Two millennia have slipped by and yet the people are still held at bay by the same two fundamentals needs, bread and circuses. Feed the crowd, amuse the mob and there will be peace and prosperity on the streets. Let the populous go hungry, allow their minds to focus on anything but base amusements and there will be dissatisfaction and strife.
Computer generated images clinically replace games of life, death, fortune and fate, allowing the young to indulge their primeval needs without risk of physical harm. Martial arts, practiced by highly skilled professional athletes replace blood soaked individual and mass conflict, allowing eyes to feast upon sanitized and controlled barbarity from a comfortable and suitably safe distance. Modern agrarian production systems allow the vast majority of individuals access to sustenance at minimal cost. Fast food restaurants and supermarkets effectively replacing Rome’s municipally funded bakeries.
Bread and circuses. Ensconced in our utilitarian little boxes, as good a replacement as any for the cold and damp cement colosseum seating, we happily gorge, stuffing our bellies, feasting our eyes upon the life and death struggles of others. Bread and circuses.
Ah…. circuses and monkey bread
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