Quora: Why do we seem to forgive movie stars their transgressions more easily than people in other

Why do we seem to forgive movie stars their transgressions more easily than people in other professions?


Movie stars are, by profession, ‘not real people’. Every time you see Johnny Depp or Angelina Jolie (or whoever) in a film, they are literally a different person. They are in locations someone else put them in, wearing clothes, make-up, hairstyles (wigs) that someone else put on them, doing and saying things that other people told them to do and say. They are like living dolls, enacting other people’s fantasies that we are allowed to watch.

We, as consumers of entertainment, have no idea who the real human being is behind the many roles they’ve played. In some movies, the actor is a victim, in other movies, they are a hero. In some movies, they are a villain. And then the movie ends, credits roll, and we walk out into the sunlight. The feelings we had while watching are quickly shed and we go on about our everyday real lives.

So, when we hear or read that such a person has behaved in a toxic way, I think those impressions travel along the same well-worn neural pathways in our brains that we use to watch them perform on screen. We hear or read the terrible news, we feel the feelings, and then they fade away with the next ‘act’ or the next story about some other celebrity. After all, we don't know them. Nothing they do has any impact on  our everyday real life.

I think, in a very real way, we are not equipped to deal in any other way with entertainers and entertainment; we don’t have the emotional means to conceptualize or recognize the difference between Johnny or Angelina’s Real Life toxic behavior, which effects us NOT AT ALL, and a film role in which a role Angelina or Johnny is playing behaves in a toxic manner, which we may be emotionally invested in for the duration of the film, but also effects us NOT AT ALL once the movie is done.

Human beings are technologically quite advanced, but emotionally, physically, and spiritually….we are little more than apes. I’m not saying that to be mean, I’m saying it because it’s true. With few individual exceptions (Pema Chodron, the Dalai Lama, Don Miguel Ruiz, some enlightened monks, nuns, priests, philosophers, physicists, etc. ) humanity’s spiritual and emotional development has not been as fast and as deep as the advances in our technology.

Eventually I hope we catch up. But for now, we just don’t have the capacity to see famous people as anything other than abstractions. Celebrity gossip is tantalizing and titillating, in much the same way as folklore and mythology of past civilizations would cluck and gossip about Zeus and his proclivities with mortal maidens or the depravity of King David. It was entertainment, it was perhaps a moral lesson in how not to behave, or perhaps an aspirational model for how one would be allowed to behave if one was a God or a King or a great warrior.

It just has nothing to do with us, anyone we know personally, or our daily lives and so it does not effect us in such a deep way that we have difficulty forgiving, or forgetting, the toxic behavior. 

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 Posts tagged 'quora' were originally my answers to peoples' questions on quora.com. 

They were monetized but I am giving them away for free here. 

If you feel inclined to support my writing, here's my paypal 

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Quora: What does it mean if someone writes a long paragraph about themselves on their profile?

What does it mean if someone writes a long paragraph about themselves on their profile? Does this mean they are narcissistic or just confident?

Some people are just long-winded, or are trying very hard to be absolutely clear about something. One thing I’ve noticed about narcissistic folks is that they speak in absolutes and in generalities. They are the ‘best’ at this or that, they are ‘expert’ but then they don’t give any details about why they think they are the best, or how they earned their expertise. Or they may offer a correlation as a causation, saying something about having Y number of reviews on a certain site (that allows deletions of bad reviews) as ‘proof’ of their competence. I also tend to view people who repeat how ‘honest’ or ‘trustworthy’ or ‘loyal’ they are as probably having issues in those areas. People who are truly honest and trustworthy show it with behavior, they don’t need to repeat it so loudly and often.

And, you are right, one of the tools in the Narcissist playbook is a thing called “word salad” where they just spin out a lot of emotionally-charged buzzwords that are designed to confuse the reader/listener and provoke a response that is not logical or well thought-out. So it’s good to be cautious whenever you encounter a ‘wall o text’ in someone’s profile or social media presence.

Another thing they like to do is plagiarize quotes, paragraphs, or entire passages and pages from other authors—again, in a way that is designed to craft an image and promote a knee jerk emotional response from the reader/listener. This, too, can feel like ‘word salad’ because the narc is unable to distill the paragraphs and pages of ideas into his or her own words,. They just know that ‘this well respected author said some things that other people respond positively to, therefore I want to steal that positive response,” and since they are brain damaged, mentally ill people, they aren’t able to correctly identify or understand the original author’s ideas or identify the meaningful passages, so they just regurgitate them in big chunks for other people to respond to and hopefully assume the narc wrote it, or is quoting it due to some deep esoteric understanding between the original author and the oh-so ‘enlightened’ narc. Again, beware the ‘wall o text’! Especially if the person cannot condense or explain further the idea or philosophy once you start questioning them about it.

In general, be cautious whenever you go online and read people’s declarations about themselves; you have only their word about whatever their level of expertise or qualifications are. If your instincts tell you that the person is not being truthful, trust your gut. Don’t give anyone you don’t know access to your time and energy, or your finances. Watch and wait before you commit to anything with a person you’ve only met online. Read their posts, watch how they interact online with other people, watch how they deal with criticism and disagreements, watch how they respond to the word ‘no’.

 

 

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 Posts tagged 'quora' were originally my answers to peoples' questions on quora.com. 

They were monetized but I am giving them away for free here. 

If you feel inclined to support my writing, here's my paypal 

And if you prefer to pay it forward, I recommend Safe Place as an excellent place to support.