By Joshua Tyler
| Updated 28 seconds ago
In the glittering cosmos of pop culture, few stars shine as consistently bright as Taylor Swift. And something is very strange about it.
Being a fan of someone or something means you’re passionate about it. Passion comes in waves, peaks, and valleys. Stars rise on passionate fans, and then that passion eventually dims, and stars fade. Franchises rise to popularity and then fall away, sometimes to rise again another day.
Except sometimes they don’t. An organic fandom should mean a rise and fall over time. When it doesn’t, that means something’s wrong.
Thanks to Google Trends, we can now track those peaks and valleys of passion. Below is a chart showing the rise and fall of passionate fan interest in Beyoncé over her career.
Beyoncé’s chart is typical of nearly every celebrity. Here’s Kim Kardashian’s…
They rise, peak, and then decline. For the biggest and most successful, the luckiest and most talented, like Beyoncé, it happens over the course of 10 years and never fully dies out, just dies down.
Then there’s Taylor Swift. She rose to fame nearly twenty years ago and never faded. Here’s her chart…
It contains none of the declines you expect from the ebb and flow of legitimate, organic fan passion. Her fame is steady, and it only peaks; it never significantly falls. Taylor Swift is not the only example, just the clearest.
Who are these people whose passion acts more like an algorithm than an emotion? Who are the fans who seem to love everything Star Wars does, no matter how bad it is? Or the guy who hops on every latest trend for no reason and then sticks with it?
Some of these are standard Slop Eaters or insecure airport book readers. But some of them aren’t. Some may be sociopaths.
What Is A Sociopath?
A sociopath is a person with a personality disorder characterized by a lack of empathy, conscience, and remorse. They manipulate, deceive, and exploit others for personal gain without guilt, often hiding behind a charming, calculated facade to blend into society and avoid detection.
4% of the world’s population is what would clinically be defined as sociopathic. That means out of the 8 billion people on Earth, 350 million of them are sociopaths. That’s the equivalent of the entire population of the United States. And of those 350 million sociopaths, it’s safe to assume that a lot are Taylor Swift fans.
Sociopaths In Taylor Swift’s Fandom
I’m not saying all Taylor Swift fans are sociopaths, far from it. Most of them seem to be well-meaning, generally friendly, middle-aged women. I’m also not saying there’s anything wrong with Taylor Swift. Her music is good enough, she’s pretty, talented, and thoughtful about business. But there is something unusual about the consistency of her fame, and sociopaths are probably the answer.
In her seminal book on dealing with sociopaths, The Sociopath Next Door, Dr. Martha Stout examines the way sociopaths hide themselves among normal people. She explains that one of their key techniques is a tendency to join non-controversial groups and pretend to be a part of them, as a way to make people think they’re just like them.
Here’s an example. Former FBI director James Comey recently posted this video, declaring his own Taylor Swift fandom. If someone were a sociopath pretending to be a Swifty, this is what it might look like…
Taylor Swift’s appeal as a safe, neutral, mainstream pop star is marketable, accessible, and relatable without edginess. That makes her the most ideal person on the planet for Sociopaths to hide behind. Being a Swifty is so safe and aggressively normal that it’s become almost boring.
What A Fandom Infested With Sociopaths Looks Like
Sociopaths don’t experience emotion. They don’t have passion. They don’t feel anything, but fake it and are really good at it. Sociopaths are often the most charming and seemingly passionate people in our society. They’re lying about everything, always.
A fandom infested with sociopaths would be immune to the normal ebbs and flows of passionate, emotional fan behavior. A sociopath who decides on something as their way to camouflage their lack of feeling and empathy has no reason to change what they’re doing, and so they won’t. And if you mapped that kind of fandom out on a chart, it might look exactly like this…
Swift’s popularity peaks, like the 2023 Eras Tour explosion, align perfectly with her sales surges and Trend spikes, but the baseline consistency? That doesn’t look organic; it’s bolstered by a core of unwavering supporters who don’t burn out like typical fans.
People Without Emotions Create Robotic Trends
Sociopaths, with their lack of emotional fatigue, could provide that steady engine. They buy albums en masse, stream relentlessly, and promote things others would abandon without the ups and downs of genuine passion, all to project normalcy. Unlike edgier artists who can’t help but occasionally alienate with controversy, Swift’s wholesome vibe lets them avoid red flags, sustaining her empire through sheer, unyielding calculation.
Swiftys aren’t the only group that may be infested, just the biggest. The next time you see unusually supportive reactions online, take a step back and ask yourself if you’re witnessing organic passion, or the collective work of sociopaths hiding in plain sight.
