Looking for thrills

Copyright 2017, InterAmerica, Inc.

Anyone paying attention to society’s movements can discern that the great unwashed is straining to be entertained.

The surfeit of Facebook,YouTube, Twitter, Netflix, Hulu, et al. “pleasures” being offered to the proletariat hordes is overwhelmingly available and absorbed, to the detriment of culture, refinement, and intellectualism; vulgar exhibitions and activity have become prominent in human society, across the board.

One would be inclined to cite the “bread and circus” entertainments of the Romans as indicative of a decline in that civilization but Gibbon, in his monumental The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire doesn’t see that boisterous period as germane, nor do Barrow in his book The Romans, Dudley in the History of Human Society: The Romans 850 B.C. – A.D. 337, and Michael Grant in his History of Rome.

And Roman Katz in his The Decline of Rome dismisses the decline of societies and Rome in particular to various hypotheses that have been offered but he does give a hint to what happened to writing and authors – something that can be seen in the current raft of ufological writings:

“Since the Present age seemed dull and uncreative, the leading authors wrote on themes that were irrelevant to life in a style that was neither fresh nor spontaneous but a nostalgic attempt to recapture the flavor of an earlier and a happier age.” [Page 18]

An era of vulgar, popular entertainment that mimics our time is that of the German Weimar Republic [1919-1933] right before the advent of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

The Germans were anxious to exploit the pleasures of the flesh, not the delights of their recent lofty periods of enlightenment that German art, literature, music, philosophy, and science brought to the evolutionary environment.

And this is where we are in today’s society, with UFO buffs and ufologists trying to cull entertainment from the UFO phenomenon rather than attempting to understand the elusive enigma.

Even my pals at the Anomalist seek venues to extol that titillate. 

This kind of attention to vapid nonsense floods the UFO pages at Facebook and usurps much of ufological blogs and web-sites.

Everyone wants to be entertained, not enlightened or force-fed information that may edify them.

It’s the current societal Weltanschauung, from which there seems little escape.

RR