I’ve been enjoying videos about music by Adam Neely. One of the concepts he returns to frequently is that repetition legitimizes. If you do something once, perhaps it’s a mistake. If you do it a few times, the listener assumes it is intentional. It becomes a regularity that needs explanation, rather than an aberration that needs excuse. I have gradually come to believe that this is as close as one might get to a cognitive ‘theory of everything’. For any cognitive pattern you encounter and may seek to understand, the ultimate explanation is very likely to be that repetition legitimizes. We think this way because we thought that way once, and then we thought that way again, and then it became the way we think.
When I try to understand what made my mental world when I was young different from what it is now, the best explanation I’ve come up with is that the number of repetitions needed to legitimize was extraordinarily small, then. If I think of something that seems as though it ‘always happened’ when I was young, and I try to figure out how many times it actually happened, the sample size from which I generalized, I always end up at a very small number. Two, three, four, maybe as high as seven or eight. Rarely, if ever, higher than fifteen.
A result of this is that explanations of why something is the case are typically restatements, in greater detail or at a higher level of abstraction, that something is the case.
To me, this is most obvious with internet memes. The bedrock explanation for everything in the world of internet memes is that some set of symbols appeared in the past, had enough repetitions to establish itself in the minds of a particular group of people, and was subsequently referred to. It’s an in-joke with a relatively large in-group. It’s funny, to the extent it is funny, if the original referent was understood as ‘funny’ or if references to it have subsequently been understood as ‘funny’.
As applied to celebrity, this phenomenon is described in its purest form as ‘being famous for being famous’. When you look a bit harder, of course, any outstanding feature of a celebrity to which you might appeal as grounds for their fame is only adequate as an explanation to the extent that people with that feature are famous. One has interpolated a step in between ‘being famous’ and ‘being famous’ rather than providing a foundation on which fame is built.