I was literally in the middle of writing my newsletter this weekend when I realized that the Golden Globes were happening. Hundreds of fancy-pants hypocrites up on stage handing each other trophies for every inclusive category they could come up with. So when my wife brought it up, outraged that the celebrities were blatantly disregarding the same tyrannical social distancing policies that they had been paid to promote for the rest of us, I was embarrassed that I hadn't known the event was even happening. Straight-away I decided to pound out this article instead of continuing my series on Personal Responsibility (it'll continue next week).
Am I going to bore you with yet another article examining the Golden Globes? No. God no. But I will say sorry in advance for a rushed article. It's very stream of consciousness.
What I think is more appropriate than just the Golden Globes is to talk to you about Being Relevant. The concept is pretty much its own proper noun nowadays. It means more than just knowing what is important, or having an interesting perspective on current events. It means knowing precise details of particular celebrity's every moment - even if they are otherwise vapid or mere sensationalists.
This idea of relevance is something that used to be reserved to tabloids, but kept out of the serious news. Nor was it the fuel for conversation between serious people having interesting conversations. All of that is different now because Twitter is the primary source of most news and conversation. Twitter is basically the digital tabloid mill, and everything else has lowered to that common denominator. Relevant is no longer about whether your insight adds to a line of discussion. It's just about how well you can parrot whatever happened most recently with celebrity x, y, or z.
Suffice to say I don't really think that's the core of relevancy.
Look, I'm just not relevant by this standard because I look for consistency in the people I follow rather than the novelty of a new thing every day, minute, second. It's why I'm interested in the opinions and activities of Donald Trump, Chris Do, Ted Cruz, Elon Musk, Mark Levin. With few exceptions, they have a stable ethic and approach to what they do. Their thoughts tend to be consistent from issue to issue. The same kind of consistency makes certain older public figures interesting to me, such as Milton Friedman, Hayek, Joseph Albers, Thomas Sowell. For the most part, you can count on these types of people to be a solid touchstone. This is what true relevancy means: having a perspective that can be applied regardless of the topic du jour and with useful results.
Unfortunately, the thing with being relevant is chasing the schizophrenic antics of people like Kanye West or Miley Cyrus. For example, everyone in the conservative movement was super excited when Kanye West came out supporting Donald Trump and Candace Owens. But then he threatened to run on his own platform, and flip-flopped several other times on his value statements. Every time the question was - "what did Kanye mean??" I always said, who cares? He's not consistent, so he isn't relevant to me. The benefit of being "not relevant" in the general sense is that you get to set a few boundaries on which people and events impact you.
"This is why conservatives lose." That's what we say whenever we catch conservatives doing something particularly out-of-touch. So while I really don't subscribe to the world of the twitter-sphere, it's obvious that tapping into it and capitalizing on it is critical to the success of conservatism. We can't be a bunch of sticks in the mud with a holier-than-thou attitude about current events. If we think that current events are stupid, it's only because we've failed to engage them in the past and set a higher standard.
I think it's clear that the word "Relevant" has nothing to do with eternally relevant values or good insight anymore. Just knowing that and averting our gaze won't help. We've got to engage the issue and literally make relevancy relevant again.
Like I said, I don't want to write a worn out analysis of the Golden Globes. I just want you to think a bit more about who is leading the conversation in our public dialogue when we chase relevancy. Instead, we need to reframe and create the relevant events. Instead of only pointing out the hypocrisy of celebrities who go mask-free in their award ceremonies, we should take these opportunities to argue against the worship of public figures. In other words, we ought to anchor the "non-relevant" timeless values to the minute-by-minute "relevant" people and events.
