Super Bowl Sunday: Scientifically Crafted Mass Mental Illness
As the Roman Empire drew to a close, the poet and satirist Juvenal wrote about an infantilized populace that had surrendered its birthright of political involvement.
“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties,” he wrote, “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.” The Latin phrase panem et circenses is often translated as “bread and games.”
In America, circa 2010, the phrase bread and circuses, or bread and games, has become what passes for our national anthem. The masses long ago abdicated their civic duties and have since forsaken the Constitution — and are in fact almost completely ignorant of it — and have abandoned their birthright of liberty in favor of mindless and indeed infantilized entertainment.
It is not merely the gladiatorial Super Bowl. It is an entire popular culture steeped in meaningless celebrity worship. Far too many Americans reject political involvement — their birthright — for a vicarious and perverse obsession with the minutiae of manufactured stars and starlets.
It is no mistake Aldous Huxley used the phrase in Brave New World Revisited as an example of one of the ideas he used as a theme in Brave New World.
Steve Bonta, in an article published in The New American, compares and contrasts Huxley and Orwell:
What Huxley understood more acutely than Orwell is that it is easier to enslave a people by seduction than by coercion. In the words of social critic Neil Postman, “what Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one…. As Huxley remarked…, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’ In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.”The Super Bowl event is a scientifically created mass mental illness that exploits man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. It is the bellwether of tyranny.
