Can you be both Sun and King?

I have been thinking about a few people lately, and have ended up asking myself a question: what do Oprah Winfrey, Chris Anderson (head of TED) and King Louis XIV of France have in common? One answer is that they control (or controlled) the vast majority of popular science and arts that reach the public. Now, they all do this in very different ways, but I think that two things can be said of powerful arbiters of information; they tend towards hedonism at some point, and as time goes by the need for exuberance associated with the adulation leads to excess. These cases of similarities may or may not be obvious. The links I see are that these people started with a lot less power than they ended up with. They generally used that power for a number of things, but one of them being to provide the public with what they value as important culture. Oprah was acceptable with Dr. OZ, the reintroduction of Tina Turner to the public and giving away free stuff to women who waited all night in the cold winds of Chicago to see her. Chris Anderson posted daily TED talks free online. At the same time he holds conferences where people can enjoy each other’s wisdom and company, and where he picks generally interesting speakers. The Sun King was gracious enough to allow Molière to take the occasional public tour with his troop, as well as promoting science through court publications. All of this is good, if you don’t consider that for all of those things that trickle down to the public there is an especially elite privileged group behind the scenes. Think of Oprah having Barack Obama over for dinner to ask him to run for President, or the court of Louis XIV.  Even if the benevolent leaders intentions were right, this leads to a type of megalomania which can create a magazine with your own picture on every cover (O), a series of conferences where only a small amount of people are invited for the pleasure of paying $10,000+ to attend, and posts only a a small fraction of them online (TED), or building the world’s most decadent castle (Versailles). It is hard to blame either three, and in aggregate, they have possibly done more good than bad, yet I think they were all more important for society when they were less powerful than they were to become. Oprah didn’t use to have the power to stop vaccines by having a stripper promote anti-immunization propaganda. Chris Anderson didn’t have the ability to create the cultural forces which include only a very liberal, often factless connection to the world’s intellectual treasures, nor did Louis XIV make or break science and the arts of his time. Eventually they did take the air out of the world’s atmosphere, leaving us all with such a powerful source that they had a responsibility that no individual could possibly succeed with.

Here is where I take a larger leap; every time I post a growing frequency of blogs, and gather even the few readers I have, I am doing the same thing, and am at least ethically bound by the same responsibility that I am asking of them (ok, not much Louis can do now I know).  If I look back at my early blogs several years ago I felt no responsibility either to engage my readers (as they were just Mom and Dad anyway), or to not offend. Now I am more careful, though as you can see here I still do take the risk of offending. My readership is not much, but it is growing by mere 10s and I should take that seriously. Perhaps this is a potential issue with blog publishing in general. It is deceptively open. It is a way for news empires to not control the spread of information, yet it is also completely self-regulating. That is wonderful freedom that I am lucky exists, and glad exists, but the potential for an individual to rise from obscurity to prominence without oversight exists every day. Any of us could be the next Oprah or Chris Anderson, and that is thrilling, and an American Dream type proposal. It also comes though with a little recognition that quality does not ascend linearly with power. In fact in many instances it decreases. Perhaps we all need to write with that in mind. And in case you are reading this Chris, please just post all of the talks or none because it might be nice to be king at a TED conference it is too much responsibility to be it every day. And Oprah, I am sure you are not reading, but in case I were to become one of the ultra-powerful that I am discussing overnight, I would have two suggestions. Promote some real science and some jazz music from time to time. As for you King Louis, I will be kind to the dead, and just thank you for “The Misanthrope” and the hall of mirrors.