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Celebrity Worship

You don't actually admire them. You're borrowing their success because yours doesn't feel like enough.

Celebrity worship — and its modern variant, billionaire worship — is what happens when parasocial attachment combines with a need for meaning. You follow their lives, defend them online, buy what they sell, and feel a strange pride in their achievements as if they were your own. The relationship gives you something: a sense of proximity to greatness, a feeling that you're on the winning team, a borrowed identity that's bigger and shinier than your everyday life.

This is not accidental. The ultra-wealthy and ultra-famous cultivate these attachments deliberately. They build personal brands that invite identification. They share carefully curated vulnerability. They position themselves as underdogs who made it, so you can see yourself in their story — even though their reality has nothing to do with yours.

The political consequences are real. When people worship billionaires, they vote to protect billionaire interests. They oppose taxes on wealth they'll never have. They defend systems that extract from them, because attacking the system feels like attacking their hero — and attacking their hero feels like attacking themselves.

Celebrity worship fills a gap. But the gap was manufactured. A culture that strips people of community, purpose, and dignity will always produce a population searching for someone to believe in. The question is who benefits from that search.

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