'One should respect public opinion," Bertrand Russell said, "insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison." He continued: "But anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny." Russell, the 20th-century British philosopher who shunned idealism for a more analytical path, would surely have some interesting things to say about the publicised stoning that western civilisations like to call reality television currently being doled out to Katie Price.

Price, aka the 'glamour' model Jordan, is on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, a reality TV show that takes place in a jungle setting, designed to be as uncomfortable as possible to encourage in-fighting, hunger and temporary mental breakdowns. It was in this setting that Price met her husband Peter André five years ago. They have since divorced, natch, and have spent 2009 bitching at each other with public sympathy leaning so far towards André that he nearly got a number one song out of it despite sounding like a camel being suffocated by a bag of feral cats.

Shorthand for all that is wrong with the oxymoron that is 'celebrity culture', Katie Price is impossible to escape. A ubiquitous British tabloid page-three stalwart for the past decade, she moved quickly into television (the number of programmes documenting her life currently stands at 10, not including reality TV or other series appearances).

She has published three autobiographies, four novels, one tome on fashion and 19 children's books (namely about ponies). She competed to represent England in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2005, wearing a skin-tight pink latex catsuit while heavily pregnant (she came second). She even ran as a candidate in the British general election in 2001.

All of this on top of endless endorsements, paid-for magazine exclusives and appearances and smart investments has earned her around €50m. And she has done it all while unashamedly wiggling her boobs in our faces, dating cage-fighting pornstars and giving good taste, decorum and subtlety a large, fake-tanned and French-manicured middle finger. Katie doesn't care. Katie is getting paid.

There was a hilarious, but thankfully brief, moment when the liberal arm of the British press decided Price was some kind of post-feminist, or even plain old feminist, icon for the 21st century, that her rampant individualism, self-interest and the fact that she was independently wealthy should have been some sort of inspiration to women.

On I'm a Celebrity... this time around, however, the public are getting their own back. Sick of Price, even though she exists in the symbiotic relationship of omnipresent celebrity and public consumption, viewers have decided: we made you, now we break you, and maybe if you cry and beg for forgiveness – forgiveness for what, we don't know, perhaps our own foolishness at endorsing you in the first place – we'll like you again.

Price has been subjected to legal televised torture. These are "bushtucker trials", hideous challenges that contestants, voted for by the public, must undertake to win food for the group. Generally, the public vote for the person they hate the most, or whom they would like to see squirm the most vigourously. Price has been voted to undertake an unprecedented four trials. These have involved her swimming with crocodiles – and she has a fear of water, never mind the crocs –crawling through tiny spaces peppered with bugs, and eating crushed beetles. The public keeps voting for her to endure more gruesome challenges, showing our propensity for encouraging torture as a mob.

As Price squirms on TV, there's a correlation with other forms of public torture and mob rule. On Tuesday, a 20-year-old woman was stoned to death in Somalia for "adultery" with the aid of hundreds of people. The divorcee admitted having sex with a 29-year-old unmarried man. All week,TV, radio and newspapers have been full of near-xenophobic rants about Thierry Henry and the French team.

Mobs have always existed but the democratisation of interaction with popular culture has accelerated their creation. There are so many tools at our disposal now to instantly rally thousands of troops. At the time of writing, just one of the Facebook groups that has sprung up out of the Thierry Henry handballgate "We Irish Hate Thierry Henry (the cheat)" is approaching nearly 100,000 members.

Joe Duffy's radio programme, the broadcast version of the town crier for waiting torch bearers, was full of it too. If an alien tuned into Liveline, it would imagine Ireland as a failed, racist state where public sector workers are whipped mercilessly by nine-armed robot monsters as they boarded mass (yet inefficient) cargo trains from the suburb slums into work, where our hospitals envy Taliban cave clinics in the Tora Bora, and where a strange creature called Jedward presides over the nation, rapping relentlessly.

In punishing celebrities we simultaneously endorse, such as Price, we ignore the responsibility of our own contribution to their rise. Much like many people who fail to see how their own lack of personal responsibility and planning led to their financial insecurity, we should look at our own actions before doling out retribution to others. Whose fault is it that Price exists in the first place?

umullally@tribune.ie