“The cult of royalty, while the mystique lasted, suggested to those who followed it that there was a plane of existence that transcended the everyday world, and that there existed something greater and more important than themselves; whereas the cult of celebrity is but a disguised worship of our own, generally uncultivated, tastes and desires. Quiet reverence for the unseen has become noise tittle-tattle about the ubiquitous, which has resulted in a vicious spiral of ever-coarsening public appetites, because tittle-tattle must be ever more salacious to satisfy us.”
– Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It
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