Entertainments

People spend billions on advertisements in the belief that they change people's attitudes. They seem to work. The shows must have an impact too.

To film a TV show you need to have room for the cameras and the lights and for characters to come in and out dramatically. The room being filmed is therefore necessarily large. So when you watch, you see something larger than life--or at least your life. How come the people like me have bigger houses and more stuff? And they don't have much work to do, either income-generating or household maintenance.

A play now and again might give you a sense of things you could aspire to. A steady diet of amusements in which everyone has plenty of stuff without obvious effort has got to effect you too. I'd think it would redefine what "normal" is. Work 9to5 isn't normal on TV, and even on shows where a character's job is significant, the work doesn't usually seem to be the center. I can think of exceptions, and you can probably think of many more, but on the whole that seems to be the rule.

A fantasy now and then is harmless, and probably good. We want something different from everyday life, with a little drama and conflict, or silliness that we wouldn't care for in real life. I don't want to watch an assembly line, or a man writing code, or another planning meeting.

I don't see how a steady diet of entertainments can avoid shaping your attitudes about what "normal" life is like--and not in a good way. A steady diet of "entertainments" that were "realistic" sounds cruel and unusual. It seems as though many of us grew up with one foot in a land where problems are solved and there are no trade-offs and everyone seems wealthy without effort. One candy bar is good, but a box of them...

Since we are, by and large, rich enough that existential problems are rare, we don't have as many reminders that the magic land isn't real.

A lot of the action in society happens from the tails of the distributions in attitudes. It doesn't take a very large change in the average to make major changes in the proportions of the political players, or the cultural players. Can you imagine someone 50 years ago offering to "celebrate her abortion?" That fringe wasn't nearly big enough. They were there, but didn't seem to be applauded by very many.

It hasn't been hard to find people in every era who believed that the vague "rich" were responsible for our woes, and that if they were found and properly shaken down all would be well. We have a significant number of them today among the nominally educated.(*) Open a newspaper Click a news-site and find what used to be fringe personality problems staking out self-important claims to be society leaders. Most of us don't care, but the tails of the distributions have shifted a lot, and that's where the cultural action is. And the political action.

Don Quixote lost his mind from over-indulging in heroic romances. At least he got a sense of duty out of them. Us--not quite so noble.

(*) Perhaps I am unduly snarky here, but most of these people I've met seem not to have spent much study in "subjects where there is a right answer or the bridge falls down" or in "subjects where there is perennial debate and good arguments all around."