48 I Can Read You Like a Book
love fest. Who could blame these celebrities for developing a sense
of superiority in multiple aspects of life? Through precedent, people
gave them the right to display that superiority by advising the ordi-
nary people in matters of lifestyle, domestic politics, and even inter-
national relations. They, too, saw the need to adopt causes to maintain
their identity.
This situation, in which celebrities with a range of mental abili-
ties and wisdom make pronouncements on social change, results in
three outcomes:- It helps a culture of victims to take shape.
- It further raises the celebrity status of those super-
typical people who have exhibited righteous indig-
nation over the treatment of the sub-typical. - The concept of tolerance assumes a distorted meaning:
“whatever.” As in, “do whatever you want,” and “be
whatever you want.”
When something such as this happens, no one aspires to
become the typical. Remember the bell curve? People in a culture
with these pressures now aspire to the super-typical only—they
want to be super-typical in their own microculture, whatever that
is—and they contort their behavior to get there. They hang on to
anything that makes them special, that distinguishes them as unique.
Voilá! The result is America is a jellybean jar, rather than a
melting pot. Create more celebrity by being different, and in the
process, sacrifice “American culture” by glorifying uniqueness. The
paradox that also affects thinking and behavior, of course, is that