God Complex: The Danger of Celebrity Worship Culture

I was asking Cameron Mulla ’26 the other day about how much money she spent over the years on BTS merch. “It’s probably in the $150 range,” she said. “But I’ve seen people spend more than that.” While the latter half of the response was partly an attempt to stave off the inevitable onslaught of teasing, there was some truth to her words. The quintessential American teenager, according to an NBC report, spends $2165 on material goods on a yearly basis. This is the world’s largest economy, you’d think people would spend some of that money on therapy, but well… such is life. 

Most of us don’t personally know young billionaire pop stars, and we never will. But the way Taylor Swift inspires such rabid devotion, even Kim Jong-Un could take some notes from it. Look at the feud between her fans and any person listing off CO2 emission statistics. Mark my words, we’ll be analysing the depth of the parasocial relationship between herself and the fans in a couple of years. Considering how difficult it is to get college students to enroll into classes, we might be having an offering like that soon enough. I never credit my Mom for teaching me how to eat my veggies as a kid, it will always be Rose from Blackpink. 

They say that celebrities are human, just like us mere mortals. They live, they die, occasionally get outed for shacking up with other people’s spouses and make more money than most essential workers ever will, but somehow the allure never really fades away. This was a common phenomenon then, and it’ll continue to be like that. My nieces have Exo, my grandma had The Beatles, some of your great-grandparents had Liszt, while the rest continue to have sustained ear damage. 

And it’s not just us girls, look at the fans of famous footballer and alleged rapist Cristiano Ronaldo, and then you’ll truly know what stan culture is. A guy I knew spent $300 on Attack on Titan merch while we were at Universal Studios Osaka. He has worn the Survey Corps cape once since our trip. 

It’s easy to laugh at these people, these young, gullible wads of cash just waiting to make you and your grandkids richer than they themselves could ever be. We build shrines in their names, wear clothes they advertise on social media and doxx court officials when they don’t pay their taxes. 49.4 percent of the population in Afghanistan live under the poverty line. Many of them have to choose between footing the gas or water bill. 

This is not unique to them alone. According to the World Bank, about 23 percent of the global population are not having their basic needs met. You know you’re living in a country with a robust economy when young people with still-developing prefrontal cortexes can dedicate time and resources to a product curated by PR teams and entourages that could mean life and death for someone else. 

Furthermore, as much as we would hate to admit it, celebrity worship among the masses does not just affect us plebs. Famous people, unlike the god(s), funnily enough, are rarely unaffected by the love of the masses. I remember being a young child in the 2000s, my face glued to the TV screen as gossip channels, hypnotised by what I now know to be the dehumanisation of young pop stars and starlets. Donald Trump’s political successes can be partly attributed to the executives at FOX News realising the potential boost in ratings from having a media figure be as outrageous as possible. From being a person’s Big Brother figure to electing a person president, celebrity worshippers do be like that. 

As entertaining as this old person yelling at the clouds segment of our once-respected section might be, I would like to add onto something about our worship of celebrity culture. We can often comment on how it distills the worst aspects of the Modern Era, with its mindless consumption, mob politics, and all that lovely stuff. 

But here’s the thing, as unsettling parasocial relationships can be, I remember football supporters around the world continuing to fight against the tragedy of the Hillsborough in 1989. There was a concerted effort among tabloids to push the deaths of 96 match-day attendees on fans. People from around the world pushed back against this. For many of them, they would not have learned of the issue in the first place if they didn’t fall in love with a team that had their favourite players on FIFA. 

It’s easy to mock the uncritical adulation, but this is also a group of people living across great distances coming together because they initially liked the same thing. It scares me too, because of all the things that keep happening. But then, I just keep remembering that one time when people were brought together through celebrity culture, and hope that we can come together, because God knows how much we need to do that.