On the Human Drive for Fame and Immortality
May 31st, 2009
Under the Microscope
Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal… This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
- William Faulkner, from Lion in the Garden, 1968.
by Glynn Wilson
I logged into my Facebook account today and was struck by a photo of three women on a beach. Not famous women mind you, but looking like someone famous on those blue chairs to go with the ocean and the sky with matching umbrellas, sporting sunglasses and cocktails, like Hollywood actors of old.
After a month on Facebook, I’m wondering if the rich and famous hate the paparazzi so much, why do complete nobodies take pictures of themselves and post them in the public domain?
Could it be that the rich and famous would not have minded the paparazzi BEFORE they were rich and famous?
Maybe that’s the point. Or maybe there are more interesting questions, some without answers.
If it’s true that humans possess a natural drive to seek answers and really know what’s going on, why then do they often turn to all the wrong places to find out?
Gallup has found that 18 percent of Americans still think the sun revolves around the earth, as opposed to the other way around, which is close to the margin of error of corresponding with President George W. Bush’s final approval rating of 22 percent.
Now I’m not saying that all of Bush’s holdout supporters don’t realize the earth revolves around the sun. But let’s say for the sake of argument that a large percentage of this group is the same.
Now for the next piece of the equation, you have to understand how newspapers work. They are sometimes great sources of information and for narratives of what’s going on in our culture. Yet they are rarely definitive.
The Washington Post Sunday magazine carried a somewhat fascinating news feature today about a kid from Baltimore who got famous for making funny faces in YouTube videos.
It starts off as a typical newspaper feature about a person and deals with a modern technological innovation and the phenomenon of fame. Buried deep in the story is a bit of social science research attempting to explain the phenomena of political blogging. What is missing is a further search for the source of the blogosphere map, which leads to Harvard and one of the first big studies of blogging, journalism and the impact on society.
But before you go off reading up on those things, let’s take it a step further and to a question we can answer.
One of the most asked questions today is based on this statement, true or not.
“The urge to be famous has always been a part of human nature. But it’s become worse than ever in our modern society? Why?”
To begin to find out why, I remembered something from a college Psychology class and began to Google updates to the theory of a human drive for immortality in all it’s forms.
There’s actually a grand theory of it all now, and here’s the best quick thing I could find on how the quest for fame complies with the immortality drive I learned about in that Psychology class.
The Immortality Drive plays itself out through three urges: (1) the urge to achieve immortality by extending your physical life and its impact on the world as much as you can, (2) the urge to distract yourself from thinking about the fact you are physically going to die and may not have a spiritual afterlife or reincarnation awaiting you, and (3) the urge to ensure spiritual immortality after physical expiration.
This researcher says the reason fame obsession has gotten worse has to do with how secular our society has become.
As each generation become less religious, the sincere belief in an afterlife also probably decreases, meaning that people have to focus on alternative ways of satisfying their drive for immortality. This causes us to focus more of our energy on wealth accumulation, power, status and of course fame. Fame is an easy way to at least ensure your name and image will endure forever, even if your body won’t.
Another reason for the increased fame obsession, according to this report, is the advancement of technology.
Imagine the days before there was an international media. Before the invention of the telegraph, information could not travel faster or farther than people. And before the invention of the railroad and steam engine, people had severe limitations in how far and fast they could travel. What technology has done is increase the speed with which information travels and the geographic range that information can reach. Fame was much harder for the average person to achieve. You had to do something grand, good or bad, and you had to have some sort of talent. You had to be a war hero, a conqueror, a great politician, an infamous serial killer, etc. Now with television, radio, the 24-hour news cycle, reality shows, the internet and viral videos, 15 minutes of fame is easier than ever to achieve for the average person.
The third reason for this increased fame obsession is the rising narcissism, which this researcher says comes from our modern culture’s self-esteem focused style of parenting. I’m not sure I agree with all of that, but the underlying theory seems solid.
The immortality drive is the major driving force behind human nature.
Fame is the most enduring and potent form of immortality humans can actually achieve, but because it used to be so hard for the average person to achieve people channeled their energy into satisfying the drive for immortality in other ways. But now, thanks to increased secularism, improvements in technology and media choices, less barriers to fame and a stark rise in narcissism, fame seems more achievable than ever to the average Joe, which has driven our obsession with it to new heights.
For those who don’t have the wherewithal to get at this immortality any other way, there is also “immortality by proxy,” where individuals talk about the importance of being “part of something” this is “larger than themselves,” like a person, event, or movement.
I can relate, as I’m sure you can, whether it’s a political or social organization or even just an e-mail list.
This author leaves out the bit about the form of immortality that comes from breeding and leaving behind offspring with your genes. Then there’s always those who get famous by killing someone famous, like that particularly American breed of assassin such as John Wilkes Booth.
