PHILOSOPHY DESK

IN HIS NEW book The Rise of the Court Jester, journalist Randolph Sirius Major argues that mass entertainment’s grip on humanity is now so strong that even elections for high office have been reduced to mere popularity contests.

“It used to be that there was the serious life of work and affairs, and then there was recreation,” he says. “The latter was a small part of anyone’s life, and all the more exciting for it. Then it began to break free of its boundaries and grow, until it overtook serious life and became the dominant force, saturating everything, giving us role models who are not real, but who act out our fantasies. More and more, reality is consigned to a small corner of people’s lives while entertainment follows them everywhere. People whose job it was merely to distract from the world, have become the world.”

The book is available on Amazon.