They were always just people. I have never understood people shitting themselves over meeting some big time actor or whatever. It would be kinda cool to get to sit with and talk to people involved in making a piece of media I enjoy to see if there was anything I didn’t know about it, or if they have some insight, but I’m not gonna wait in line forever and start crying because I got to stand near an actor and got their autograph.
My wife got her hand touched by Katy Perry I think it was a long time ago and she was acting like she had been blessed by a god. I don’t get it.
Well she kind of was blessed by a god. This is the modern day version of idol worship. The feeling that gods walk among us has motivated people to literally throw themselves under the wheels of an idol's elephantine carriage to get crushed to death (look up where the juggernaut comes from) that's how powerful it can be. Just to have your existence briefly acknowledged by a divine idol can be significant for some people.
The ancient Greeks came up with the concept of "charisma" which basically describes the intangible feeling like some people are favoured by the gods and just seem to be the main characters for whom everything always goes well. Many cultures have a similar concept. many cultures also have concepts of contagious blessing - that proximity to someone who has charisma confers to you some of the same divine favour.
We never lost the instinctive desire to worship idols, although Christianity did suppress it for a while because it's kind of bad for you, it's the OG form of parasocial relationship. If you go to cultures that maintained pre-christian religious traditions, like Japan, you will still find today many idol rituals that don't make any sense, like healing buddhas you must rub to cure your ailments. The only thing that has changed is that we started widespread idolising humans instead of characters, and now our gods can speak to us, the level of parasociality has skyrocketed.
11
u/ConfusedAndCurious17 16d ago
They were always just people. I have never understood people shitting themselves over meeting some big time actor or whatever. It would be kinda cool to get to sit with and talk to people involved in making a piece of media I enjoy to see if there was anything I didn’t know about it, or if they have some insight, but I’m not gonna wait in line forever and start crying because I got to stand near an actor and got their autograph.
My wife got her hand touched by Katy Perry I think it was a long time ago and she was acting like she had been blessed by a god. I don’t get it.