No-one should ever be worshipped for the simple reason that everybody poops. If I had to choose, I'd go for technology developers over airhead socialite celebrities any day of the week. But you're supposed to respect people because of what they've done, not respect the things they've done because of who they are. That might be a crude definition/explanation of fanboyism, I think... a sort of positive feedback loop that results in the subject of the devotion being able to do no wrong, a manifestation of absolutist thinking.
https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2016/05/politically-correct-or-politically.html
Think about that quintessential tech guru, Steve Jobs. Even after his deaths, articles come out praising his leadership skills, his visionary forward-thinking, and his business acumen. He’s worshipped like a folk god or a saint––and if you think I’m exaggerating, then you should know his belongings are being auctioned off like capitalist relics. Articles about him open with biblical verses. His deeds are chronicled in almost hagiographic reverence. But here’s the thing––he was darn close to sociopathic.
Max Weber helps us understand why that is. Scholar Eileen Barker has applied Weber’s concept of charismatic authority to new religious movements. In her analysis, charismatic authority is particularly powerful––and capricious––because it is not bound by tradition, law, or bureaucracy as the other types of authority are. Charismatic leaders, by virtue of their own mysterious authority-granting magical charisma, get to set the rules that everyone else plays be.
http://alltop.com/viral/time-stop-worshipping-tech-leaders
I've been around my craft long enough to have attracted a few would-be acolytes. I tell 'em, straight up, if they see any good thing in me, they're only seeing the good in the people from whom I learned, aspects of the person they're becoming. For the writing of good software is mostly emulating one's betters, becoming that better person. We grow in the image of those we love.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with success, as many thoughtful people understand - and you've actually done a few curiously effective models of the problem - is our flawed model of success' causality.
Steve Jobs was hardly a self-made man. Steve grew up in a neighbourhood where everyone's dad worked for the military industrial complex. Cupertino. He calls up Bill Packard ( Hewlett-Packard ) for some electronics parts and gets a job. He was a nasty little shit, even as a kid, but he had great teachers.
Steve Jobs was also a liar. Wozniak builds a clone of Pong, gives it to Steve to show to people. Steve takes it to Atari, lets them think he built it. He also cheats Wozniak on several occasions.
Steve Jobs was a heartless man. But he'd learned to be a Charismatic Leader by following a charismatic Zen bozu Otogawa Koubun.
It's not particularly hard to be a Charismatic Leader. People act as if it's magic. It's not. Charisma is two things: symbol and emotion. It's just that simple. My father and I were connoisseurs of sermons and preachers. Hard to beat the symbols of Christianity: a dead man hanging between heaven and earth: oh, sure, there's Christos Pantokrator, ruler-of-all, but that could be any king. The gruesome figure of the Crucified Christ, that engenders horror and pity.
Charisma = Symbol + Emotion.
I think the villains and heroes we personify by way of projection are born out of innate hungers for things like safety, which in some cases can translate into the type of hero worship we see with Jobs and others. My guess is this behavior of ours - to imagine powerful altruistic beings is "out there" in our corner with extraordinary perspicacity is a useful projection of unwarranted strength and virtue on persons and groups that exists, at least in part, because we realize our own inadequacy as sufficient protector for ourselves and out interests.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of our villains, my guess is those are most often projected personifications that operate as symbolic tokens that are more readily comprehensible as a springboard for tangible actions by our shallow minds. They stand in as understandable focal points in an otherwise incomprehensible complexity of things that we would drown in if we were to try and see the whole board. We need our symbols to act as a comforting compensation for our inadequacy - to serve as a hedge against the things the might devour us if we unwarily drink too long at the water's edge.
Perhaps we intuitively recognize the self defeating consequence of living too firmly in the shadow of such unresolvable dilemmas. An accurate assessment of our mediocre self driven shroud of protection from the tooth and claw of raw nature might be too costly an energy draining distraction for us to function toward progress. Perhaps this is why we live with at least a few toes in dissonance.
When we trade mere reasons that masquerade as sound reason in exchange for the ghosts of power and might that we believe will get us through the moment, at least we do not have to walk in the fear that unrestrained reality offers. I think coping mechanisms rooted more in placating ourselves than in pragmatic reality come in many forms, like hoarding and dominance. These are simply different colors of the same kind of paint we coat ourselves in - underneath is an emotional prosody, the ritual nature of which is made visible in the form of the abstract symbols we cling to, whose source is the power of the trail of happenstantial traumas and nourishing experiences that splashed against us in the wake of our passage through time and circumstance. Inaccuracy is not without its utility.
I could be missing something(s)
No-one should ever be worshipped for the simple reason that everybody poops.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure there are transhumanists working on that...
Dan Weese Hard to beat the symbols of Christianity: a dead man hanging between heaven and earth
Interestingly, the fish (as in the fish multiplication miracle) was used as a symbol by the early Christians, it was only much later than the crucified Christ was adopted, once Christianity was seriously taking off.
It would make sense that they searched for (or stumbled on) a more effective symbol and decided to adopt it. Call me a cynic, but I can see figures of power deciding to go for the frightening/hopeful figure of the gruesomely "dying/soon-to-resurrect" symbol over that "generous to the people and fuck the food industry business" symbol that those damn hippy amateurs went with.
Elie Thorne As someone who still calls himself a Christian - and has somehow managed to ( imperfectly ) square the circle of belief in scientific truth with what Jesus Christ had to say on the subject - my view is hardly impartial.
ReplyDeleteBut the symbol of the crucified Christ goes right back to the beginnings of the faith.
ἐπειδὴ καὶ Ἰουδαῖοι σημεῖα αἰτοῦσιν καὶ Ἕλληνες σοφίαν ζητοῦσιν, ἡμεῖς δὲ κηρύσσομεν Χριστὸν ἐσταυρωμένον, Ἰουδαίοις μὲν σκάνδαλον, ἔθνεσιν δὲ μωρίαν,
== for the Jews seek evidence and the Greeks seek insight, but we preach Christ crucified., a scandal to the Jews and stupidity to the Greeks.
That fish symbol has some odd semiotics, most of which has been utterly lost in the welter of tales surround such things. Christianity also had the symbol of the ship under sail. I love such discussions immoderately.
Elie Thorne ... there was a great sci-fi story in one of the omnipresent magazine collections we used to buy back in the day - about a boy who'd left an extremely high-tech society and found himself among the primitives - there must be a million stories like that, eh?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, all his life to that point, he's been fed little food pills which supplied all his dietary needs. He has to learn to eat real food.
Then comes the moment where he has to pass his first full-sized turd. The primitives are howling with laughter...
... maybe you had to read the story. I found it hilarious.