I don’t often watch movies, but when I do, they’re usually on planes and almost invariably about cults or exorcisms. Don’t ask. I have no idea why watching people surrender their souls to charismatic psychopaths or battle demonic possession entertains me so much, but I guess we all have our little quirks.
Cults, in particular, really fascinate me. Not so much the leaders, who are fairly predictable. They’re typically male, narcissistic, highly manipulative, and wildly oversexed. It’s the followers I find most interesting. What is it that makes seemingly intelligent people hand over their money, their bodies, their lives, even their children to another human being? How does one look at some mediocre man delivering increasingly deranged monologues and conclude: Yes. Him! THIS is the person God has chosen to explain everything.
I don’t get it. And I can’t get enough of it.
At first glance, falling prey to a cult might seem like something that happens only to weak, desperate people in remote places with nothing to lose. But then I look at celebrity culture and see the irrational fervor with which otherwise sane people lose their motherfucking minds over someone simply because they wrote a hit song, starred in a movie, was all over the news, or amassed a million followers on whatever social media platform. Our propensity for cult-like worship is far more widespread than we think.
I guess I can understand the initial pull of celebrity, but only up to a certain point. The closest I’ve ever come to being starstruck was in 1993, when I was 13 and met Pamela Anderson—then in the midst of her rapid rise to fame on Baywatch—at Los Angeles International Airport while waiting for my flight home to Montreal. When I asked her for an autograph and a photograph, she graciously obliged. I remember her being incredibly kind, somehow even more gorgeous in person than on TV, and smelling so exquisitely good that I solemnly vowed to wear perfume for the rest of my life.
But I didn’t cry, scream, faint, or begin worshipping at the altar of Pamela. She was a huge star, but she was still a person, and a lovely one at that. I admire plenty of people and can be very impressed by extraordinary talent, courage, beauty and achievement. But I’ve never felt the impulse to treat anyone as though they have transcended the rest of humanity for any reason, let alone just because they’re famous.
I spent so many years working for judges who were actual superstars within my field. Judges, like doctors, run the occupational risk of developing a bit of a God complex—perhaps understandably, given that they hold people’s lives and futures in their hands. The judges I worked with had not only risen to the highest levels of their respective national judiciaries, but had gone on to serve on some of the world’s most prestigious international courts and hear some of the most consequential cases in modern legal history. They were towering figures, quoted and studied by lawyers everywhere, and approached with enormous reverence. I had the utmost respect for them and felt deeply honored to serve as their trusted legal adviser.
But I also saw them up close every day, and no matter how important or distinguished someone may be, they still get cranky, they still misplace things, they still send emails without the attachment, and they can still occasionally say something so bewilderingly ignorant that you have to wonder whether you heard them correctly. Greatness in one area doesn’t necessarily confer wisdom in all others.
And yet, I have watched people fall all over themselves to fawn over someone famous, regardless of what they’re even famous for. Take Keanu Reeves on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Colbert asked him what he thinks happens when we die. Keanu paused and replied, “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” The audience released the “awww” heard ’round the world, followed by deafening applause, as though Rumi, the Buddha and Marcus Aurelius had merged to deliver the answer. It was sweet, sure. But what does Keanu Reeves know about life after death?
It doesn’t matter. He’s Keanu. He was in The Matrix.
Once someone has been designated important, we too readily assume that everything they say or do must be important too. If your Starbucks barista says, “I think kindness matters,” nobody cares. But if George Clooney or Oprah Winfrey says it, everyone gasps. “Oh my God.” “Exactly.” “So profound.”
This is what I call deus ex absurdo: a god emerging from the absurd.
We manufacture these gods collectively, often out of very little. Sometimes all it takes is a title, an award, a viral moment, a lot of followers, or even just a beautiful face, and suddenly we are genuflecting. We receive their every word as near-prophecy because, like some modern-day Midas, we come to believe that anything they touch must turn to gold.
The problem is, they inevitably begin to believe us. No worshipped person builds their pedestal alone. Everyone around them carries a brick and helps hoist them onto it. Imagine attending event after event where everyone is thrilled by your arrival. Every joke lands, every opinion is affirmed, and nobody ever interrupts you, contradicts you, or tells you that the story you’re telling for the seventeenth time was not interesting the first sixteen times you told it.
After enough indiscriminate applause, even a relatively grounded person can’t help but begin to believe that greatness is no longer something they have to work for. It’s just something they were born with. Effort is no longer required. Why reach for excellence when everyone claps at whatever comes out of you?
Political leaders are particularly fond of this arrangement. Authoritarian rulers like Kim Jong Un, Paul Kagame and Ilham Aliyev, as well as populists like Donald Trump, understand the power of making themselves inseparable from the movements they lead. Through rallies, slogans, state media, and heroic imagery, politics becomes fandom, only with much higher stakes and worse consequences. But no leader builds a cult of personality alone. It requires an army of yes-men—officials, advisers, propagandists and supporters willing to applaud every decision, explain away every failure and turn on anyone who refuses to join the chorus. Once the leader becomes the movement, loyalty to the person is equated with loyalty to the country. Criticism becomes treason and contradiction becomes heresy. The cult of personality does not ask citizens to think; it only asks them to believe.
I wonder why so many of us are so willing to manufacture these false gods. Is it because we secretly dream of becoming one ourselves? Because we want the followers, the applause, the recognition, the comments telling us we are brilliant, beautiful, inspiring and absolutely right about everything?
If we care about true freedom and democracy, this is one of those less flattering human impulses we need to recognize and rein in. And I am certainly not above it. I write publicly and, of course, I want people to read my work. I love hearing that something I wrote moved someone, helped them or made them laugh. Wanting recognition for our work is normal. Wanting acknowledgment, even praise, is human. Nobody wants to pour their heart into something only to be met with crickets. And nobody enjoys being judged or criticized. Anyone who claims otherwise is either lying or running for office.
But there is a difference between enjoying applause and requiring it to know that what you created has value. The moment we start shaping everything around what will get the biggest reaction, we stop creating and start performing. We become content machines, feeding an audience we hope will one day love us enough to make us gods. This is how people end up doing all kinds of dumb shit for attention on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.
The more serious danger, though, is not what people do to become gods; it’s what the rest of us surrender once we decide they are. We stop evaluating what they say and start accepting it just because they said it. We repeat their claims, excuse their failures, and defend things we would find indefensible in anyone else. And then, when the world descends into chaos, we pretend it happened without our participation.
Admiration should never require the suspension of critical thought. Someone can be brilliant, talented, courageous, accomplished and still be wrong, dishonest, ridiculous or completely full of shit. We have to be more discerning about what our manufactured gods say and do, because this is precisely how we are manipulated: through disinformation, personality cults and our own willingness to surrender our judgment to someone we have decided must know better. Following, after all, is easier than thinking.
So yes, admire people, celebrate talent and give recognition where it’s deserved. But always keep your judgment, your values and your sense of direction firmly your own. Develop them from the inside out, rather than copy-pasting them from whoever happens to have the biggest audience. We do not need any more gods. We need more people who know what they stand for and have the courage to think for themselves.
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Listen to Sheila’s personal reading of “Deus ex Absurdo”.
Sheila Paylan is an international human rights lawyer and former legal advisor to the United Nations. Now based in Yerevan, she regularly consults for a variety of international organizations, NGOs, think tanks, and governments.
