Are you not entertained?

As we are being plied with 'bread and circuses', bread is becoming more scarce

“Are you not entertained?” words spoken by Russell Crowe in his role as Maximus in The Gladiator. The story of general reduced in stature to fighting in the gladiatorial arena. In that transformation from general to spectacle fighter, Maximus comes to learn how the games he is being forced to participate are being used. The same is true of almost everything in our society today.

In our most recent elections, we have not been voting for the best and brightest but rather the loudest and most entertaining, those that put on the greatest show. This has been aided and encouraged by our media for quite some time now. After all, the media lives on their viewers and advertising dollars so the more eyeballs on things, the more they like it. The old adage in media, ‘If it bleeds it leads’ has never been more true.

As we are distracted with the latest spectacle, horrific things are happening in our society. We are doing nothing about them or worse being coerced to participate in the horrific.

Life expectancy in the US is down in the last few years and continues to fall.

While at the same time, birthrates continue to fall:

US News and World Report: U.S. Birth Rates Continue to Fall

Falling birth rate not due to less desire to have children

The decrease in life expectancy coupled with a decline in birth rate is something that should be of great concern, instead many of our leaders tell us that abortion is good for the nation’s economic success. It seems as though our ‘leaders’ have lost the thread that for a society to survive it has to procreate and its citizens need to live long and productive lives.

The media floods us with distractions while at the same time, tamping down genuine discussion of issues. When then candidate Donald Trump was first running for president, the media could not take their cameras off him, continuing to wait for the next ‘controversial’ thing he might say. This is no different that when Howard Stern first came on the scene, people who listened to his show were polled and more than 80% said they listened to see what he would say and do next (whether they liked or hated what they were hearing). While this is not that different from years gone by, now our government has become increasingly involved in creating distractions from problems and crisis.

The Reagan administration was accused of this with the invasion of Grenada, the Clinton administration accused of it with the military action in Somalia. The normalization of this sort of thing was explored at great length in a film called Wag The Dog

All of this pales in comparison to where we are today. Today we not only ‘wag the dog’ but our media and government is pulling sleights on hand to distract from issues of crime, human suffering and other truly disturbing, yet preventable problems. Where our ‘journalists’ would document problems that were solvable such as reducing air or water pollution or improving availability of housing, today they create distracting problems that feed physical and mental deterioration leading us to be unable to answer questions in congress such as “What is a Woman?” (The subject of which has become a best selling documentary by Matt Walsh and the Daily Wire)

How we are entertained can take two forms, one directing us towards the end of western civilization and the other providing reinforcement for morals and ideals that will allow western civilization to flourish. This duality was summed up very well by something from producer/writer Aaron Sorkin a few years ago:

We are plied with more entitlements from the government, more free things every day. Covid relief funds, free government cell phones, never ending unemployment benefits. For those who do not take the handouts, the act of making ends meet becomes more difficult every day as the powers that be are encouraging more and more degradation of our working base and middle class, pushing people either up the ladder or down it.

There is a need for an awakening, both intellectual and spiritual, before we drive ourselves into a new dark age. A new enlightenment and revival in opposition to the spirit of the age is what is called for.

‘Are you not entertained?’

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