01-13-2017, 11:04 AM
Quote:I hate to admit it--contrary to that last optimistic bone in my body--but you may be right that "the vast majority doesn't give a shit," that "they don't want to be informed, they want to be entertained." Neil Postman, in his prescient 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, predicted that American society was much closer to manifesting the dystopia of Huxley's Brave New World than that depicted in Orwell's 1984. (We may yet succumb to both nightmarish visions, in that order.) If citizens of this country can't pull their heads out their "technological escapism" long enough to see what's going on around them, then they--we-- may one day cede democracy in a time of existential crisis to some kind of totalitarianism.
I came across this televised interview of former Supreme Court Justice Souter, commenting in stark terms about the danger of America's 'pervasive civic ignorance.' About four minutes in, he issues an apocalyptic warning about where our civic ignorance--and lack of civic engagement--may take us as a country. Chilling...
I have Neil Postman's book on my list of books/authors to acquire, but in the meantime John J. Reilly predicted something similar in Spengler's Future. We may simply be passing out of the age of the Republic and into the era of bread and circuses for the masses.