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International Law

: Misleading Advertising Law

The Michael Jackson Tributes

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In Scream, Jackson and his sister Janet angril...

Image via Wikipedia

Stanton Peele has a good take on the Michael Jackson tributes:

"Some people, although revered in some respects, are more inconvenient alive. For example, when the mightily inconvenient Orson Welles returned to the U.S. to receive an honorary Academy Award in 1971, he hectored the audience for funding for his current work (Wells was persona non grata in Hollywood).
One member of the audience was heard to murmur, "We should have waited until he was dead to give him an award."
After Jackson's death, the tributes poured in from his legion of friends and fans - Liza Minnelli, Elizabeth Taylor (too choked up to comment), Quincy Jones ("I've lost my little brother"), Governor Schwarzenegger, President Obama - who even knew Jackson and Deepak Chopra were friends?
Released of their conflicted feelings over his corporeal presence, fans flocked into the streets, created shrines, and wrote love notes."

Even Tyler Cowen, an economist who I expect better analysis from, has jumped into the fray with his own Michael Jackson tribute.

Why are all of these people paying tribute, now and not then, to a man with clear mental health problems who hasn't performed in almost 20 years? What is social signal behind paying tribute to Michael Jackson? Most of individuals giving Michael Jackson tributes are simply forgetting or ignoring the broken human being Michael Jackson became.

However, the phenomena of a number of people testifying to "fact A" when there is ample evidence that contradicts fact A being true is the combination of social proof and cognitive dissonance, first made famous by Leon Festinger. In possibly Festinger's most telling observation, written up in "When Prophecy Fails", Festinger observed that it was hard to change a man with a conviction.

"What Festinger and his associates demonstrated in the end was that the failure of prophecy often has the opposite effect of what the average person might expect; the cult following often gets stronger and the members even more convinced of the truth of their actions and beliefs!"

When faced with the terrible fact that Mr. Jackson was no better than the average addict, addicted to pain killers, the cult of his "musical genius" had to grow to counteract the terrible truth. The Michael Jackson tributes are all the louder because in death he was shown to be a simple addict.