Or hey, this example from today that broke on the Web as I was writing this:
O’Reilly’s ‘Tiller the Baby Killer’ Gunned Down in Kansas Church
Personally, since I don’t have kids or an actor or politician’s fame, I still cling to the “immortality of the writer” form from that first lesson in Psychology. I liked the idea at the time. Still do.
And I don’t think it makes any great difference whether the writing is published with ink on paper in book form, in a newspaper or magazine — or an electronic Web Press archive.
Besides, there are other takes on immortality to consider. According to the Greek philosopher Socrates: “Of all our possessions, wisdom alone is immortal.”
Then there is the inspirational quote from American business.
“What we do for ourselves dies with us,” said Albert Pine. “What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.”
They say blogs can’t replace newspapers. I ask you: Who answers the questions best?
Want to get famous? Make comment.
But wait. If you are making the comment anonymously, how does that get you any closer to fame?
Is it possible that there is a form of fame that only exists in the individual mind? Might that explain a lot of the anonymous blog comments now famous especially on Alabama blogs, including the newspaper variety at al.com and elsewhere?
As always, the world is more full of questions than answers. Unless, of course, you listen to talk radio, where they profess to know it all — without doing one whit of research. Whatever comes out of their mouths when they open them will do…
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May 31st, 2009 at 5:41 pm
This argument could be a form of anachronism: projecting the present into the past. I’m not sure that good historians or anthropologists would take this research at face value. It ignores the fact that art, e.g., developed in pre-literate cultures. It seems to assume that fame must be global or at least continental or national to be fame. The pyramids, Maya and later tribal ruins in Mexico and Central America, Mound Builder culture in the US, many prehistoric monuments in the British Isles, etc. One could object that these were all non-secular, but the argument begs the question that secular humanism is not a form of religion. It also is only relatively true that communication was limited to the speed of humans: the discovery of the wheel and the domestication of horses, e.g., and the use of smoke signals, signal fires, and carrier pigeons seem of ancient origin. The notion of narcissism is at least as old as the Greeks. The development of games and athletic competitions seem to be as old as society. Fame in one’s village in 3000 BC for being the best wrestler, spear thrower, carver, baker,etc., may have been just as important in its culture as they are today on a larger scale. A great deal of fame was not transmitted, of course. But having spent my life and career in the information age, I have some evidence that technology may be making the problem worse, not better. Information has always had an important property–it flows. We are losing much more information today than ever because of the speed of the outdating of technologies. A huge amount of research and a number of practices such as the Internet Archive are trying to discover how to transfer information to new technologies losslessly. We aren’t there yet. You can still buy turntables new, but not 8-track tape decks. No 5.25 inch disk drive connected to a computer with the CP/M operating system, which was widely used before the IBM PC, exists today outside museums and a few preservation labs. The CD will disappear much faster than the LP. The fame suggested in the Harvard research exists on fragile media, much more fragile than stone tablets. I didn’t read the article, but I’ve seen others like it, and I’m not convinced.
May 31st, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Not sure what you are not convinced about since you didn’t read the article, by that I assume you mean the column, or any of the linked articles?
This is the core statement and it comes from Psychology, not historians or anthropologists.
The immortality drive is the major driving force behind human nature.
Are you saying there is no such drive? In a blog comment from a Facebook post? : )
June 1st, 2009 at 8:25 am
The “human” drive for fame and immortality may be more a product of culture than genetics, although there are certainly sound arguments to be made for both positions.
Monotheistic religion, which is the cultural base for much of the world, assumes an outside higher power or superior being. This power is defined as a kind of superhuman, with many if not all of the attributes of ordinary humans, save that it has unlimited power, knowledge and prerogative. The Star Trek Next Generation series had a recurring superhuman, nearly godlike character called Q who was a great case study in why it would likely be cosmically disastrous if such a being or beings exist.
Wanting things to stay the same forever, one expression of this cultural imperative, along with wanting to control and use as much of everything and everyone else as possible, fuel much, if not all, of what is wrong with human interaction today and all the complex, and debilitating, relationships and institutions in today’s world.
There are no sane justifications for war, for sacrificing the welfare of coming generations on behalf of excess by the present one, or for sacrifice of even a single human life for some other, allegedly greater, purpose.
True immortality seems to me to rather be living in such a way that one creates true value for self and others. There are people who have lived that way — Gandhi and King in recent times come to mind — and people who are living that way now. But they are still a small minority in the world.
These true humanists are fighting the often lonely, and mostly unreported struggle day in and day out to show that a humanistic society is possible and that indeed, it is the only realistic hope for humanity.
June 1st, 2009 at 10:20 am
So what does that say about the Facebook, Twitter and American Idol phenomena?
June 1st, 2009 at 11:54 am
I’m not sure. Those venues are certainly places where people ignored by mainstream entertainment and news media can become famous, and in the case of American Idol, even become rich.
The kind of unsung, value-creating activities I mentioned in my previous post do not easily lend themselves to any of those venues, and my guess is that those involved in those unsung actions are typically not given over to self-promotion.