Taylor Swift & Why Humans Like Creating Killable Heroes

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Subtitle: The Behavioral Science & Social Psychology of why we like to use the Halo Effect on others.

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EXCERPT:

Why do we like to create heroes? Mainly, because we like to scapegoat them. Okay, I know, you’re going to think this is just a dystopian interpretation of our desire to create someone we wish we were like. There are copious amounts of reasons driving human behavior to want to be the cool kid in the group.

The word hero might feel a bit out of place when we deconstruct the many reasons why Taylor is a social phenomenon. First off, she represents a cultural value. Not the person. Not her music. But, the very fact that we have created a divide between fans and their objects. What do I mean?

Well, fans need something to be fanatical about. Some artists need fans to experience a feeling of relevance. It’s a symbiotic relationship between two people who might never interact. One relies on the other. To fully grasp this, we have to turn to?evolutionary theory? to understand what drives people to have fans, and why some like to be fans. Rest assured, this dynamic is never one-sided. Each person(s) needs the other.

Let’s trade terms to help us really apprehend why we do what we do. Let’s switch out the word fan for follower and artist for a leader. In the ancient world, people wanted leaders because they had either access to desired resources they themselves couldn’t access or wanted to learn something from them that they couldn’t seem to learn on their own. Notice the connective thread here:?Access.?People wanted leaders because leaders had something that the followers needed or thought was valuable to get ahead in their world.

Fanaticism is about access.

People are obsessed with her music, her life, and her — but not as a person, as an object. We objectify those things we want, so we can justify wanting them.

We invent a mystique that the thing might not naturally have, so we can then create behaviors and rituals that guide our newfound obsession.

Using game theory as bedrock, ?we suggest that followership emerged as an evolutionarily stable strategy. We then go back to human evolutionary history and argue why humans have evolved adaptive followership psychology and what the psychological mechanisms underlying followership are.

Being a fan of a singer, a brand, or some new trend is not just about obsession, it’s a strategy. We adapt to become something other than we are because we think changing will get us to where we want to be. Change isn’t just about adaptation or even growth — it’s about getting something. Now, I get that this might be too dark for some people, so let’s continue the human excavation.

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THE OUTSIDER WITHIN

Let’s explore a concept that might be new for some. The notion of being?abject.?What does that mean? It’s one of those academic terms that gets thrown around [mostly in ivory towers], and no one else cares about it. But, let me convince you that we all should know this term.

The word "abject" refers to a state or condition of being extremely unpleasant, degrading, or repulsive. It represents something that is cast off, excluded, or considered socially undesirable. In a broader sense, the concept of the abject encompasses that which disrupts or challenges social norms, provoking discomfort, disgust, or fear. [ChatGPT]

The person we want to be like most represents something in ourselves we either wish we were, or something else we wish we weren’t. What does that mean? If we are obsessive fans of someone else, we either want to be famous, or we don’t like that we’re not famous. It sounds the same, I get it - but, there are subtle differences here. One is a desire of wanting to have something we don’t yet have. The other is something we don’t like about ourselves. We feel like an outsider to being fully accepted, so we live a life of quiet desperation. But, there is something else that is occurring that we need to comprehend.

We are conditioned to believe that we should hide the part of ourselves we don’t like. We romanticize it as perfection. We tell our children that we should only focus on our strengths. We give people awards for doing good and avoid any part of ourselves that might be perceived as a weakness. This is abjection. This is the outsider within.

We simultaneously worship our insecurities by avoiding them.

By not dealing with them we are driven by them. We already know doing so we create the paternal figure that fathers all of our current mental health issues across society.

LET’S FETISHIZE IRRESPONSIBILITY

Another possible reason we want others to fulfill the role our obsession, is because we need them to either be a screen or scapegoat. Let me explain, but sharing an obnoxiously obscure quote:

According to anthropological philosopher ?René Girard (1923–2015), an important human adaptation is our propensity to victimize or scapegoat. He argued that other traits upon which human sociality depends would have destabilized primate dominance-based social hierarchies, making conspecifc confict a limiting factor in hominin evolution.

He surmised that a novel mechanism for inhibiting intragroup confict must have emerged contemporaneously with our social traits, and speculated that this was the tendency to spontaneously unite around the victimization of single individuals.

He described an unconscious tendency to both ascribe blame and to imbue the accused with a sacred mystique. This emotionally cathartic scapegoat mechanism, he claimed, enhanced social cohesion, and was the origin of religion, mythology, sacrifce, ritual, cultural institutions, and social norms.

We heroize people like Taylor because we need to justify the decisions that guide us toward the desire to chase after fame. To possibly make these non-linear, non-sensical life choices that romanticize our pathway to our goals. But, there is also something sinister here at play — if she ever fails social expectations, we then have someone else to blame. We don’t have to blame ourselves, or our cultural values — we can’t just blame her for her own failures. This model works best in a culture where individualism is the dominant way to think.

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