Feeding The Beast

Ellsworth Toohey, in Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’

Toohey’s vision would seem to have whole-heartedly arrived, in the form of our current obsession with celebrity do-nothings like Paris Hilton and the rest of her odious ilk. The average person’s interest in the lives of famous folk is nothing new, and totally understandable, but the shift in focus that we have seen in recent years - from movie stars and musicians to rich kids and party girls - is particularly galling. Even if you were not a fan of a particular singer or actor, any fandom they inspired (even if it reached hysterical levels) could be partly justified by the fact that they at least produced something tangible, be it a cheap pop song or a cliched movie.

The situation we have now, where people are celebrated for doing nothing, is so pervasive and destructive that I have to wonder whether it really has been engineered in some way. It is almost as if someone wants to destroy the idea of the artist, the creator, the inventor, at least as any sort of worthy role in life. There are so many people out there creating wonderful works of art, innovative and useful tools or new business opportunities, and they are the people who society should be holding up as worthy of our interest and adulation; they and their work. Instead, we are presented with non-news about non-entities who create nothing of worth.

As a self-confessed creative, this is a bitter pill to swallow, and I am starting to feel a certain paranoia about the situation. Are there people out there for whom an anaesthetised public, unquestioning of the status quo and happy to be fed a diet of cheap reality TV and celebrity do-nothings, is a useful tool? Undoubtedly, but could we even see a situation whereby innovation and creation are seen as a threat? Perhaps. If there’s one thing that any power structure desires, it is to maintain and bolster that structure. Change is to be feared, as change brings instability. Anything that could lead to change, be it a new tool, or a new way of looking at things, would need to be held back. For the existing power structure, the creative individualist is the greatest threat.