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Entertainment is the new God
Thursday, 2 November 2006
Spend a moment thinking about the illegal drugs industry and all the areas its tentacles reach into.
Think about the civil wars in Central America, the powerful cartels in Mexico, and the money laundering operations in the Caribbean. Picture all the gang related violence on the streets of Western cities, the drug mules on flights from Jamaica with twenty packages in their stomachs, and the high proportion of young people wasting their lives in maximum security prisons or on death row in Asia.
Reflect on all the junkies sleeping out in the street, the prostitutes selling their bodies for the next hit, and the muggers attacking innocent passers by to support their habit. Ponder the billions of dollars of taxpayers' money spent on preventing this trade, the tens of thousands of police officers who dedicate their lives to it, and all the diplomatic problems caused between supplier countries and consumer ones.
What an enormous and deadly serious industry illegal narcotics is. Destroying lives, sucking in huge amounts of money, and causing problems for even those who want nothing to do with it.
Why? What's the point of all this sacrifice and suffering?
It all comes down to one simple thing - entertainment.
At the end of the line of all this death, expense, danger, sacrifice and destruction lies some person looking for a few quick thrills. It's all in the service of boredom relief - a bit of illicit excitement injected into somebody's sad little life.
And that's it. Remove that component from the equation, and the whole thing becomes completely pointless.
But illegal drugs is just one of the more dramatic fixtures of the new world we live in. Hippies in the 1960s came up with all sorts of conspiracy theories about the military-industrial complex and how it ran society. But there's no conspiracy when it comes to entertainment and the way it has a grip on us all.
Human beings will always struggle to find some kind of meaning and use it to fill the void at the center of our lives. We've found various ways of doing just that over the millennia.
We originally found significance in mere survival. For most of our history, just finding enough food, shelter and safety was a full-time existence, leaving little time to search for anything else. Then, as we lifted ourselves above mere subsistence and formed the first civilizations, religion and social class moved in to provide us with structure and meaning.
Today, religion is a side issue for many people in Western societies, if it exists for them at all. Those who claim religious beliefs generally have lifestyles which barely differ from those of their more secular neighbors. They certainly don't follow their faith in any way that would be familiar to a medieval monk.
Now that religion, class and survival have been largely removed from our lives as a source of all-consuming meaning, we have to fill the void within using something else. And it's pretty clear that at the start of the 21st century what that something else has become - entertainment.
Look at all the activity around you - the work people are putting into producing things, the plans they're making, the things they're obsessing over. What's the root purpose of most of it? Why do most people get up and go out to face the world every day?
In most cases, it's to buy that plasma TV, the house near the beach, the luxury car or the tropical holiday - entertainment, entertainment, and yet more entertainment. Built up around these "needs" are huge industries to finance, produce, distribute and promote the products that promise to amuse us. Sports and movie stars are paid millions, the designers of the latest hot gadget clean up, and the media hunts desperately for the new, new thing.
It's those who are most effective at producing, financing consumption of, promoting or distributing entertainment who are today's heroes.
People the world over spend sixty hours a week at work - stuck in meetings, starting at screens, stressing out, and pressuring each other - just so they can afford the latest must-have pleasure stimulator. They'll lie, cheat and steal in exchange for access to as many things as possible designed to give them a quick buzz or a warm glow.
Relationships also often become reduced to mere tools of entertainment. Friends are actors in a great soap opera with you as the central character - and the more drama that can be injected the better. Love and commitment become replaced with "how to drive your partner wild in bed".
Even war becomes fodder for amusement. For all the intense debate over America's decision to invade Iraq in 2003, much of what went on in the West had all the hallmarks of a huge entertainment extravaganza.
Whether you were in support of or opposed to the war, there was endless amusement to be had consuming editorials, arguing on blogs, and engaging in debates over a few cold beers.
And of course there were all those exciting pictures on TV. The buzz in the air at the time was electric.
Now that survival, aristocracy and religion have been sidelined, entertainment is the new God in most people's lives. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and it certainly makes a more pleasant world than struggling for food and shelter or engaging in religious wars.
Really, it's something I believe everyone should become aware of. Once you understand the driving force behind much of what's going on in the free world today, everything starts to make much more sense.
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