The pop song I knew well growing up was “Fame,” written and performed by David Bowie and released in 1975. Strange and enticing stuff. Fame, he sang, “makes a man take things over.” It “lets him loose, hard to swallow” and “puts you there where things are hollow.” He later sings that fame “drives you to crime.”
Of course, we were all obsessed with the famous because my childhood was full immersion in mass culture: TV, radio, magazines, LPs at every store. My parents didn’t like it but there was little they could do about it. The sights, sounds, and messaging of the age was about fame-chasing and fame-worshipping. Ironically, this song is what made David Bowie famous.
Looking back, those were innocent times compared with our own. We are now surrounded by it: social media, streaming, constant and universal digital contacts, texting on every platform, and the possibility for anyone to reach a mass audience with video, plus AI to do editing and sprucing up to make even simple videos look amazing.
There is a new so-called profession called being an influencer. Everyone is invited to try their luck. With enough likes and follows, you get monetized. Then you are paid based on your success in becoming famous. Every platform pokes you to “keep going” because you are “getting traction” so “try interacting” to “boost engagement.” You too can be a star.
We are all invited to participate: more likes, follows, comments, content. Make yourself a star! The people will love you! You will get paid! Money for nothing and partners for free.
This is life for an entire generation. I hate to be that guy to throw water on all this but here comes a giant barrel of it. This is all gibberish and nonsense. It’s spiritually dangerous. It’s empty and an occasion of sin. Fame is a drug that will betray you. The rise is as fake as the fall is real. It’s like some law of the universe. Live by it and you die from it.
I’m ever grateful to the priest who took me aside when he first noticed that I was making an impression in public life. He warned me never to believe or even read my positive press nor revel in flattery from any quarter. Fame is a deceiver, he said. Seek out critics. They are the ones who are more likely saying what you need to hear. In short, flatterers are likely liars seeking favor; critics are at least trying to say something true.
Outstanding advice but it’s not easy to follow. There is something intoxicating about fame, how it conjures up in one’s mind that others are thinking and talking about you constantly, and appreciating and valuing you.
It’s a main feature of life itself that everyone wants to be valued. We go through much of our life feeling undervalued. That is true for all of us in all times and all places. Fame offers a correction, a salve for a wound we might not know we have. It lifts us up and grants us dignity that we are quick to believe we deserve.
Such thoughts come to me from the very painful experience of reading the diaries of Anthony Fauci, posted by Sen. Rand Paul. Most of the content concerns his own fame. He luxuriated in every positive story and headline. He celebrated every bobblehead, every cupcake with a Fauci image, every laudatory media appearance, every selfie for which he posed.
I’ve taken some time to reflect on what some of the greatest minds said about this topic. My favorite writer Oscar Wilde said, from his novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
This was in 1890 with the dawn of mass media culture. Wilde loved fame. Sought it. Bathed in it. He believed his fame would protect him against the growing legal charges against him. He dared the courts to rule against him. They would never convict England’s most beloved playwright.
Friends pleaded with him not to go ahead with the trial but he would not be dissuaded. He made an enormous error, faced a guilty verdict, went to prison, and died in exile after living life as a beggar in Rome and Paris. Absolutely heartbreaking.
It was only a few years later that Mark Twain crafted this exquisite sentence: “Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.” He also wrote, “On the whole it is better to deserve honors and not have them, than to have them and not deserve them.”
Most fame is undeserved honor. This is one reason it can be so dangerous. Its very fragility makes it constantly vulnerable, inspiring unrelenting and existential panic on the part of the holder. What happens when they find out? It also generates what’s called imposter syndrome, the sense that the glory that covers you is not really deserved.
As in the Victorian period reflecting on newfound opportunities for fame, Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote: “We cannot serve two masters who are enemies the one to the other. …. This is the reason why it is wrong to pursue the world’s praise; viz. because we cannot have it and God’s praise too.”
Centuries earlier, Francis Bacon wrote that “Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.” Further: “Good fame is like fire; when you have kindled you may easily preserve it; but if you extinguish it, you will not easily kindle it again.”
Samuel Johnson wisely observed that “men have a solicitude about fame; and the greater share they have of it, the more afraid they are of losing it.”
The ever-brilliant Lord Byron experienced vast fame in his life. “I awoke one morning and found myself famous.” And yet: “What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.” Further, he uttered a truth of his times and ours: “Fame is the thirst of youth.”
That’s another way of saying that seeking fame is essentially childish. Which is to say that the impulse to grab it is born of a lack of experience and wisdom. It leads to grave embarrassment.
To shower a person with praise born of fame creates a delicate relationship between the adoring and the adored. The audience does not want to believe that the object of their appreciation is motivated by a burning desire to elicit fans without limit. The audience wants to imagine that the famous are of humble heart and thereby in need of affirmation.
The only fame that is deserved is that which is not sought. That’s the intuition we all hold. Fame breaks and shatters—extinguishes completely—once it becomes obvious that the famous person is nothing but a manipulator, a puppeteer, a seeker of fortune, a cynic who is using fame as a cover. That’s when the fame is withdrawn and turns to shame.
In the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, Dr. Jekyll carefully guarded and curated his reputation as a fine doctor and upstanding gentleman, and ever more so as he revelled in his alternative personae of Mr. Hyde. Each depended on the other. But that story ended as this story always ends. The fall is as great as the rise, the shame felt in equal measure as the fame itself.
