Celebrity ... from Lila

From Lila by Pirsig

Politics... mixes celebrity with static legal patterns and isn't a pure study of celebrity. In fact, the way political science is taught now, celebrity is made to look incidental to politics. But go to any political gathering and see what's making it run. Watch the candidates jockey for celebrity. They know what's making it run.



This whole business of celebrity also had something perceptibly degenerate about it. Vulgar and degenerate and enormously fascinating and at times obsessive, very much in the same way that sex seemed to be vulgar and degenerate at some times, and enormously fascinating and obsessive.

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So what you get is this tension, this business executives' tension, where you're the most relaxed, smiling, easy-going guy in the world - who is also absolutely killing himself to beat the competition and get ahead.

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The old Indians knew how to handle it. They just got rid of anything anybody wanted. They didn't own property, they dressed in rags, some of them. They kept it down, laid low, and let the aristocrats and egalitarians and sycophants and assassins all look on them as worthless. That way they got a lot accomplished without all the celebrity grief.