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A Billionaire Of Little Brain
It’s not only Winnie-the-Pooh who suffers from an evident lack of intelligence
We humans love to project our fantasies onto people who are remote and thus unknown, yet the subject of endless media attention and thus seemingly familiar to us. We’re hardwired by evolution to do this, but whereas formerly we’d thrust our fervid fantasies onto the leader of our clan or tribe, today we do it to media-generated celebrities. Teens nowadays often have as their first crush some suitably well-presented performer, and adults just as enthusiastically have their political and commercial crushes too. No matter how inadequate and inane the well-known person may be, provided they get a lot of media coverage we can be sure that a significant number of ordinary people will credit them with all manner of unlikely gifts.
The infantile halfwit creature Trump is of course a prime example of this phenomenon, but it’s easy to find nearly equivalent examples all around the world. In general, it’s the least adequate and least intelligent among us who rush to project their desperate fantasies onto some famous person and no doubt in years to come the syndrome will acquire a name, much as the Dunning-Kruger syndrome is now shorthand for the risible over-confidence that is imparted by total ignorance of the subject-matter in question.
