurt very easily.

The exaggerated need for approval that drove them to be famous in the first place makes them particularly unprepared for coping with the taunts and denigration they can be sure to face once they have a name. They will be forced to understand that their reputation is not theirs alone, but is a co-creation between themselves and their audiences over which they have appallingly imperfect and indirect control. Shepherding a reputation has some of the futility of trying to guide a soap bubble. When insult strikes, inside their frightened minds everyone has read the venomous articles and seen the embarrassing pictures and will believe the worst. The fears about themselves that made the celebrities struggle to win fame have turned out to be real: they truly are the monsters they tried to persuade themselves and the world that they were not.

3.

A STANCE OF heroic defiance is sometimes suggested at this point; the wounded celebrity is advised to be the bearer of his or her own meaning and to disregard what the world is saying. But how could anyone become famous without a disposition to care a little too much about what other people think?

A better tactic would be to get into the minds of one’s enemies. The famous person might imagine their critics to be motivated solely by a limitless, obsessive hatred, and to have made their lacerating deductions from immovable convictions. But in truth, their opponents are generally not much more than thoughtless, unem-pathetic, inured to low standards and accustomed to doing what others do. Their cruel jibes arise chiefly from the sheer implausibility that the person they are being mean to could actually be listening and is likely to be deeply vulnerable. As when one is dropping a bomb from high altitude, the capacity for hurting others increases hugely when one doesn’t have to look one’s victim in the eye.

4.

THE REASONS WHY we need others to fail and why we delight in gossip about their missteps are in the end deeply sad; because we are furious about our own lack of attention — and so attempt to gain relief by punishing those who seem to have deprived us of our due. Our disappointed ambitions turn us into failures: people who need others to fail.

The urge to gossip and the desire for fame spring from the very same ill: both are caused by a shortage of attention. Celebrities are really only trying — albeit on a much larger stage and scale — to solve the same problem we all grapple with, that of being ignored. We might even say that famous people stand in relation to failures of attention much as the fearless pioneers of flight stood in relation to air travel. Although many of these early airmen died in violent explosions and crashes, the ultimate goal was that one day everyone might be able to fly safely, just as the hope in the arena of fame is that dignity will over time grow more common, and that the sort of respect that is now still the preserve of only a few will some day become properly and democratically prevalent.

We are still working out what the word democracy really signifies. At first, it reflected a conviction that power shouldn’t just be in the hands of the few. It took a great deal of time, sensitization and political articulation for this point to get across and for elites to recognize that being deprived of the right to vote deserved to be listed among the very real ills that a ruler might inflict on his or her people. We should now move the democratic process along and accept that we have other needs which are no less urgent or important than the need to vote, among which we must include the need for dignity and respect. We should sensitize ourselves to the immense psychological repercussions of being pushed around and humiliated. A society which routinely debases the greatest share of its members will find itself afflicted by a strong desire for fame, mixed in with eruptions of the most sarcastic, vindictive and schizophrenic attacks on the few who have managed to secure renown.

The solution to both vicious gossip and the overardent longing for fame lies in a manoeuvre all but unimaginable within the current arrangement of society: a broader distribution of high-grade attention. With more of this in circulation, the manic need both to insult the few and to stand out from the many would abate, to the flourishing of all.