A Simple Formula for Fame
- Find an Enemy.
- Promote why He’s Bad.
- Promote Why You’re Better.
A very simple formula, but it forms the basis of how the major influencers in our culturescape came to power.
Take the obvious example of Donald Trump.
How could someone like that have possibly become president?
After all, he was mean, vicious, and insulting. I think that even his supporters doubted his victory for a large part of the race in 2016. I mean, it just seemed so unlikely that such an unorthodox candidate could win — right?
Well maybe not.
First of all, his “naming” scheme was brilliant — by giving each opposing candidate a sort of derogatory nickname to fix into the public’s mind, Trump immediately outlined in one word what was supposedly wrong with them.
Lyin’ Ted. Low-Energy Jeb. Little Marco. Crooked Hillary.
His insults didn’t even have to be political angles — even just making fun of someone’s physical features or demeanor somehow seemed to position him as superior.
Trump also rallied against the media itself, launching attacks that I haven’t ever heard so blatantly said by a mainstream politician.
He even went as far as to label the mainstream media “the enemy of the people”. Quite a bold move.
Trump was successful because he attacked — he didn’t defend. People tend to get behind an attacker.
Attacking others is unfortunately a great way to come into power. (It is of course important who you attack — I’ve made the point before that you should be punching up, not down, because of something called the Streisand effect.)
But the basic impetus behind most political claims to fame includes this sort of negative counter-positioning.
“Causes” are always against something, even if they are really for something. It’s the only way to get people to really listen.
This inconvenient truth stems from us humans’ inherent “negativity bias” — our tendency towards looking at, accepting and remembering the negative over the positive.
Negative news is captivating. That’s why it sells, and that’s why you’re always going to hear about the grizzly murder down the block before you hear about the new local bakery that’s opening.
Epic public freakouts are always going to go viral more often than someone winning an award or an athlete setting a new record.
It’s just the way it is, and it will be, so long as news outlets are profit driven.
The best thing that aspiring influencers can do is pick enemies thoughtfully and rail against them as hard as possible — watching for backlash from the section of the public that actually supports who or what you attack.
This is the problem with the two-party system in the U.S. — politicians know that people are looking for an enemy to hate, and delivering one into public view will give them the spotlight.
One party endlessly attacks the other and vice versa, thus prohibiting the forming of any other political party. A third party vote won’t be a big enough blow to the enemy, after all.
AOC, the congresswoman from New York, gained her fame not merely from advocating in favor of certain policies, but by positioning herself as harshly against traditional conservative views.
A quick look through her twitter feed reveals that almost every one of her tweets is a vicious attack on someone, usually the president. She does not bother to defend her own view and explain their merits — rather she takes it for granted that her audience agrees with her and simply launches attacks to gain further support from the democratic voter base.
As in the above example, even while promoting some positive event that she organized (a “know your rights” campaign), AOC starts off her tweet by lobbing a harsh, yet succinct, attack on the president.
She knows the three steps and is following them well.
Another group, up and coming in the political arena, doesn’t use this tactic very well but is sort of an example of it by accident.
That is, the Libertarian Party — third largest political party in the U.S. Libertarian candidates and party members are actually fairly bad at finding enemies and attacking them. They love their principles and generally use their energy to promote those. Things like the “non-aggression principle” and “free markets”, for example. While interesting to the more scholarly among us, these ideas do not actually attack anything and so gain very little traction.
One idea that has gained traction in the libertarian thought camp, however, is the often divisive meme — “Taxation is theft”. Now there is an attack.
It’s divisive, it makes people angry, and it is a direct attack on something that is so familiar to our society that, even without evaluation, it feels obligated to defend it.
I don’t think that libertarians understood the impact this meme would create; I think they were just adhering to their basic principles and this is what came out.
But if libertarians want to be successful in the political arena, this is where they start — by creating more attacks like this.
Positioning taxation as the enemy, though there is no “tax party” or “tax-supporting” advocacy group in the U.S., is a position against the funding that makes the agendas of both parties possible. Without taxes, both the left and the right would lose power. Both sides seek to further their own political agendas and that can only be done (in their eyes) through government spending.
After finding an enemy and publicly attacking it, what’s next?
Hopefully at this point you have some public attention — now you need to redirect that attention towards what makes your agenda a better option.
That’s when you fill in the gap with information like the above — not necessarily attacks, but just information explaining what makes your position superior.
Without the initial attack however, you wouldn’t have the attention necessary to get people to even look at your message.
The key to remember is this: notoriety in one group means fame in another. Becoming overwhelmingly unpopular means that soon, somewhere, you will become overwhelmingly loved. Rarely does one exist without the other.
It then just becomes a numbers game from there — if the group that loves you is more powerful than the group that doesn’t, you win. Vice versa, you lose.
Moral of the story: You make no enemies, you make no friends.
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