[ExI] hero worship

[William Flynn Wallace]

Along the same line:  the local newspaper has, every single day, a big
write-up on the sports pages (and even a hint of it at the top of the first
page) of a high school player, invariably Black.  Sometimes a college
player.

I have wondered what incredible attention like this does to a youngster?
If good, then he works harder and harder to justify his prominence.  If
bad, he begins to act entitled.  I have no data, so I can't say what
usually happens.  But certainly all of them become big men in the
neighborhood;  some will make under the table deals with shady sports
agents and often get caught.

Some of them may be potential Rhodes scholars for all I know.  I suspect
not.

So we should have a new saying, in light of what we know about brain
development, moral development and the sort of world youngsters go
through:  don't trust anyone under 25.

bill w

bill w

On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 4:07 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
>
>
> > *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
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200710/0e75d6c2/attachment.htm>