Oh boy, another thinky post! I really like thinky posts, and I like hearing what you all think about the thinky posts.
I suspect you are all vaguely aware of the Princess of Wales kerfuffle over the past couple of months. She announced she was having surgery, and then about a month later things started to feel weird and the Internet Sleuths sensed that they were weird, and suddenly gossip exploded in all kinds of crazy directions. Culminating in her revealing this week that her surgery had resulted in a surprise cancer diagnosis a few weeks later and they had been struggling to deal with it as a family before announcing it to the world.
First take away from this: yes, things WERE weird, all those odd behaviors folks saw consciously or subconsciously were there.
Second: when you sense something is strange in a public figure’s life, think horses not zebras.
And third take away, for me in particular, was how surprisingly familiar this whole cycle felt.
There are very few humans in the world who are subject to such constant scrutiny that the public can sense almost immediately when something is “off” in their lives. The British Royal Family is one group of people, and the top Indian film stars is another. That sense that something is wrong, I don’t really think that is a good or bad thing, it’s just a fact. The same way you can tell when something is off with a close friend, based on behavior changes so small that they sound crazy when you repeat them but you KNOW they mean something, that’s the level of access and interest the public has to these people. They are SO predictable, SO familiar, so Known to us, that we can tell when something is just not right. It’s true, not conspiracy. Where it gets into conspiracy is what people do with that “not right” knowledge.
I think it relates to soft versus hard power. “Soft power” is what the British royals have, and what the top Indian film stars have. Thanks to the constant attention they have on their lives, they can change the public discourse, they can draw attention to or from certain areas, they can change MINDS even if they can’t change LAWS. I do think most folks who weald that much Soft Power are serious about it, are aware that who they invite to dinner or what wedding they choose to attend is about a lot more than their social calendar. I think that just like, for instance, learning how to drive a car involves slowly coming to awareness of how powerful the car is, and therefore how careful you must be, being given power and understanding it brings a natural human urge to control it and use it well. If you are handed the keys to this great power, it only takes a little time of using it to see just how powerful it is, and then either to choose to hand those keys back or accept that you need to learn the “rules of the road” and follow them carefully.
So the public sees these people who they know so well, and sees how they can change the world with just a dinner invitation or a handshake, and starts to think of them as not just “people who have been handed a great deal of power through an accident of circumstances” but rather “people who are slightly more than we are”.
Reading the gossip around what it might mean that “something” is happening with the Princess of Wales reminded me a lot of reading the Greek Myths. Or the Hindu stories of Gods. There is an assumption of human desires, weaknesses, sins, etc. etc. But SO MUCH BIGGER than the level of desire/weakness/sin that an ordinary person might have. They feel “bigger” than us, so every part of their life must also be BIGGER somehow. No one at that level of fame ever just has a flirtation, it’s always An Affair that Shakes the Foundations of Their Marriage. No one at that level is ever mildly tipsy, they are A Dangerous Addict. No one at that level can ever just have an argument, it’s always A Massive Feud.
That “BIGGER” effect is still there with this particular Princess of Wales story now, because now the story has become “this is the biggest PR failure in the history of the world”. But I don’t think that is true either. I think it was a sad and unexpected situation and folks scrambled a bit. It happens. We think they have to be perfect because they are famous, but they are just human here too. It reminds me of when AbRam was born. That was such a crazy time, people KNEW something weird was going on, Gauri wasn’t being photographed, Shahrukh was oddly touchy, and it wasn’t until AbRam was out of the NICU and home that they announced his arrival. Probably there was some way to handle it that would have made the public situation smoother. But their new baby was really really sick, they made hurried decisions to try to keep it private, and it came off badly.
There’s two parts to this “they must be BIGGER somehow than we are” fallacy. The other part is that WE must be BIGGER somehow. Now the dialogue has shifted to how horrible it is that social media was going after all these rumors and creating all these things about the Princess of Wales and how much that must have hurt her. But, did it? Not saying it doesn’t matter at all, but ultimately if she is being talked about it means her Soft Power is still there, her job is secure. And on a basic level, when you have just learned you have cancer and you have to tell that to your 3 young children, how much space is social media going to take up in your life? These people are so BIG to us, we think we (the collective we) must be BIG to them. I don’t think we are. I think sometimes these “PR fails” are really “PR don’t cares”. Sometimes it’s easier to think it is a Vast Conspiracy to Fool us, than to accept we weren’t being thought about at all.
