The significance of vfame: an overview

This book is a wide-ranging discussion of the significance of vfame. It is wide ranging in the sense that it runs all the way from a dispute that began in ancient Athens, through certain ideas that originated in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, to the rise of religious fundamentalism in the late-twentieth century. Much of the time it might be difficult to see what any of this has to do with either fame or vfame. So, in this section, I want to lay out the argument that I'm going to develop in the rest of the book.

Here is the central idea: vfame is a symptom. That is the significance of vfame. The importance of vfame lies not in what it is in itself, but in the fact that it is a symptom of something else. There is nothing morally objectionable about vfame in itself. As we have seen, perfectly decent people – as I'm sure Paris Hilton is – can be purely vfamous; and psychopathic mass murderers can be purely famous. Nonetheless, there is something morally questionable about vfame. But this can only be seen when we understand vfame as a symptom of something else.

The question, then, is this: what is vfame a symptom of? I don't want to give away too many of the details at this stage – and, at this stage, they wouldn't make much sense anyway – but, roughly, I am going to argue that vfame is a symptom of a form of cultural degeneration that has a specific character.