Plays Scotty. He was the blond part of the duo in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets.

Her thesis is that what people relied on in culture -- a sense of the spiritual, ineffable -- was displaced once the Enlightenment happened and churches took a less-central place in Western culture. That hunger for spiritual questions moved into genre fiction -- gothic, romantic, fantasy, horror, science fiction.

From a solid review of the book:

Rather than wring her hands at this creeping "techgnosis", as the dark clouds of occultism and the New Age mystify the operations of technology, Nelson makes some uncommonly intelligent points about the limits of scientism. "We should never forget how utterly unsophisticated the tenets of 18th-century rationalism have left us, believers and unbelievers alike, in that complex arena we blithely dub 'spiritual'," she writes.

"We forget that Western culture is equally about Platonism and Aristotelianism, idealism and empiricism, gnosis and episteme, and that for most of this culture's history one or the other has been conspicuously dominant – and dedicated to stamping the other out."

In the middle of this ongoing cultural war, we still want to believe. So, then, fandom, with the aspects of darsan (worship through gazing upon a god's image) translated into fan clubs, autographs, red carpets, passionate arguments, deep mourning for Valentino, Dean, Ledger, as well into the opposing griefers who shout, "losers!", because they know what they worship -- cynicism, opportunism, power -- supports them much more tangibly and handsomely than what fans get, through their love.

The apotheosis of this cynicism is PNAC, Strauss' and Rand's followers, people who market to the proles yet proclaim their immunity to the hard sell. And yet they've been sold the hardest bill of goods of all, that people are no damn good, that they have to be lied to and tortured to get them where you want them to be, and only violence makes any sense. To go all Kavalier on you, these are the Men of the Iron Chain, and they hate superheroes and the people who dream of them as avatara of human potential. The epithet such Men use -- fanboy -- tells you all you need to know about how grown-up they think they are. But they're just boys afraid of the dark, afraid of the Big Brother or father whose belt they expect to feel, if they move one step out of their comfortable pessimism.

Hope is dangerous.

That's why they've been associating it with products for so many decades, in order to defuse it. And the link to Arthur's work would be through Alice Miller's work concerning the political consequences of child abuse, on which he's written extensively.

First, you misquoted:

Not:

And then there are those of us not looking to have someone save us, not looking to worship a superhero, and who don't see the worshippers as 'avatara of human potential' but as--children.

But:

To go all Kavalier on you, these are the Men of the Iron Chain, and they hate superheroes and the people who dream of them as avatara of human potential.

The superheroes are avatars of human potential, not fans. (Perhaps I should have diagrammed that for you.) And you came to the wrong post to use the same comments that griefers do, albeit the Liberal Version -- "All the time spent worshipping could instead be used in actually making changes, rather than luxuriating in the foolish idea that simply by believing we are doing something."

I'm not talking about the importance of worshiping fictional characters, or even worshiping gods. I'm discussing how some of the energy people used to spend through religion can be diverted to fandoms and enthusiasms of all types, and how both religious authorities and secular proponents of scientism are deeply uncomfortable with that. That's energy they'd rather harness, to use for their ends. Thanks for proving that point for me, by example.

Second, you stated that you spent time on Fringe fan sites. Were you observing fans as a scientist does fruit flies, or did you actually have an interest in the show? I hope you measured the time you spent being a fan, if you are, so you could plan suitable activism offsets, to keep your mental ecology balanced.

Next, just because this one post clearly stated it had a tangential relationship to politics, did you mistake this post as representative of this site's lack of seriousness of purpose concerning social issues? If you did, you sure haven't spent much time on here. You can damn me all you like (which you seem intent on doing, which means I can't even catch a break here, either) but don't lump in the rest of Corrente with me. Everyone else who's commented here (with the exception of you, since I've never read you here before or know what you do politically, unless you're Celinda's husband) is active in advocating for several issues, online and in meatspace.

If you stuck to this idea --

"rather than luxuriating in the foolish idea that simply by believing we are doing something."

-- instead of opening with an insult and blaming fans/worshipers for their lack of social action, we could have begun a fruitful conversation about how the sales pitch for Obama and Blue Dog Dems was nothing more than unsupported belief -- hope, with nothing else -- and how real progress demands both the critical faculties to determine whether positive change is happening, and individual effort, massed together, to support such change. Being critical of mass media, political figures and religion go hand in hand in a tangible and solid approach to keeping one's head clear. Too bad you mistook a opening weekend's enthusiasm for deep mental congestion.

And if you just wanted to get on your atheistic or agnostic high horse about the oblique discussion of faith in this post, well, no one can stop you, can they?