Collectors of People

One character that struck me hard in the J.K. Rowling's wonderful Harry Potter series was introduced in the sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  He is Professor Horace Slughorn of Slytherin House, brought out of retirement by Headmaster Dumbledore to shed light on archvillain Voldemort's early strategies when he was Slughorn's pupil at Hogwarts Academy many years before.  To this end Dumbledore asks Harry, a celebrity renowned throughout the magical world, to allow Slughorn to "collect" him...after explaining to him exactly what he means by "collect".  I'll try to do the same here, but maybe you already know what it means if you've read the book or saw the movie adaptation. This character made a big impression on me since he reminded me greatly of some of my old high school teachers.  First of all, you need to understand that where (and when) I went to high school they deliberately kept teachers more distant from the students, instead constructing the curricula around what they called Learning Activity Packages (or LAPs) which were pages stapled together and handed out to students.  The (erroneous) presumption here was that we students were all miniature, mature, and motivated adults who could be counted on to diligently and responsibly go through our LAPs on our own...and if we needed a "teacher" to help us on something they would theoretically be around to assist us.  Although not all of the courses were conducted this way, it did relieve the faculty of the burden of preparing individual lessons for each day in front of the class...and therefore made it more likely that many students who weren't doing too well would slip through the cracks.  I see all these pro-teacher union ads on TV and the teachers are always so personally engaged with each of their students...I wonder how many teachers I had over the course of my elementary and high school years who even were aware of me as one of their students, much less interested in my progress (or lack thereof).  But if one of us were to excel and become lauded for some accomplishment, such as acting, singing, playing a musical instrument, sports, or in a more academic area like debate or mathematics, then all of a sudden you'd see certain teachers rushing to the forefront to be identified with them.  Never mind that in some of these cases the students' accomplishments and skills were directly attributable to private classes away from the classroom or because of their own parents' occupations and tutelage.  And yes, a lot of the students' achievements were from their own hard efforts...but not necessarily that of their teachers...

In adulthood there are a couple more manifestations of this "collectors of people" phenomenon I'd like to discuss.  There are those who are seriously into name-dropping, apparently because they either think they need to insert their encounters with famous people into their conversations in order to be interesting or because they're of the false notion that they're important enough to be famous themselves.  Along with this are those compelled to stop celebrities on the street or in restaurants for selfies or autographs...I remember that one of the things John and Yoko Lennon liked about living in New York was that the locals respected their privacy in spite of their celebrityhood: it took a scumbag from Hawaii one Monday evening in December, 1980 to ruin all that, though.  Another "adult" element of people collection is the notion of networking, implicit in which is the belief that if one develops a tangle of connections around them then some bigshot corporate, academic or government leader will one day be more disposed to hiring them for a big bonanza job...the site LinkedIn is for those "collectors". And of course people collection figures heavily into social media like Facebook and Twitter and the number of friends, followers and likes and viewings...

I know we're all in community with one another and that's a good thing...even though my tendency is to shed people, not collect them.  But the idea that one is so insecure that they need to buttress their own lives with human trophies repels me, and I've seen it firsthand without the need to observe it in a make-believe Harry Potter character...