A thought has been gnawing at me for quite some time, and it is this: We spend an overabundance of our money on those who entertain us–movie and tv stars, athletes, singers and the like. In America, we spend around $490 billion dollars a year on entertainment. Take the following numbers into consideration:
Internet access: $81.5 billion Music (concerts, cds, mp3): $19.8 billion Movies (theater, dvd, downloads): $30.9 billion Sports: $25.4 billion Television (subscriptions): $92.9 billion We pay our A-list celebraties $20+ million per movie Last year, Taylor Swift made $57 million and Rihanna made $53 million The top T.V. actors make $700,000 to $1.2 million dollars per episode Kevin Durant earns $86 million over five years for playing basketball while Tom Brady earns $18 million a year for throwing a football
While these people certainly are talented, hard working, creative, unique individuals, does their particular work warrant the outrageous amounts of money we lavish upon them? More importantly, why do we spend so much money on those who entertain us? What does this say about us that we want to be entertained at any and all costs? Again, I certainly am not making a value judgement on the arts or any of the people who make their living this way. What concerns me is that, as a culture, we seek escape from reality at any price.
This reminds me of the Romans panem et circenses (bread-and-circus) efforts, whereby the Roman officials would pass out free wheat at gladiatorial games to the peasants in order to keep the public distracted from the lack of civic virtue and total disregard for the common good present in the vicious imperial ideology of Pax Romana. Unlike Athens (where entertainment served a specific educational purpose in the form of cathartic tragedies), the entertainment of Rome was designed to keep the masses silent, numbed and indifferent to the vices, oppression, and injustice inherent in Roman culture.
Walter Brueggemann, in his book The Prophetic Imagination, writing about the imperial need for numbed distraction, says that, “the cultural situation in the United States, satiated by consumer goods and propelled by electronic technology, is one of narcoticized insensibility to human reality. It is easy to see ourselves in an economics of affluence in which we are so well of that pain is not noticed and we can eat our way around it.”
This, then, is why I believe we spend so much on those who entertain us: we don’t want to face the reality of our existence.
In Jean-Paul Sarte’s book Nausea, the main character becomes so tangibly aware of his own existence that it makes him physically nauseous. My hunch is that we too would become ill (and perhaps rightly so) if we were really forced to see the suffering, oppression and barrenness in our own backyard. Like Jesus, I think we would weep for our city if we saw the hurting, grief and overwhelming sense of despair seeping out of every corner of our society. Instead, we pay good money to sit in a darkened theater or flip on another senseless tv show or lose ourselves in alternative realities in video games or surround ourselves with hundreds of cyber “friends” who fill our need to be loved with superficial associations that offer shallow, trite consolation…anything but open our eyes to see what reality truly looks like.
The weight of the human condition is a tremendous burden. As Sartre says, “We are condemned to be free”; that is, we are given this great gift of free will and moral agency in order to bring light to dark places, yet we flee from this at every turn by throwing money at anyone capable of making us forget, just for a little while, the deep responsibility we bear to ourselves and our fellow man. What, I wonder, would our society look like if we stepped out of the darkness and faced reality? What would our response be if we stepped behind the veil, turned off the noise, and listened to the cries of our heart and the humanity of our neighbors? What if, rather than seeking so hard to escape from reality, we turned to face it, in all its sound and fury, in order to engage it to make all things new?
What we long for (intimacy, connection, value, dignity, trust, healing, reconciliation) gets lost in another thirty minute tv episode so banal it must include its own laughtrack. In a healthy world, our entertainers would still be a vital part of a vibrant, creative, flourishing culture, but we would not need them to keep us from engaging in shaping a more meaningful story with our lives or from being architects of repair in the world.
All true. Many people lack the will, interest or means to make those changes. I think we lack leadership, and distraction becomes an easy out.
To deny suffering and death is to deny our very existence. This is why we spend billions on distracting ourselves from reality. We have lost our sense of being human. We dwell on death when we should be celebrating life. All the great art, literature, architecture, music, etc. through history is a celebration of life as well as a recognition that our time here is but brief. Today our culture celebrates nothing and serves merely as an opiate.
It is true the state of human affairs today may be some of the most depressing in hisotry because we have completely lost our sense of humanity through distraction and technology instead of using our knowledge to advance the human experience. Finding our way back to being decent human beings will be hard and very painful for many.
You are so right: we have forgotten what it means to be human. Or perhaps we have yet to fully realize it. I tackle some of this in a previous post, “Redefining Wealth” that you might like. Thanks for adding to the conversation!
amazing! Keep the good work:)
Thanks!
Very thoughtful and clear writing. Good work.
Thank you! Welcome to the conversation!
I agree, and I have recently quit facebook, partly in the hope that it would force me back into the ‘real world’. However, so far I have filled my time instead with blogging and playing Sudoku and Mah Jong…
What does it take to re-engage? or does that desire for re-engagement become one of those impossible desires you mention in your post ‘the Cult of Desire’? Is caring for our family, talking to and praying for the lonely people who cross our paths, and donating regularly to charities we believe in enough?
What would a fully engaged life look like? For the normal person, that is, not the priest or nun or social worker who cares for the needy as a full-time job. Should I give up choir and volunteer in a rest home instead?
I am not asking these questions because I want an answer from you! I am sharing them because I have asked myself them many times and still not come up with a totally satisfactory answer. Is it then the nature of life in this world that we will never quite be satisfied, because we are created for a better reality?
Jesus never talked about work-life balance.
For me, re-engagement comes in the form of putting first things first and pursuing wisdom, virtue and the simple life. If you are interested in what this looks like for me, I tried to unpack this in a previous post titled, “Redefining Wealth” that you might find interesting. Thanks for the questions! Keep them coming!
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Thank you! It’s good to have you on board!
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