Amusing ourselves to death

Re:Amusing ourselves to death by onion2k on Wednesday January 08, 2014 @06:31AM (#7022885)

I think you're doing a disservice to the 'bottom 55%' of society. Ignoring perhaps the bottom and top 5% of the curve, the spectrum of intellectual difference isn't that big. Most people can read a book. Most people can visit a museum. Hell, most could write a book. Most people can understand and enjoy intellectual pursuits. The reason why the bottom 55%'s chief pleasures are "TV, alcohol, taking selfies, incorrect spelling in text messages, Facebook, Instagram, Candy Crush, etc" is because they believe society's lie that they can't enjoy anything else. The overwhelming majority of people are actually very capable of doing intelligent and creative things.

The problem is that intelligence and creativity are a threat to the 'elite' at the top of society in terms of power and wealth - society has been designed to subjugate as many people as possible with Huxley-esque triviality for fear that if people started using their brains that power and wealth would no longer be in the hands of a few. Everyone would be a bit more equal if instead of sitting down to watch the latest Hollywood movie or listen to whatever reality star's new album we sat down and painted a picture or talked about philosophy - there would be no money flowing towards the rich any more.

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Re:Amusing ourselves to death by clienthunter on Wednesday January 08, 2014 @06:52AM (#7022945)

I said their chief pleasures 'may' be those things - a list suffixed with 'etc'. My aim was to get the reader to have an idea of the kind of person I was talking about rather than construct an exhaustive but useless and pointless list of their activities.

Yes, those people could do the things you say. But they don't. The point I'm making is that coercing them into behaving differently is not practical nor moral.

I have an IQ in the top 0.001%, am relatively wealthy, relatively well educated, and have a bizarrely diverse skillset. I play Call of Duty and enjoy life's trivialities much more than I paint or talk philosophy.

I agree that society can be fearsome for some in the way you describe, but as I said its reflective of its components, and in order to change the scary bits you have to enforce change on those nearer the top of our curve - and I outright reject the notion that they are more deserving of the pains of coercion owing to their status. Everybody will always suffer in a plan to take one set of ideas and force them upon others. History teaches this lesson over and over again. Present government is teaching it now.

Capitalism - the best word to describe our current societal system - is the antithesis of this. It promotes freedom for everyone to do what the hell they want, not what they 'should' or are told to, and prescribes nothing but subscription to capitalism itself which incidentally is not a system imposed on the world by political leaders, but rather a descriptive term for something humans have been doing (or trying to do against a range of government constraints) for centuries: trading 'stuff' they have for stuff they don't freely and openly.

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Re:Amusing ourselves to death by onion2k on Wednesday January 08, 2014 @07:26AM (#7023051)

"The point I'm making is that coercing them into behaving differently is not practical nor moral."

I agree that it's not moral, but it is demonstrably practical - business changes the way people act all the time, coercing people into behaving in a way that, in my opinion, holds the majority back and turns them into mere passive consumers rather than the creative, intelligent people they could be. While you say in another comment that you want purer capitalism without government interference, I actually want to go further still - removing corporate interference in our lives as well. Although, admittedly, I have no idea at all how you'd do that.

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Re:Amusing ourselves to death by bananacurve on Wednesday January 08, 2014 @08:50AM (#7023406)

So there is a conspiracy by the "elites" to make the masses love the Kardashians? This level of absurdity is not apparent to you? Being intelligent is not a perfect defense to confusion.

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Re:Amusing ourselves to death by onion2k on Wednesday January 08, 2014 @09:30AM (#7023627)

I think the conspiracy* is modern anti-intellectualism, mocking creativity, and the promotion of the idea that respect, fame and wealth should be something that comes instantly when you're judged better than your peers rather than something that can be earned by hard work. The Kardashians are the result of that rather than the means.

* Conspiracy is the wrong word. I think it's quite transparent how society has be changed in to something that benefits the ultra-wealthy more than the rest.

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Re:Amusing ourselves to death by vidarh on Wednesday January 08, 2014 @11:01AM (#7024273)

There doesn't need to be a conspiracy to make the masses love the Kardashians. All that is necessary is for the elites to follow their own drives to meet the demands of their social class and accumulate wealth to retain their position (and there's nothing sinister with wanting this; we all have strong drives to keep or improve our relative positions). The rest follows pretty much by itself:

It is easier to create wealth by feeding the immediate drives of the consumers than by trying to make them genuinely happy and fulfilled in ways that require their potential customers to put in effort and make sacrifices in the short term.

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