The Celebrity Culture

How this ruins us.

As children growing up we look for role models before we even know this is what we are doing. We are looking for people we can identify with but who also seem to know what they are doing. While we are doing this early on we are not knowledgeable or mature enough to understand that these people we are attracted to are more than the parts they reveal to audiences. Over time we learn that for every person on the screen or in the tabloid at the checkout stand there is an army of others behind the scenes promoting them. And they aren’t doing this because they necessarily are as excited about them as their fans might be. Their motivation is to entice the paying public to spend money. This is the way they themselves make a living.

Promoters of performers or acts geared to children or adolescents understand that their target audience is seeking alternative voices to parents who are training children to become competent independent mature adults capable of managing the challenges of life someday on their own. None of us like discipline and chores that seem to limit our fun. It is the natural instinct of children to therefore seek role models who seem to have it made, who are famous and do not appear to have to do all the menial chores most children are burdened with.

And because our society is filled with more leisure time and gadgets than any other generation in history, not to mention access to more entertainment, including pornography, along with access to illegal, deadly, and addictive drugs, those in a position to cash in on all of this are only too happy to drive wedges between the generations. If they can get young people to never trust those older than they are, then they become easy marks who will then spend their money and energy on frivolous things and activities. In the process of isolating children from those adults who know and love them most these hucksters will permanently damage young people so they will not one day be able to have healthy relationships necessary to be able to raise healthy children themselves.

None of this is a new problem, only more pronounced because the society we are currently living in is affluent and soft.

One tremendous counter to this dilemma we face with the children of today is to teach them from the Old Testament Book of Proverbs. Look at how the book starts and note who its intended audience is.

The Beginning of Knowledge

The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel: To know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight, to receive instruction in wise dealing, in righteousness, justice, and equity; to give prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the youth—

Let the wise hear and increase in learning, and the one who understands obtain guidance, to understand a proverb and a saying, the words of the wise and their riddles.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Proverbs 1:1-7

The Enticement of Sinners

Hear, my son, your father's instruction, and forsake not your mother's teaching, for they are a graceful garland for your head and pendants for your neck.

My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent. If they say, “Come with us, let us lie in wait for blood; let us ambush the innocent without reason; like Sheol let us swallow them alive, and whole, like those who go down to the pit; we shall find all precious goods, we shall fill our houses with plunder; throw in your lot among us; we will all have one purse”— my son, do not walk in the way with them; hold back your foot from their paths, for their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed blood.

For in vain is a net spread in the sight of any bird, but these men lie in wait for their own blood; they set an ambush for their own lives. Such are the ways of everyone who is greedy for unjust gain; it takes away the life of its possessors.

Proverbs 1:8-19 (ESV)