I’m flabbergasted on a daily basis by the idiocy that goes on in this country. We have the lowest percentage of people working since 1978. We have 47 million people, or 20% of all households, on food stamps. The real median household income is lower than it was in 1998. Gas prices are near all-time highs. The average family has virtually no retirement or current savings. Despite these facts, millions of broke Americans lined up to buy a freaking video game to the tune of $800 million in the first 24 hours on the market. They just whipped out the credit card and went $60 further into debt. I’m sure some people enjoy video games. Personally, I have never played a video game in my entire life. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on games for my kids, but never played one of them. Of course, I’ve never sent a text message in my life either, so I may not be the ideal judge of technology.
I see this phenomenon as part of the bigger picture of a world ruled by propaganda, distraction, chosen servitude and willful ignorance. The corporate fascist ruling class know they must keep the masses distracted from the true reality of their situation. Video games, sporting events, 24 hour faux news entertainment, reality TV, porn, the stock market, religion, evil dictators, iGadgets, fashion magazines, and most of the internet are just opium for the masses.
Our Controllers have succeeded in implementing every dystopian idea dreamed up by Aldous Huxley and detailed in his classic 1932 novel – Brave New World. Huxley’s fears have been realized to a greater extent than he could have imagined:
“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies – the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.
In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were “solemn and rare,” there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment – from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema.
In “Brave New World” non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly “not of this world.” Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx’s phrase “the opium of the people” and so a threat to freedom.
Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
The ignorant masses that make up the majority in this country have learned to love their servitude. We threw in the towel on vigilance and love of liberty decades ago. While millions sit in front of their boob tubes killing whores and stealing cars with their joy stick in their fantasy worlds, our Controllers are smiling as they manipulate, obfuscate, and increase their wealth, power and control. Welcome to Brave New World USA.
‘Grand Theft Auto’ Sets $800 Million, One-Day Record
Surpassed Record Set by ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops II’ Last November
Image: Wikimedia Commons
