We Are the Show People

We live at the tail end of more than a century of mass production. Look up from these pages and take a glance around your room, or even outside. Almost all the human artifacts you see have been mass produced. Books, furniture, electronics, clothing, automobiles, mailboxes, the airplanes flying overhead, the asphalt used to pave the streets — all of it came from a factory. One-of-a-kind things, like the ceramic dish an elementary school child makes for his mother in art class, are exceedingly rare. In a way that has made the relationship between the creature and the Creator ambiguous and unstable, human beings stole fire from God. What we stole was not the fire of birth, not the power to create ex nihilo, but the fire of the forge, the power to fudge real creation by stamping out reproductions ad infinitum.

There’s one more thing to add to the list of mass-produced items: us. Not the flesh-and-bones, body-and-soul us but the everywhere-in-cyberspace us, the avatars with which we have filled the ubiquitous electronic mind. If anything, the latter seem to have overshadowed the former. Our bodies and souls have become staging grounds for the social-media plays we put on about our imagined selves. These performances use the power of mass production, the effortless and endless reproduction of image and voice, to obscure their origins in favor of the seemingly much more interesting Me, Myself & I Revue always spooling out somewhere online.

As with all mass production, however, when the human person is subjected to the same basic make-more-and-more mindset that has clogged landfills with throw pillows and Model Ts, there are marginal costs, big ones. Factories, it turns out, wreck the natural environment. The marginal cost of convenience is a world full of poison. The marginal costs of mass producing the human form in digital format are even higher. God made each of us a singular being in His own image and likeness. When we mass reproduce that image and likeness, we not only make cheap imitations, we cheapen our divine origins by the very act of reproduction. Our online avatar is not so much a sound-and-image snapshot of ourselves as it is a parasite feeding off our lifeforce to sustain an infinite array of Doppelgängers in cyberspace. The more photos and videos of ourselves we upload, the more our bodies distort and our minds darken. It is not free to post selfies to Instagram. The mediating screen really does steal God’s fire from the soul. We semi-Prometheans face payback for our theft.

Some people create online personas with toned muscles and perfect hair. Some perform online as binge eaters or thrill seekers, stuffing themselves full of food or hanging by one hand from radio towers atop skyscrapers. Some, in the throes of transgenderism, show off the scars on their chests where their breasts had once been, or the plastic breasts a doctor implanted where once there had been pectoral muscles. Many people jump off bridges or in front of trains when they realize the avatar they created has an insatiable desire for more and more of the real person. Many more try to cut a deal with the devil they’ve unleashed, lashing out at other avatars or posting more and more images and videos, flak-like, camouflage-like, so those other avatars will never see the real person.

What are we trying to do in all this if not fool others and ourselves? We are bad actors in a cursed play. It used to be that actors were seen as questionable members of society, people without gainful employment who earned a living by making spectacles of themselves. Show people, they were called, barely a step up from carnival barkers, and often part of the same misfit crowd. Show people were clever fakirs, those who hoodwinked the public by pretending, for a fee, to be somebody they were not. What the show people really looked for was fame, the renown that — let’s face it — those without stable family lives crave as affirmation in lieu of intimacy and love. Nobody loves a famous person, though. That’s the tragedy of it. Show people were social outcasts because the price of their fame was performance, and the price of performance was trickery and clowning.

Now we are all cast as outcasts, all clowns in a deadly serious online bloodsport. In the age of social media, we have all become show people, people on a virtual stage, garishly lit up like the ghoulish faces in a Toulouse-Lautrec print, begging the world for love when all that is on offer is, at best, a fleeting fame — and fame’s constant counterpart, contempt. Show people are sad people, pitiful people, commodified people, lost souls in search of a mirage. What they want is fame; what they get is always disappointment.

How did show people move from left-bank bohemia to overarching paradigm? Mass production. Fame changed as the world fell under the sway of the factory and, later, media and performances for the masses. Before the rise of mass production, fame was a way to describe a different kind of reproductive power, that of a name spoken by a pair of lips. Show people, as well as the ambitious in politics and art, used every resource they could think of to get more and more pairs of lips to reproduce their names. Invading Gaul was one method. Writing a sonata was another. Before movable type and mass literacy, and long before vinyl records, poetry was often performed as plays or sung as sagas, and music was at the mercy of the musician and his instrument. The main thing was to have people remember that Julius Caesar was a great leader or Mozart an inspired composer or Rembrandt a remarkable painter who could create a scene in oil on canvas to rival the reality that everyone knew underpinned it. Fame was rooted in the human person, in the imagination as anchored by the senses, the conscience, and the soul. It could and did lead people astray, but it was never a Pied Piper for more than a feverish few. The vast majority were unshown people. They didn’t chase fame. They simply served as vehicles among whom the names and exploits of the daring — Ezra Pound’s “high deeds in Hungary to pass all men’s believing” — could proliferate. Only a handful of men were widely known. The rest of the world were the knowers. But to know is a human action, so fame, though illusory, was never in itself destructive of the soul.

