I think when we cling to things like that, it is because we are wrestling with our identity. Everyone wants to know who they are. But if you start saying "I'm a buddhist" or "I'm a marxist" then it becomes hard to reject them them, because they are part of you.

I can imagine earnest college kids clinging to their copies of Joyce's Ulysses as their parents might have once clung to their Bibles.

It's a risky thought but perhaps the purest cultural fetish is one's own name. But then the transcendence of fetishism is preferable to that perhaps. Is "transcendence" just the name of a temporary emotion? Perhaps, but it's better than nothing.

Is silence the best note in music? Is empty space the ideal sculpture? Tune in next time.

I would also like to mention the power of fame to bias us. We assume that the most famous names are the most worthy of study. Often they are. But sometimes not. Is Foucault as valuable as he is famous? This is a question of opinion of course, but F tends to bore me.

And what does the fact that someone bores you show? Lots of different people bore lots of different people. So what?

Perhaps we go through this in differing degrees as we age and our culture changes as does our own regard, our own importance, our own position, our own narcissus.

I currently see this fetish in intellectual-evolutionary terms, but this if of course just my transformation of the theorized fetish.

For me, progress is the trading of worser idols for better. I feel that narcissim is the root of idolaty. We want to ally ourselves with the power. But if we become self-conscious of this, we can cast off the borrowed robes and declare our future ideal selves as our idol. This is romantic-Satanic egoism,I suppose. But it's not that simple really. I should make a clear that "satanism" is my sense of the word is just self-as-god or self-as-the-measure.

Our cultural fetishes are self-serving from the beginning. The Marxist is the hero. The atheist is a here. The Christian is a hero. The philosopher is a hero. The anti-philosopher is a hero. The clarity-man is a hero. The think-outside-the-box man is a hero. It seems to boil down to continuous heroic role-play. It's just that we can change the hero mask sometimes. The cultural fetish is the mask.

But this is just a psychological hypothesis.

Would you rather dub your self knight or be crowned a fool?
We think we can gift ourselve more of the self same self so when we are taken from there will still be something left over.
Natural you might say but delusional also.
Why when we are small we want to be big and when we are big we want to be bigger, the smart or delusional ones learn that it would be better to be smaller taken car eof because one cannot take care of all the big self they think they have to be or defend, even if this means you think that by being smaller there is less of you that can be taken. The smartest ones realise there size and know it. Even knowing ones place need not be a bad thing, means you can rest and be contented, but as long as we think we have been put there instead of battling (being the hero) to get where we are, we will always be a made fool not created hero. Our life is myth and if not myth then tragedy.

Being the slave=being the king? How very Marcus Aurelius of you, sometime

Religion is the opiate of the masses. Marxism is the opiate of the intellectuals.

Marx wrote of commodity fetishism. But Marx himself serves as a fetish for others. But Marx is not so hot these days. There are better examples.

I can imagine earnest college kids clinging to their copies of Joyce's Ulysses as their parents might have once clung to their Bibles. The reverence/idolatry hasn't changed but only the fashion.

Of course this is not aimed at everyone. I'm suggesting that we all undergo a sort of intellectual/cultural evolution in which we learn to think for ourselves. Can we skip the idolatry phase? I doubt it. But this is an opinion, not a proposition.

Young men must have mustangs or mohawks or marx, drugs dreads or derridas. We are the same old Bible-thumbing rabbit-foot carrying species. Or not. I report. You decide.