The story so far

The most obvious question that emerges from the preceding discussion is, of course: what does any of this remotely have to do with fame? I am, in fact, getting to that. The purpose of this rather circuitous discussion of the nature of the West is to give us some sense of the predicament in which we products of the West find ourselves. In particular, what I have tried to show is that the West is the product of certain tensions. First of all, there is the tension between objectivism and individualism. These two ideas are, I have argued, compatible. Indeed, more than that, they actually support each other. However, unless we are very precise in our understanding of them, we can easily become confused and believe them to be incompatible. It is in this possibility that the tension between individualism and objectivism can be found: it is a tension that issues from a misunderstanding of these ideas. Secondly, both individualism and objectivism have a tendency to collapse into their degenerate forms: relativism and fundamentalism, respectively. It is to these tensions – between individualism and objectivism, and between each of these and their respective degenerate forms – and to a specific form of degeneration that the West can consequently undergo, that we have to look to properly understand the rise and rise of vfame.