Mass production, however, counterfeited fame, much in the same way it counterfeits creation. To make the same thing again and again and again is not the same as making someone unable to forget a couplet or a battle or a tune. Old-style fame reposed in the human person. New fame, mass-produced fame, especially Internet fame, is an onslaught against the senses, part of a war on the order of the soul, the body, and the mind. Something strange began to happen when mass production hit the various realms of human endeavor. A new kind of human type emerged, the genius. “Genius” had once been thought of as a spirit of creation, an otherly breeze that blew from time to time into inspired hearts and loaned men the power to call forth new things. But no one mistook the power for the hand that it moved. As mass production took over, however, genius became a way of describing a person, usually a borderline madman, whose singular obsession with war or painting or science or whatever was the price he paid for seeing further than the present production paradigm otherwise allowed. There were intimations of this in the Renaissance, when individuals with artistic gifts were held up as bearers of a new age. But with mass production, the genius entered a new and dangerous game. The genius became mankind’s champion against factories. The genius became, in our hopeful but depraved imaginations, the victory of the individual over the endless spasms of mass production. Michelangelo might have been oohed and aahed over as the forerunner of coming artistic endeavor. Picasso, by contrast, was a man who was to tame production, to beat back sameness with the force of his superhuman personality. This was to have disastrous consequences.

In our often irrational love for people like Picasso or van Gogh or Salvador Dali or, at the cusp of the new age of factories, Napoleon Bonaparte, we sought, in part, refuge from the mass production that had swamped us with cheap imitations. The overwhelmed consumer sought something higher than bourgeois satiety. Adolf Hitler, the political genius of the 20th century, stood at the forefront of tens of millions of outstretched right arms, bending mass production and fame to his singular will. Hitler’s photographers and publicists ensured that his face was on every flat surface in Germany. But it could have been a hundred times the number of arms and fanatic followers, and he never would have been satisfied. Hitler was a genius, but fame, multiplied by mass production, swallowed him whole, too. Nazism itself was an attempt to wrench the creation of unique human persons from the hands of God and have the state determine who lived a faceless life for the Fatherland and who died mass-produced deaths at the behest of the same. The genius, like the online avatar, overcomes mass production only by destroying human beings.

Eugenics, racialism, Aryanism — these 20th-century codewords for the subsumption of the individual within the mechanism of diachronic mass production were, at root, about creating show people, outstanding physical specimens to pay tribute to the fame of the breed. This is not how God’s production works, of course. Everything and everyone God makes is unique. But the Nazis told a lie about God and declared the human person to be nothing, an expendable cog in a dark machine led by someone who pretended to be the only real individual in Germany — a genius, in his own telling, a man who had seen the future and was prepared to do incredible violence to the present to bring it about. At Yad Vashem in Israel are written the names of the people whom the Führer of the faceless erased from earthly existence. Mass production plus human persons equals cattle cars bringing victims to the ovens. Or it equals junior high schoolers mauled by transgenderists. Or it equals the halfway house to nihilism that people ironically refer to as “social” media, where women boast of their abortions for likes and subscribers. Fame kills, and kills surely, in this age of unstoppable mimeographing of the human face.

These examples of mass production and show people in the thrall of darkness are dangerous, because they can cause us to forget that we are all in the mire. We worship mass production and fame. Perhaps we don’t throw people into ovens, but we do cheapen the human person as part of our daily routine. In late 2023 it was announced that a Japanese baseball player named Shohei Ohtani had signed a ten-year contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers for a record $700 million. Ohtani, like virtually every other famous person, lives in an exclusive neighborhood, which guarantees that he need not interact with any of the people whose ticket and merchandise purchases help pay his salary. This may sound unfair, but it is precisely here that Ohtani earns his pay. Ohtani is not paid to play baseball; he is paid to exist in a realm separate from mortal women and men.

Readers might recall that Ohtani’s organization once hosted a hate-filled mockery of Catholic nuns, a Satanic drag-queen show. That evil has almost entirely disappeared from view. Ohtani’s boyish face fills the airwaves now. He lifts us out of the boredom of mass production. He makes us forget that he works for a dark force while pretending to be a hero. It’s all as simple as reproducing Ohtani’s image so many times that the images of disfigured bigots and predators disappear from the top of the search page. Seven hundred million dollars will buy near-divinity-level mass production of an avatar.

