By: Danielle Mitchell

According to the video below, it’s easy to convince hundreds of mall goers that you’re a celebrity with just a fake name, fake credentials, and a few fake groupies and entourage following you. Recently, some people from Chill Hill Media went to a mall in Virginia for a day and was able to shut down several stores, get a mall security escort, and take pictures with unsuspecting mall goers. But, to be fair, many of the tweets that are shown along with the video suggest that people were also questioning who this guy was, who claimed to be Thomas Elliot, a made up name that turned into an instant, though short-lived, celebrity.

In this instance, along with many more, it’s perhaps best to ask: why are we so willing to fabricate these lies about how other people are important to the point that it becomes a truth? Literally, an entirely fabricated story about a guy named Thomas Elliot manifested into a whole mall clamoring around this fake celebrity wanting to get a picture and autograph from him.

As a psychological experiment, this Thomas Elliot figure is perhaps indicative of a much larger phenomenon that explains why people like Paris Hilton and the entire Kardashian family is famous, as well as many others. They’ve done absolutely nothing, contributed only their unrealistic expectation of beauty, and yet they’re given millions of dollars every year, some of which comes from doing what this Thomas Elliot guy did, just going around a mall. And while some commentators can easily state that they’re just starved for attention, what about the people that feed their attention-seeking behavior by actually buying into the lie that they’re important people.

To go even further, what about people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, people who have clearly made a contribution to society, but yet are disproportionately worshiped by thousands, if not millions? Jobs once stated that his goal was to make a dent on the universe, and people bought it up, as if one single person, or if one single company, could actually influence a universe that was fourteen billion years old. Thomas Elliot is obviously only the tip of the iceberg, and was just a prank that turned into a social experiment, but it’s all indicative of people thinking that humanity is a lot more important than it actually is.

We’re merely one link in a very long evolutionary line that doesn’t ensure our permanence. And perhaps it’s because of this sense of temporality that we allow certain individuals to thrive off the attention we give them, but maybe that shouldn’t be the case. Because when we idolize a few, then many more are forgotten. So, while you might be watching the video and just thinking it’s a joke, a mere light-hearted prank, maybe it could be used as a catalyst into critically thinking about why society is so inured by celebrity worship.