Great article. What you say is true to a certain extent and in my opinion it doesn't describe the whole world, but particularly modern western folks (starting at the age of enlightenment). In other parts, pretenders are easily spotted, and even laughed at and ridiculed.
This reminds me of an interview of Marlon Brando after shooting The Bounty in Tahiti, and how he described landing in Tahiti expecting everybody to treat him as a superstar, just to find out that no one cared. With the enlightenment, the human was put in the leading role, no one else to look up to.