Recently considering the matter of the pursuit of the longshot of celebrity--the immense time and effort and often money people pour into it, with almost no chance of realizing the goal--the question "Why do they do it?" inevitably comes up.
The obvious answer--which Upton Sinclair already gave in 1927's Money Writes!--has been that the rewards are immense, the alternatives profoundly unattractive (life as a "nobody" instead of a "somebody"), and that society relentlessly encourages the public to not count the one-in-a-million odds and instead believe that they are that one in the million that will win this "winner take all" game.
Still, it seems there is something more to be said of the last part of that, the persuasion that they will surely be the exception, with all its profound unreason, enjoining the public to set aside the depressing rational calculation and its implications in favor of "faith," all while vehemently insisting that a lack of "faith"--a lack of readiness to believe in those things running contrary to the evidence of the senses and the conclusions one derives from them using reason, and in which Authority tells them to believe for its convenience--is not just the mark of a superficial mind failing to apprehend "higher" and greater realities, but a grave "character flaw" dooming the sufferer to misery in this world as well as in the next. (Thus does our crappy popular fiction so often depict atheists, rationalists and other "faithless" persons as miserable people and show them up as wrong in the end.)
Do not think, goes the teaching, believe--for knowledge will serve you less well than belief, so much so that one may say that ignorance is strength.
By any chance, do you remember which society encouraged that particular outlook?
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