Abstract

Consumer culture is in need of the Man of Success and, consequently, mechanisms of “creating” idols and fans. Treating success as some unconditional stock, it pushes people to achieve the latter by any means, including giving up one’s own personality and identity and betraying all other values. To those harnessed into this mechanism, which is motioned by “the wheel of fortune”, it offers the participants of the continuous show some unauthentic, substitute life. Unaware, they are drawn into a trap of self-destruction. Idols become victims of transitory fashions, whereas their fans turn into victims, identifying themselves with the fans deprived of any identity. The false awareness of “the ideology of success” is reduced to propagating internal emptiness and creating a demand for “artificial feeding” on the products of mass and populist cultural pulp