The Roman poet Juvenal (circa 100 A.D.) wrote regarding the way latter-day Roman emperors
retained power and control over the masses that were seemingly more than happy to obsess themselves with
trivialities and self-indulgences while their once-great-and-powerful empire collapsed before their very eyes. He
wrote: “Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the
People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions–everything, now restrains
itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”
- Aldous Huxley -
Man's Almost Infinite Appetite For
Distractions
Loving
Our Servitude
By Aldous Huxley
“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of
universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the
propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist
democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the
true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take
into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this
appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a
year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach
to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat
monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome,
where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from
poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to
military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now
provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema.
In "Brave New World" non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as
instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of
the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of
entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions
and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase "the opium of the people" and so a threat
to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently
on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures.
"A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and
now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera,
of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would
manipulate and control it.”
Giving out cheap food and entertainment, "bread and circuses", would be the most
effective way to rise to power.
Super Bowl XLIX The Fix Is In
Published on Jan 28, 2015
Infowars reporter Rob Dew uncovers the real scandal behind the upcoming Super Bowl. While
hundreds of millions of fans eagerly await the game ahead, the truth is that the game is fixed and the only thing
being played, are the fans.
Americans Are ANGRY!...About The Royal
Rumble
Published on Jan 26, 2015
It's finally happened! Americans nationwide are rising up in unison to boycott a giant
corporation as a backlash against what they see as a grave injustice!
Unfortunately, that corporation is the WWE and the grave injustice is the Royal Rumble
result.
In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this
appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a
year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach
to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat
monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome,
where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from
poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to
military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now
provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema.
