Fame, notoriety, reputation, honour, celebrity. Stardom.
“A celebrity,” said an American academic in the 1950s, “is someone who is famous for being well-known.” I have the sense that this particular ‘demon driver’ gets less basic respect than the others.
Perhaps because sex and power and money (or possessions) all have something to do with survival. Stardom is an extra.
At the same time, the seventeenth-century poet Lovelace could write,
“I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.”
Fame, he claims, matters more to him than love. And add yourself to the equation. If you do something better than other people, and nobody notices, it’s unlikely you will keep quiet about it for very long—unless you are an extreme introvert, and regularly bask in your own self-satisfaction.
What is more, our current fascination with celebrities and Nobel Prize winners (pictured: “Marie Curie”, in an AI image) and “influencers” (who combine fame with power) is only matched by the stories of people who, over the centuries, were prepared to part with their life in order to be famous. The truth is that, just as any of the drivers can trump both common sense and uncommon inventiveness, each of the drivers can trump the others. Everything depends on the situation and the person.