As before I think his reflections are worthy of posting - for comment!
Hi BruceI'm looking forward to Wed night on "decadence". But in the mean time, here's a couple of thoughts:1. We've swapped our human idols - probably until the beginning of the 20th Century the humans that were considered to be "idols" were philosophers, politicians, artists (writers, painters, ... broad definition here), scientists etc. Today - our idols are from holiday: the faces on the screen as opposed to those that had the brains (? may be an overstatement about some of the material that comes out of there) who wrote it etc. Scientists and philosophers, etc ... perhaps not an endangered species, but not welcome much. We also have sports people - I'll lump those in with the faces on the screen, because once these people didn't get paid as much and while today's sports people are undoubtedly talented, some lack the breadth of things that made the oldies good (let's put in their humility etc). So we have a group of entertainers. Now to be a successful entertainer we have decided to pay you too much - result all sorts of problems: drugs, multiple highly public failed relationsihps, etc etc ... gets me on the front cover. Also - being on the front cover makes my value go up. BTW - I want all the things in their life - cars, clothers, houses, etc. (I wonder if the non entertainment companies decided to manufacture "stars" or "entertainers" or whether the "star production outfits" realised there was money to be had (from advertising) and created them - probably the latter. Thus - huxley's 1984 has come true - whatever the substance was that kept the masses happy - we have it: entertainers and no brain required. The outcome is a perceived need for their life style (which is manufactured by ...) (sadly even the universities have succumbed to this ... honourary doctorates for people who declare they don't read or worse still have never read an entire book - give those people AOs for services to sport or entertainment, but not phds!).2. Another school of thought: Louis 14 - liberalist until married a certain person. Result - conversative behaviour. Development of fairy tales - warned about consequences of certain behaviour. Now - fairy tales are politically correct - no-one dies, and certainly the message has been watered down ... we revert to life b4 Loius 14 got conservative. Does the demise of the fairy tale content say something about our society?? (this was a summary of someone's thoughts - they want to do a phd on fairy tales and morals).bet you glad you get emails like this... :-)
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