Me! Me! Me!
May I Have Your Attention, Please?

by Reppy Toppenish

If I had to pick one TV program in these complex, post- McLuhan days which subtly embodies a critical, overlooked key to human personality, motivation, and behavior, it would not be, say, The Sopranos, or the late Seinfeld, or Letterman. Not WWF, or the Teletubbies. No, it would be the ubiquitous on-going staple of recycled video chewing gum known as Hollywood Squares. Why? Bear with me. To explain why requires a few tricky routines on the mental parallel bars. Here we go.

1. Achtung!
Grant for the moment that in the wide mid-range of human intelligence, variations are not critically important. Any I.Q. between say 110 and 150 provides you with enough tools to survive with some often considerable degree of comfort.

The farther below 110 you get the more problems you have. The farther above 150, the more problems but also the more very specific rewards (think Einstein).

If in that mid-range, we all are pretty much equal intelligence-wise, then what do those people occupying the nine overlighted cubicles on Hollywood Squares get out of life that you and I don’t?

Money? Well, yes. But though important, money is, surprisingly, secondary.

What they all get a lot of and want a lot more of is: attention. Millions watch. Those nine people, sometimes called crosses and sometimes noughts, know that is so because they get paid by sponsors and networks who know that it is so.

2. Look here.
Hold that thought a moment while we consider a tough question:

What in your life do you have control over?

Not temporary, come-and-go control but real almost total perfect control (if you choose to exercise it)?

Your body? Come on. Even masters of body control have at best intermittent success (think Tiger Woods).

Your family, your spouse, your children? Your work? Your car, even?

Of course not.

Are we all then helpless?

Please. Keep thinking.

And the answer is….

3. Problem Areas
The only things that can interfere with this control of my point of attention are:

1. Pain. I fall and break my arm. All I’m going to pay attention to for quite a while is the broken arm and the pain associated with it.
2. Unconsciousness / sleep. I fall and hit my head hard and I’m gone for a while, as also when I sleep.
3. Sex. After puberty, much of one’s energy, at least for some years, is devoted to flight toward or away from orgasm. This pursuit often overrides one’s attempts to pay attention to other things.
4. Cultural conditioning. As I grow up I learn to pay attention to whatever my particular society thinks is important.

We have established two points.

2. The only thing we have control over is what we choose to pay attention to, though our degree of control may at times vary or even be interrupted altogether.

If Point No. 2 is correct, then that reality, that nearly absolute ability to move and focus our attention is a core part of our inner reality. And although nobody except meditation teachers, graduate psychology professors, and philosophers talk about it, we must all in some sense be aware that this is the case.

Power, then, real power means learning how to control other people’s attention.

Education, real education, then becomes a matter of learning how to do just that.

4. The Puzzle.
One of the maddening puzzles of life is this. I encounter people who, I quickly determine, are more or less as intelligent as I am, but who (I also quickly determine) not only don’t believe what I believe but who often hold beliefs which I consider to be at best ridiculous and at worst downright barbaric.

If these people and I share membership in that broad mid-range of viable intelligence, how, I ponder, can this be?

After all, I know how intelligent I am. I know how I have carefully weighed the information and experience available to me, and I have come to my very reasonable beliefs which form the basis of my life. But I keep running into, reading about, hearing from, seeing all these other presumably "intelligent" people who spout beliefs to which I have difficult giving any credence at all!

How can this be? Am I missing something?

What is especially maddening is the suspicion I have that these people are equally baffled by my own beliefs, which to them seem just as absurd (think conservatives vs. liberals).

In this mix, remember, we all know all that time that the only thing we really control is our point of attention, and attention is what we also all thus come to crave from the individuals around us.

We learn quickly as infants that the non-human world pays no attention to us and in fact often appears to present many dangers (hot stove!).

Other people, in contrast, especially those closest to us as infants, pay a lot of attention, at least some of it usually adoring. And we want more, and more of this attention.

Given the millions of possible combinations of nature and nurture, young humans figure out millions of ways to get attention. While these ways may differ in certain details, general patterns which we eventually came to know as personality types emerge.

Fascinating aside: Some of us, working in the odder mixes that nature-nurture can throw up, find that we are unable to get clearly adoring attention so we learn clever, even devious ways of getting negative attention (think Richard Nixon).

No matter how intelligent I am, if I early learn that, for example, well-exercised snobbery elicits approving attention from the humans around me, I’m well on my way to growing up as a solid political conservative.

If, on the other hand, I early learn that concern for the well-being of others gets a lot of approving attention, then I’m headed toward a maturity of political progressivism.

Obviously many shadings occur, so you get unusual phenomena like Clarence Thomas, or Log Cabin Republicans. And you can also find instances where the continuing drive for attention leads to a 180-degree switch in the persona in order to continue to get enough attention: The young Tory Churchill fading into the older Whig Churchill. The young radical David Horowitz become the older extreme conservative David Horowitz.

6. The Zsa-zsa Syndrome
All of which is not to suggest that the drive for attention is the sole determining factor behind our behavior, but only to offer the possibility that it can help to understand the differing political and cultural choices of more or less equally "intelligent" people.

So strong is the often overlooked desire for attention that it cancels decisions that intelligence is trying to make in one’s life.

Which brings us back to the seemingly vacuous entities occupying the cubicles on Hollywood Squares. One of the more popular solutions in the quest for attention is, fascinatingly, the quest for attention. Just ask Zsa-zsa (or now, I suppose, her channeled spirit).

The "celebrity," in its purest form the person who is famous for being famous, is the grown-up infant who has learned well that the pursuit of fame is its own reward.

7. Social Truth
The most highly gifted practitioners of public relations of course know all this (though they may not know that they know it). The basic rule of PR, remember, is: Any attention, bad or good, is better than no attention.

My group applauds me, rewards me, gives me hugs for treasuring the same biases and prejudices that they hold and treasure. The least sign that I’m deviating leads to a withdrawal of attention equal in quantity to the seriousness of my apparent deviation.

If I’m clever enough to do something that attracts media attention to our treasured biases, I’m doubly rewarded. Not only do I get the media attention, my group also gives me a lot more attention. Which only reinforces my certainty that these biases are valuable and correct. I feel good about myself. I like me more and more because I’m learning ways to get more and more attention. Therefore I am both a successful and a good person. I’m not merely OK. I’m RIGHT and you, if you disagree with my biases, are clearly WRONG and most definitely not OK.

END

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