But Ohtani, savior for an hour, will be cast out one day, too. The avatar will suck his lifeforce out until it uses him up and throws him to the curb. Occasionally, there are tales of once-famous people who have been found, decades after their stardom faded, living in cheap motels or out of the backs of their minivans. That these people live among us now is why they are no longer celebrated. If Ohtani were ever to move to a bungalow on Chicago’s South Side and start showing up at block barbecues, he would be mobbed at first by crazed fans, but soon he would be despised by those same people. The reason fans focus on celebrities is that celebrities are rarities, living in rare air far beyond the smog and beer belching in which the rest of us muck through our days. Ohtani is the genius who overcomes the marginal costs of our mass production of the human image. Once celebrities can no longer deliver glimpses of glamour from unreachable social elevations, though, it becomes clear that they are unremarkable slobs with little to offer beyond studied snobbery. Few have been hated as fallen show people have been hated. It’s a jolt, an unpleasant one, to realize that the person you have idolized is a chump. But we fall for it again and again. We have to. It’s how the age of show people works as a mechanism of sin. The world is filled with those eager to show off for the bloodthirsty crowd.

Consider how iron the grip of the show people is. In an age of mass production, when the image is cheap and the imitation ubiquitous, nothing a show person does will disappoint us besides being a regular human being. Among the celebrities we have celebrated are pedophiles, wife beaters, con artists, drug addicts, sex traffickers, occasional prostitutes, and, in general, badly broken, empty, and narcissistic trainwrecks. None of this matters so long as show people remain on display. The hypocrisy of it all, our gullibility in playing along with the farce of celebrity, is visible everywhere. A celebrity whose personal life (almost always wretched) has turned up in the daily news will take to social media to post pleas for “privacy” — but it’s patently ridiculous for someone to use a global platform viewed by billions of people to ask for privacy, especially when that same person has spent his career creating a fake image of himself online. The whole exercise is about maintaining control of the avatar. Without the fake, only the real is left — and then the walls come crashing down. There is no mercy in show business. There is only fame or oblivion.

Show people must know that, of all people, their real lives are the most private of all. They are shells of real people, crafted and cultivated images of human beings who once existed in the mortal realm. Nothing is so private as a show person. Let a celebrity fall to earth and start lining up in queues or shopping with the hoi polloi at Walmart, and it will be obvious, from the scorn of the same throngs who once screamed in ecstasy at the mere mention of his name, just how private the show person had been all along. The masses will take photos on their phones and post them online to jeer at the lowliness, the sheer humanity of the person whom they once thought more than human.

The mass production of show people has bled into everything we do. It affects our money, for instance. Paper money often has images of famous people on it, show people whose likenesses give credence to the fiction that cash is the equivalent of whatever is being bought and sold. Of course, it isn’t George Washington or Abraham Lincoln who personally guarantees the soundness of the money their mugs grace. It’s our idea of them, their status as political celebrities that seals the deal. Today, people can make cryptocurrency “coins” with anyone’s (or anything’s) image on them. These coins multiply daily, and virtually (no pun intended) no one cares about any of them or about whoever or whatever is used for their branding. Do you remember Nyan Cat, the meme consisting of what looks like a strawberry Pop-Tart with the head, tail, and legs of a gray cat, streaming through the universe trailing a 1980s-arcade-era rainbow behind it? The “original” version of this non-thing, which exists only in cyberspace, was sold as a non-fungible token (NFT) in 2021 for more than half a million dollars. Tell the truth: Do you care about Nyan Cat as an original entity, a series of ones and zeroes grouped into code that instructs a computer how to pixelate its image on a screen? Do you know anything about its creator, Chris Torres, or want to? If he were homeless and leaning against a building somewhere, would you look twice at him or even once? Would you give him some paper with a Washington or a Lincoln on it, one manipulated image for another? Would you even give him a real strawberry Pop-Tart?

There seems to be little anyone can do to stop mass production from overrunning the human person. We mass reproduce our images, our God-given likenesses, with abandon online. We go online to buy mass-produced junk. We are caught like pheasants in the mass-production net, and we don’t even realize we are entangled. To stop being a show person, to start being a human person again, perhaps the only place to start is in the solitude of the monastery or the convent, or in the isolation of the catacombs, where Christians have always gone when the world’s hatred for humans has resurfaced.

“If you’re uploading your ‘images’ onto the Web…then you’re probably hoping to be seen and noticed, and maybe recognized and acclaimed…. [People] now want other people, as many people as possible, to watch them as they carefully craft their privacy into a marketable, public style.” — Lee Siegel, Against the Machine

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