[ExI] hero worship

[spike at rainier66.com]

> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Sent: Friday, July 10, 2020 1:10 PM

Subject: Re: [ExI] hero worship

 

Spike - did you see S.O.B.?

 

I too have wondered about the adulation of movie stars.  Looked at in a different light, they are people who make their living by pretending to be someone else…

 

The adulation itself has a negative impact on the ones being elevated.

 

Case in point, one that I followed: the chess champion Bobby Fischer.  If you are in that crowd they treated him as a god, if not even the capital G, almost.  But only the chess crowd.  Outside that crowd, plenty of people wondered if he was retarded.  We now consider it likely he was Aspergers, but one of those who had the option to close himself off into his own world where people would treat him like a god rather than the real world where people would consider him a total reject, probably kick his ass.

 

He quite high school and studied chess full time.  No one really gave him much bother about it: he won the US championship at age 14.  In an area where they treat chess at least as seriously as any other sport, no one was going to demand he study algebra.  Result: he practically lived at one of the strongest clubs in the US, if not the strongest, where people treated him as you would expect.  That caused him to not need to develop normal social skills, and he didn’t.  He had a special gift, he hung around those who cared about that only, then he could be anything he wanted.  So, he did.

 

Fischer is a good example but scarcely unique: many sports heroes and entertainers have a clear gift from childhood and are treated as special cases.  That causes them to not need to adjust themselves to the real world.  We do, they don’t.  Result: their opinions on real-world things not only are not superior to the masses, they are generally inferior.

 

spike

 

 

  

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