Peter Kropotkin - what are your thoughts on celebrity culture?
I completely reject celebrity culture 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, it 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. Hero worship 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. Celebrity culture turns people into spectators, not participants. It transforms people into consumers of other people’s lives, it turns creativity into a performance economy.
Celebrity culture also distracts people from how they are exploited, it presents wealth as deserved, it glamorizes capitalist success, it constructs personalities to reinforce consumption. Capitalism produces celebrities to stabilize inequality - Capitalism constantly manufactures illusions that make inequality seem natural or glamorous. Celebrities are manufactured to keep people emotionally invested in the system that is hurting them.
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.
Celebrity culture is 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.
Real freedom comes from collective agency, not followers worshipping individuals. We need to promote the joy and dignity found in everyday labor, creativity, participation, community life, voluntary association.
I support admiration when it’s horizontal — shared, reciprocal, egalitarian — and oppose it when it becomes worship, hierarchy, or spectacle. 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.