I feel the same way about her now that she’s no longer alive as I did when she lived, nothing. Why does that sound cruel, it’s the truth, I don’t give a hoot about her or her current status. The lady was a media glutton, a seeker of external validation. A self, built in a fragile and fickle mirrored reflection that is public opinion. Only when they, the public that is, love the image of your self, the one you or others have created, can you truly almost become your own ego ideal. The online social media status you wish to be, instead of the authentic you that you seemingly loath so much that you’d swap it in haste for any falsely adored alternative. This can only be temporary though, as the spotlight rarely stays on the same person for long, the fall is inevitable. Mis-worshipped by the ignorant, and now mis-mourned publicly by the misinformed and the aspirational sycophant. She, the social creation not the person, has managed to become an inspiration to all those young girls who are struggling with not being accepted for the self-constructed, media inspired, false image they wish to be accepted by others as. Unfortunately her act will give credence to suicide rather than discouraging it, she is (because her social media creation lives beyond her actual physical person, and will continue to do so for a long time) a shit of an exemplar. I’m being cruel I know, but it’s necessary, this nonsense has to be called out before suffering and ending it all as a statement becomes some poetic goal of the lost person to be loved in the last instance, in remembrance.
When you “externalise your locus of evaluation”, I borrowed that phrase from my own therapist, and yes I’ve had therapy, you make your fragile self a target for the generally fickle natured herd. One minute they build you up and the next they break you down. Blaming newspapers is simply foolish, the media as much follow as lead, they reflect the best and the worst of us simultaneously and cannot be trusted to even be consistent, never mind truthful, truths do not sell copy. The media respond to our need to know dirt and feed our need to hurt and sympathise. “She’s also a human being” that’s what some folks say when they try to blame the public and the media for Caroline’s death, but I didn’t kill her and neither did you, so we should refuse to feel guiltily in any way. This wasn’t somebody who was harassed by journalists, in fact in today’s modern social media world she’s the harasser harassing the public and hoping the media picks it up and runs with the story. She not only wants the public to care about her created self, but the media to then report on that created self as if it is a real person. Diana Princess of Wales allegedly used to do this, create a media frenzy of paparazzi outside her gym by informing them that that was where she would be and at what time, and then look very much like she was trying to avoid them when she was leaving, an act of a character. She was not harassed by the media, she courted them, she used them to create her image as the victim of something. That’s not to say that she was not the victim of something, but the character she was playing maybe wasn’t.
Someone was recently surprised when I told them I don’t much like people in general, they thought this was a ridiculous thing to say. But I am an admitted misanthrope, concerned greatly with society and rights, even of the individual, yet I remain wholly unconcerned with the lives of other people. In principle people are fine, they’re fine in a theory or a philosophical proposition, but in reality people are rather boring and predictable, living out lives that are replications of each other, having children, working jobs, buying a house, having a holiday in Benidorm, listening to Ed Sheeran or whatever is popular, having normal boring unadventurous sex, getting their pension in order. If you live this life maybe you are merely reacting to stimulus, breaking no new ground, and to me that is just tedious. Yes there may be unique things about you, but they will likely be very banal also. My apologies, I know I’m an asshole.
I think it is a fair conjecture to say that most people wish to be accepted as part of the herd. So they modify their behaviour based on the herd/tribe they happen to be in, and assimilate its morals and its desires to be part of their own psychology, they go along intellectually to get along intellectually. People rarely escape the conditions of either their parents or their social circumstances or their education or their peer group, because to be different, or to think differently, often leads to being ostracised. Lucky is the person who needs no external validation, who can arrive at what they think by a process of examination of the cold hard reality of what is demonstrable and provable (facts), rather than to rely on flawed logic and biases. Hume said once that there would have to be a good reason given for him to prefer to personally suffer a papercut rather than for a devastating event to happen somewhere in the world that effected him not in the slightest. What he meant by this was that there are levels of abstraction in considering other people, that we are happily oblivious to the sufferings of other persons if we have not established an emotional link to them, like if in some way we can say that they are different to us and that makes it okay to be aware of their plight but not to feel like we necessarily needed to do something about it even if we had the capacity to. Akala pointed out that we have a sort of racism that is ingrained into us by society that we are consciously unaware of when he pointed out the terms by which people of colour can be described that would never be used if the subjects of those descriptions happened to be European Caucasians. He also pointed out that it was easier to move to Britain for the possible 3rd generation German decedents of Nazis that Britain fought 80 years ago, than it was for the 3rd generation decedents of those persons of colour from the colonies that fought alongside the white Europeans against the Nazis.
For media figures, celebrities, the emotional link between the public and them is simply bullshit. You do not know the first thing about a Kardashian, you know the created, mediated, heavily scripted, edited, propagandised, 35th take that day, version of a Kardashian yes, but you do not know the real person in any real way. You don’t know what they really think, you don’t know what they really like, you don’t know how they act when not on camera. For you to establish a bond with them is no different than if you did so with Homer Simpson, Dierdre Barlow, or Indiana Jones, and for you to care about them when there are people in the same neighbourhood as you that you know that may deserve your attentions and efforts more yet don’t get any of them, makes you a fool to persons who think as I do. I too feel emotions toward persons I do not know, two of my favourite people are long dead as I am writing this. Christopher Hitchens, a writer and orator, and Rick Roderick, a leftist philosophy professor, yet I know them by the writing they left behind and their inability to hold back what they actually thought and who they were. So I think I’m not in the same paradox as most folks that spend their lives obsessed with Gaga or Schwarzenegger, but I may be wrong. What I love is their work, their output, I don’t feel like I knew them, it isn’t a personal loss, it is the loss of more of the same that they might have produced.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t dislike her, I was barely aware of her, but that’s just a fraction further back on the long road of knowing her from those that thought they did.
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