3 Reasons Why I’m Glad to Find Out My Favourite Celebrities Have Terrible Ethical Views

I’ve decided that finding out my idols have feet of clay is a good thing.

In part, I’m deciding this out of necessity. With the direct contact between celebrities and fans facilitated by the Internet and 24-hour entertainment news, it’s easy to learn that J. K. Rowling is transphobic, that Bobby Orr would be proud to be teammates with someone who refuses to denounce white supremacist groups, that favourite artists or politicians or athletes hold despicable views and use their power to support the influence of hate. If I didn’t embrace the discoveries, I’d have a tough time keeping myself on an emotionally even keel.

So now that we’re clear that I’m doing my best to put a positive spin on dismaying experiences, why is it a good thing to find out someone you admired has done or promoted things you can’t accept?

Here are three reasons I’ve come up with:

1. Better to know than to unwittingly support someone or something you object to.

Would the lives of those of us who enjoyed Ender’s Game be happier if we didn’t know that Orson Scott Card is homophobic? Would it be more pleasant to laugh at old Dilbert strips, joyfully ignorant of Scott Adams’s misogynist rants?

Probably — they say ignorance is bliss for a reason. But if we who disagree were so blissfully ignorant, our money and monetized attention (thanks, online advertisers!) would still be supporting hateful views. They’d be causing real-life pain to real people: the LGBTQ fans who can’t take refuge in ignorance because homophobia comes for them whether they want it to or not. The women who get treated as win-at-life trophies instead of human beings by men who found their impetus to act in a respected figure’s verbal support.

Most of us (I hope) don’t like to contribute to hurting others. So we should be glad that we have the information that lets us do the right thing. I know, I know, it doesn’t feel great. In fact, it feels pretty awful to learn that up until this point, you have been supporting a stance that hurts other people (and maybe yourself too) just for being.

But because we’re talking about celebrities and art and stories, that’s great news! Because haven’t we all daydreamed about being the hero, taking a stand for what we believe in?

In our fantasies, we might have to heroically sacrifice our good names, our relationships, or even our lives. So aren’t we lucky that in real life, all we have to do is change our attitude toward a person we’ll never meet?

And aren’t we lucky that can mean a lot of different things? It can mean mindful media consumption, where we ask ourselves who created this art and why and what they’re saying with it and how we feel about it. It can mean mindful media purchase, where we ask ourselves if we’re OK with who gets our money and attention. And/or it can mean purposefully setting ourselves in opposition–raising our voices to disagree, focussing ourselves on helping the people our former idols hurt, or more.

2. The author is dead.

And this time we really mean it.

I have to go back to J. K. Rowling on this one, because every “author is dead” thinkpiece of the last twenty years has been about her habit of adding new, outside-the-text canon to her stories. Such-and-such a character’s real middle name is this. So-and-so’s backstory is actually that. This opinion about the story is right, and this one is wrong. (Yes, yes, and wizards pooped their pants, we know. But stay with me here.)

By and large, fandom media set up Rowling’s pronouncements as The Truth and scoffed at fans who disagreed. The author can’t be wrong about the characters and world she made up.

I don’t remember this happening before the Harry Potter fandom took off, but of course there are other fandoms and art circles where this is a Thing. The artist knows best, and the work belongs to them. When you love it and give it space in your mind, you’re actually only leasing it, the same way you pay corporations full price for music and movies and e-books but actually they reserve the ownership rights just in case they decide that they don’t like what you’re doing with the file (aka not paying them more money to transfer it to a different device or account).

This view also tends to equate making a work your own — deciding your judgment matters more than that of the original artist — with literally taking ownership of it, as though slapping your name on someone else’s work and pretending you created it is an act different in degree, not in kind, from disagreeing with the work’s creator about what it means .

But when you can’t trust the author about things as basic as your and other human beings’ fundamental personhood and identity — when the author is wrong about that in real life, why not embrace the idea of them being wrong about the worlds they’ve created, because, let’s face it, even the most creative artist isn’t making something out of nothing.

To go back to the example of Harry Potter, Rowling didn’t sit down and re-invent human beings and biology and logic. She remixed concepts and entities that already exist to make something new — and, to be clear, that isn’t a diss. Even the most abstract and out-there art is based on real things that exist in real life.

Think of when an artist is wrong about something less fraught with ethical meaning, like how to make pigment, or complex math concepts, or exactly how a particular location looks in real life. We don’t say, “Because the creators of Elementary don’t understand the p = np problem, we must assume that they are right and we are wrong about the security of computer encryption for Sherlock Holmes.” We’re just like, “Hmmm, that’s a silly mistake the creators made. That’s not how computers work. Maybe I’ll decide to go with it and imagine what this whole universe is like if p = np does work that way. Maybe I’ll find myself an elaborate Watsonian explanation of why whoever’s telling this story in-universe is getting the details wrong. Maybe I’ll shrug and ignore it to focus on the parts of this story I actually like. Maybe I’ll take the parts of the story I like and focus on how they’d work in a story where the math is correct.”

Seeing an artist disagree with your fundamental ethical worldview can give you permission to engage with their work however you want. Because now that you know that you can’t trust them on the big issues, why continue to give them authority on how you feel about the small ones? If you’re going to diverge from their extra-text canon by that much, why not give yourself permission to go the whole hog? For you, Harry Potter learning he was a wizard was always a metaphor for coming out as non-binary? Great! If that’s still how you want to engage with it, it still can be, and as long as you’ve decided to ignore how Rowling tells you to attribute meaning to her work, you might as well fly those Harry/Draco-unrequited-secret-crush, Dumbledore-is-Ron-from-the-future flags high without losing enjoyment over your interpretation being “wrong.”

3. Now you can outdo them

Although our heroes can be inspiring, seeing everything they’ve achieved can also be discouraging. Why should you practice your skating and stickhandling day after day when you’ll never be as good as Bobby? Why continue writing when you’ll never hit the bestseller list like Rowling or Card?

When we compare ourselves to our favourite celebrities and find ourselves wanting, it’s easy to want to give up. The distance between their accomplishments and ours stretches so far.

So perhaps when we discover that one of them has failed at something as basic as not using their platform to promote mistreating other groups of human beings, we can see it as a way our success has finally outstripped theirs.

It’s easy to beat ourselves up for not being able to write the next Harry Potter, but now maybe we can realize what was true all along: we shouldn’t write the next Harry Potter. We shouldn’t try to be the next J. K. Rowling, we should try to be the first us. There was never a good reason to hold someone else, no matter how much we or others love their work and admire their talent, as the metrestick by which to measure ourselves. And now that the differences are crystal-clear between who we want to become and who they’ve shown themselves to be right now, we can free ourselves from moulding our ambitions in constant comparison with their rigid paths.

We can still learn from what they’ve done, but we don’t have to learn to be like them. We can abandon the old idea of a hierarchy of talent — our heroes at the top, us at the bottom — and instead elevate what’s supposed to be at the top: our goals, not people who’ve already achieved something similar.

Will you ever have as good hockey sense and be as strong and as fast as Bobby Orr? Probably not. But can you be a better teammate to racialized players (including, if applicable, yourself) than he ever could? Definitely. And now you know which is worth more to you and the people you love.

After all, when it’s not what makes up the feet of our idols, clay is great. That’s what we use to make new stuff.