The results of the cultural indoctrination stakes are not yet in but there is a definite trend — triviality leads, followed closely by superficiality and mindless distraction. Vanity looks great while profundity is bringing up the rear. Pettiness is powering ahead, along with passivity and indifference. Curiosity lost interest, wisdom was scratched and critical thought had to be put down. Ego is running wild. Attention span continues to shorten and no one is betting on survival.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Half a century ago, humanistic thinkers were heralding a great awakening that would usher in a golden age of enlightened living. People such as Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May and Viktor Frankl were laying the groundwork for a new social order distinguished by raised consciousness, depth of purpose and ethical refinement. This tantalising vision was the antithesis of our society of blinkered narcissists and hypnogogic materialists. Dumbness was not our destiny. Planetary annihilation was not the plan. By the 21st century, we were supposed to be the rarefied "people of tomorrow", inhabiting a sagacious and wholesome world.
Erich Fromm's 1955 tome, The Sane Society, signalled the debut of the one-dimensional "marketing character" — a robotic, all-consuming creature, "well-fed, well-entertained … passive, unalive and lacking in feeling".
But Fromm was also confident that we would avoid further descent into the fatuous. He forecast a utopian society based on "humanistic communitarianism" that would nurture our higher "existential needs".
(from Triumph of the trivial life by John Schumaker in "The Age" 19/07/08)
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