I love this clip of Michael Jackson's publicist talking to Joe Rogan about what MJ was like:
He sees the infinite. I imagine for a normal person it would be like getting licked and cuddled by thousands of dogs all at once (if that were physically possible).
Ugly people want to tar and feather things that are beautiful, and it's really no surprise MJ was misrepresented.
When there's mass media, you have a few very elite level cunning psychological masters playing to the sensitivities of the most common viewer. So if you have a bunch of people who feel threatened by exceptionalism and want to see it as something a little different or less marvelous, they distort it.
In most cases when someone is exceptional, like say a brilliant physicist, they just don't show up on the radar. They're easy enough to ignore. But music and dance shows up. People can't ignore it. So you have to tinker and twist his way of being and what he's all about in a way that they can stomach.
In the futuristic beautiful free wonderful decentralized world that we're turning into, you'd hear about this sensation laterally thru the grapevine, and just travel and go see him. Or maybe listen to the stories other people tell, sure. But you'd know they're stories and passed around and are just words of mouth that are bound to have some errors. And the errors would be random and generally tethered to the real picture, rather than deliberately crafted to bring you to some alternate picture.
Overall he'd be less famous, I imagine, but what you did know would be more dialed in and accurate.
And "stardom" would be much more comfortable to someone like Michael. It's the kind of life he'd actually want.
People would gravitate towards him and stories would spread, but there wouldn't be bright lights and an obsession.
The world right now is dominated by strategy and careful thinking. I believe the future is much more loose and feel-based and flowing.
There's an interesting paradox where the people who talk about decentralization and the ways we can free the world tend to be the clearest, most technical thinkers. (Tend to be nerds more than artists. Male more than female.) And so the assumption would be that this kind of world must favor the nerds.
But quite not the case. When there's scarcity and conquest and hierarchy, the clearest thinking strategic nerds will have the best outcomes, relative to artists. That's what favors the nerds. When that all goes away, we just play and create. Which is good for the nerds too, but even more good for the artist.
Expression, and love, and play, and creativity starts to shine in a way that it doesn't right now. Careful planning, while still maybe helpful in some isolated ways, isn't a dominant thing anymore. There needs to be a hierarchical structure for planning and strategy to be so important.
So it's funny how, say, a female artist will be so likely to be sucked into statism and believe voting for the right people or passing the right laws is their way forward. And then the male nerd anarchist is scary to them. But actually the male nerd (even if unwittingly) is building a world that's conducive to the female artist.
And the female artist, to whatever extent she continues to feed the control structure, will be unwittingly holding herself back even more than she's holding back the male nerd.
Nature if too smart. If you deliberately try to make things best for yourself at the expense of people who aren't like you, it backfires. The only way forward is whatever is best for everyone.
The future is female, which I think is beautiful. The word 'feminism' gets distorted, but real feminism I think is inherently inclusive. The womb is where it all begins and then we go out as satellites to try to make the world a similarly warm and conducive place.
When play and expression begin to dominate, it's the kind of world we want to live in.
parting thought
I think in general, if you tried to make a world where Michael Jackson would feel happy and loved and content and where he'd be commonly thought of as a beautiful and exceptional person (accurate to how he really is, like how he's described in this video), that'd be a pretty good guiding light.