Finding ourselves existentially foregrounded as the protagonist in and of all we do, it is almost inevitable that we come to think of ourselves as exceptional or special and in those instances when the healthy doubt of a wise, common or garden-variety insecure intellect dawns upon us, we quite rapidly and gratefully barter our own perceived imperfection for the fictional closure and comfort that a celebrity or (other) icon’s self-identity vicariously provides us.
Prior to the perfect narrative self-containment of an icon is the symbolic closure that language offers but never delivers. What we rarely if ever catch a glimpse of is the many and diverse ways that all celebrity, all storied artificiality and all fictive closure of certain self-identity as truth or inalienable belief is really always an approximation to a median value in a statistical distribution of artefacts, entities and systems in which we (and our beliefs) are but a fairly non-descript component element.
The approximation to a statistical average is no demeaning thing – all life (and intelligence as its exponentiation) is something of an inevitability in that the dynamical autocatalysis of information and energy-processing systems autonomously self-gravitates towards an optimal solution to natural computation both in and as complexity in biology, physics and logic.
Life, just as beauty, is no outlier in this game – it is the necessary product of a function of approximation.
Daedelus Kite 