The James Effect

It has been just over 24  hours since LeBron James announced his decision to sign with the NBA's Miami Heat, ending one of the most narcissistic and ego-driven spectacles we have ever been subjected to. I am still scratching my head as to why this was so important. Why was this so momentous?

I was watching television tonight and I came upon an Oprah Winfrey special on the Jonestown Massacre, which took place on November 18, 1978 in Guyana in South America. On that day, cult leader Jim Jones convinced over 900 of his followers to commit suicide by drinking cyanide-laced kool-aid. How did a small time preacher from Indiana reach such heights and wield such power and influence over so many people? Was it his charisma? His personality? Or was it the message he preached to his followers, the People's Temple?

It amazes me how someone can cultivate such a cult of personality that very nearly deifies them. I see this in LeBron James. Now, let's be clear, I am not saying LeBron shares the same attributes that Jim Jones did. Not at all. What I want to focus on is the something that both Jones and James tapped into: the need for the public (or a good portion of it) to have some flamboyant personality become the nexus of their lives. In the past, this would be religion and many people would argue that with the passage of time and the advancement of technology, this "need" for a central figure in people's lives became more common. This not necessarily true. For quite some time, the allure of celebrity and the fascination with the famous has been firmly fixed in our collective psyche.

In his brilliant biography of Mark Twain, Mark Powers writes, "This was a hunger for a kind of faith, or a godhead that represented faith....Caught in this swirl of this maelstrom, individuals seeking a personal connection with the divine turned their attention from the whipping gales of "theology" and toward more graspable icons. This was the true birth of celebrity culture." Should we be so surprised that so many entertainers and athletes yield an almost religious aura that convinces networks to drop everything they are doing and focus on them, force feeding us an unrelenting wave of coverage of which they are the stars.

The fascination we have with celebrity culture allows us to live vicariously through successful and famous people. Sadly, I don't think this pattern of behavior we have will go away anytime soon.

So there you go. I bet you didn't think the names Jim Jones and LeBron James would appear in the same sentence. They have nothing in common...except their ability to get people to stop what they are doing and to focus on them.