Bread and Circuses

I've noticed quite a few Zaadz bloggers complaining about the lack of world-changing that seems to be occurring. "With so many enlightened souls in communication," they ask, "why isn't something happening?" This reminds me of Bodhidharma's famous observation that "All know the way, few walk it." If anything, public apathy seems to have grown in direct proportion to the proliferation of "alternative" information. More than ever, those who know the path are not walking it. How many SUVs are parked outside your local organic food mega-store? With the excuse of ignorance eliminated, what we clearly lack now is not information, but motivation. Let's explore this lack of motivation for a moment. Since natural human laziness allows the perpetuation of well-known atrocities like designer-label sweatshop labor, wilderness plunder, and social inequality (it is easier, and less expensive, to ignore it than fight it), I have concluded that our laziness is being deliberately targeted and exploited by those profit from it, in both money and power. As John Carpented brilliantly illustrated (using the allegory of an alien infiltration) in the highly-underrated and horribly-named film, "They Live," we - the general public - are being lulled into complacency by the merchants of industrialized leisure; seduced by the same bread and circuses that steal our time and resources, and drain our wallets of money that could - and should - go to different and better ends. Incidentally, the term "bread and circuses," as a reference to distractions calculated to pacify the masses, was coined by a Roman satirist named Decimus Junius Juvenalis, better known as Juvenal, whose indictments of ancient Roman public life are - by and large - still relevant today. A wonderful historical example of real-life "bread and circuses" is described by Etienne de la Boetie, who writes in "The Politics of Obedience," the following gem: "This method ... cannot be more clearly observed than in what Cyrus did with the Lydians after he had taken Sardis, their chief city, and had at his mercy the captured Croesus, their fabulously rich king. When news was brought to him that the people of Sardis had rebelled, it would have been easy for him to reduce them by force; but being unwilling either to sack such a fine city or to maintain an army there to police it, he thought of an unusual expedient for reducing it. He established in it brothels, taverns, and public games, and issued the proclamation that the inhabitants were to enjoy them. He found this type of garrison so effective that he never again had to draw the sword against the Lydians." An identical approach is taken by today's power brokers. They supply professional sports, an "entertainment industry," pornography, and drugs. They ostracize or imprison anybody who opposes them, and thus maintain peace in the first-world. Now, if they would only build a Disneyland in the Gaza Strip, establish a Hooters franchise in Afghanistan, and distribute free Zoloft to Middle-Eastern extremists, we might have peace in the third-world as well!