Vicente Blasco Ibáñez - The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916)
The media love people who are articulate but somewhat absurd, particularly celebrities and leaders of various campaign groups. The media are also happy to cast this particular net very widely indeed. Anyone can star in yet another story if they are articulate with an absurd complaint to relate. Preferably with a dash of anger and arm-waving too.
The developed world has created a very large class of well educated, comfortable and articulate people who are absurd enough to cast themselves adrift from certain important aspects of reality. The scientific method for example. Economic realities for another. There are many more.
The absurdities of this class have provided an endless fund of stories for traditional media fighting to survive the digital age. As if a culture of the absurd has taken root in traditional media as a means to attract a large audience by ruthlessly exploiting a widespread willingness to be fashionably absurd. Articulate but absurd outrage, drama and conflict have been dispensed to a large audience already attuned to it as the only fashionable standpoint.
The absurd has always been with us of course, but over recent decades the developed world has received a hefty tilt towards absurdity as a political and social culture. We appear to have no remedy apart from absolutely unmistakable failure such as...
The developed world has created a very large class of well educated, comfortable and articulate people who are absurd enough to cast themselves adrift from certain important aspects of reality. The scientific method for example. Economic realities for another. There are many more.
The absurdities of this class have provided an endless fund of stories for traditional media fighting to survive the digital age. As if a culture of the absurd has taken root in traditional media as a means to attract a large audience by ruthlessly exploiting a widespread willingness to be fashionably absurd. Articulate but absurd outrage, drama and conflict have been dispensed to a large audience already attuned to it as the only fashionable standpoint.
The absurd has always been with us of course, but over recent decades the developed world has received a hefty tilt towards absurdity as a political and social culture. We appear to have no remedy apart from absolutely unmistakable failure such as...
There are quite a few possibilities already.
4 comments:
Hienz Wolff, Patrick Moore are good examples. As was David Bellamy. But he strayed from the True Path and was disappeared for Global Warming heresy.
Well put, AKH. That poem by Kipling comes to mind:
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm
It's a well known truism in the newspaper world that “If it bleeds, it leads”. It's also true that the bizarre and absurd will also find column inches (or pixels).
At one time the bizarre was limited to the size of pumpkins in the county show, or cats with 6 toes. But the bizzare has been co-opted by people searching for celebrity (or pursuing their activism).
The down side (or benefit?) is that Climate Change activists (or COVID lockdown supporters, or sugar deniers, or anti-smoking campaigners) come across as authoritive as cats with 6 toes.
What a world we live in.
Doonhamer - I sometimes wonder why such people disappeared from the public arena. Now we seem to have nobody but politically correct stooges.
Sam - thanks, I had a thought the other day that it would be easy enough to take a few wise old maxims and make sure every child read and understood them. Yet in spite of having a national curriculum we don't even do that.
DJ - I often find myself going back to B.F. Skinner. We are conditioned quite easily but dare not admit it. Condition people to accept the absurd and rise above them politically.
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