Peter Kropotkin - what are your thoughts on celebrity culture?
I reject celebrity culture absolutely and instinctively, because I oppose all hierarchy. Celebrity culture promotes hierarchy.
Human society thrives if there is equality, cooperation, mutual aid, and shared dignity.
Celebrity culture does exactly the opposite. It elevates a few individuals above the collective, creates artificial “superior” and “inferior” social classes, it turns admiration into a hierarchy of status, it encourages passivity among the masses.
In The Conquest of Bread I point out that capitalist societies create, “artificial distinctions between the fortunate few and the great mass of the people.” Celebrity culture is an example of artificial distinction.
Additionally, I reject hero worship because it is encourages obedience. I distrust anything that encourages people to follow rather than think for themselves.
Celebrity culture promotes idolization, imitation, emotional dependence, uncritical adoration
This leads to domination, manipulation, loss of autonomy, centralization of cultural and emotional life
Real freedom comes from collective agency, not followers worshipping individuals.
Celebrity culture turns people into spectators, not participants
I emphasize the joy and dignity found in everyday labor, creativity, participation, community life, voluntary association
Celebrity culture encourages passivity, transforms people into consumers of other people’s lives, turns creativity into a performance economy
Capitalism produces celebrities to stabilize inequality - Capitalism constantly manufactures illusions that make inequality seem natural or glamorous.
Celebrity culture distracts people from exploitation, presents wealth as deserved, glamorizes capitalist success, constructs personalities to reinforce consumption
I see celebrities as: “the courtiers of capital,” manufactured to keep people emotionally invested in a system hurting them.
Anarchism promotes horizontal admiration, not vertical worship. I believed we can — and should — admire others, but in a horizontal way.
Appropriate admiration is learning from others, being inspired by others, sharing skills, mutual appreciation
Inappropriate admiration is idol worship, submission, treating individuals as inherently superior
Celebrity culture undermines mutual aid. Mutual aid requires relationships, reciprocity, empathy, cooperation
Celebrity culture erodes all of these by creating emotional one-way ties, replacing community with fandom, focusing collective energy on individuals instead of collective change.
I completely reject celebrity culture.
It is a hierarchy of fame, a capitalist tool for distraction, a barrier to cooperation, a distortion of human dignity, a system that turns people into passive spectators and idol-worshippers
I support admiration when it’s horizontal — shared, reciprocal, egalitarian — and oppose it when it becomes worship, hierarchy, or spectacle.