Vfame and the decline of Enlightenment

Vfame exists because, in the early-twenty-first-century West, we are constitutionally incapable of distinguishing quality from bullshit. This book has tried to explain why we lost this ability. We lost our confidence in the possibility of values outside ourselves. Indeed, we could no longer even understand what sorts of things these might be. Therefore, we came to think it was all about us. And our lives – and we – became impoverished as a result.

Vfame is fame unconnected to quality; it is fame disconnected from objective value and objective standards of evaluation. Vfame is fame unconnected, in any important way, to the sorts of features – excellence, broadly construed – that traditionally made people famous. Thus, it is an example of the sort of levelling down of qualitative distinctions described and predicted by Kierkegaard. From the perspective of vfame, any way of being famous is just as good as any other. Vfame is the egalitarian version of fame: the new opium of the masses. There are no clear standards of quality that one must meet in order to be vfamous. With traditional fame, there were at least some standards. They were discipline specific, and they were not always adhered to in every case. But they were there at least in ideal form. There are no standards one must attain in order to acquire vfame, not even ideal standards.