SPENGLER: Dictatorship, The Duc de Saint-Simon, and Kim Kardashian. “In a celebrity culture, people are famous for being famous; in court culture (royal, authoritarian, or corporate), people are promoted for being promoted, or punished for being punished. It is a commonplace that Stalin’s terror succeeded because it destroyed people at random, but promotion at random is the flip side of the coin. Severing reward from accomplishment is just as important to autocrats as separating punishment from crime. To wield arbitrary power, the king/dictator/CEO must wield power arbitrarily. That is when gossip reigns. Every dictatorship lives off a rumor mill; no-one knows who will be rewarded or punished in the next round, so the principal occupation is speculating about it. Gossip also provides a store of weapons to be used against prospective rivals; since no-one knows who will be a friend and who will be a rival in the next round, everyone gathers dirt on everyone. The same principle applies to a fixed population of marriageable women competing for the same population of prospective husbands, for example. . . . Here, I think, is the secret of Ms. Kardashian’s celebrity: In today’s America, rewards and punishments seem almost as arbitrary as they did in the Bourbon court. Unlike the 1950s and 1960s, when millions of star-struck kids set off to study science — the world recaptured nostalgically in the 1999 film October Sky — the vast majority of Americans stare uncomprehending at the number nerds who build software companies or trade at hedge funds. Quantitative faculties at top universities would shut down if Chinese and Indian students stayed at home. Whether the success story involves a popular figure like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, or hated figures from Wall Street, most people simply cannot imagine themselves doing what they do, the way the coal miners’ kids of the 1950s could imagine themselves as rocket scientists.”