One manifestation of Puritanism is a reverence for celebrities. They, the chosen, realize their destinies and lesser beings look on in awe. Puritanical cultures are polarized. Fortunate people are existentially super-enfranchised and their lives are validated and enhanced by their successes. Their lives burgeon and swell with a surfeit of every good thing. It is enabled by the assumption of their limitless deservedness.
The thing builds on itself. They are somehow more human. Conversely, little people accept a reduced status as their due and participate in their own belittling. Their lives shrink in significance, They are coopted into intensifying the polarization and validating their own inconsequence by fatalistic and sick beliefs, becoming so separated from the “haves” they don’t even feel envy. They invest in the lives of the chosen as spectators.
It is a carnival and calamity of inhumanity, corruption and existential folly--degrading to everyone involved. The egos of the elect achieve magnificent, delusional proportions. Poor and working people see their lives shivel and diminish in their own estimation and presumably in God’s. They receive routine intimations of their end in ashes, dust and decay as others see their godliness materialized in earthly rewards.
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