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There's a difference between what we want and what we enjoy. You see this most clearly in drug addicts - no, in compulsive gamblers: they desperately want their fix, but aren't any happier when they're doing it. But the same effect is in play for all of us, in more subtle form. You can find it in people who are trying to write: they enjoy writing, but they don't want to do it, have to force themselves to start.

There's a pattern in this. People enjoy improving themselves, enjoy learning even - but most people don't want it. Strikingly, if you have people make the choice for their future selves, they prefer the self-improvement option; if you offer someone a choice between, say, a ticket to a museum exhibition, or a couple of free drinks (at equal price), in three months' time, most will choose the exhibition. But if you give them the choice for tonight, they'll take the drinks - and when choosing in their own lives, that's what they tend to prefer. Even if they're going to enjoy them less.

So the best way to make people happy isn't just to give them what they ask for. A paternalistic intervention where you, say, banned certain kinds of entertainment, and funded others, might well result in people living lives they were happier with than the lives they would have chosen for themselves.

> A paternalistic intervention [...] might well result in people living lives they were happier with than the lives they would have chosen for themselves

The problem with this argument is that it assumes that the pater making the decisions is wiser and more able to make correct decisions for others than others themselves. In a utopia, the decision maker might be the smartest, wisest person alive, with a nigh god-like ability to discern what's best for everyone. In reality, the decision maker is just a regular Joe. Worse, in democracies like the US and UK -- where potential leaders seem to primarily be chosen solely on the basis of social class (when did you last see a genuinely lower class politico?) -- there is absolutely no reason to believe that the leader has cognitive abilities that are above those of the population.

In a utopia, a paternalist system would work because the decisions made by the pater would be better than those made by the populace. In reality, it results in USSR supermarkets stuffed with canned tomatoes because the ever-wise pater wasn't even able to predict people's most basic wants.

> in democracies like the US and UK -- where potential leaders seem to primarily be chosen solely on the basis of social class (when did you last see a genuinely lower class politico?) -- there is absolutely no reason to believe that the leader has cognitive abilities that are above those of the population.

The upper classes generally seem to have a lower time preference than "average joe", which is an encouraging factor for this kind of politician. (If anything I worry that the rise of a populist politics where lower-class leaders are electable will lower the stability of the country - to my mind the last genuinely lower class prime minister was a certain greengrocer's daughter)

> In reality, it results in USSR supermarkets stuffed with canned tomatoes because the ever-wise pater wasn't even able to predict people's most basic wants.

Sure, no-one would advocate a centrally planned economy. But I think there's a case for soft incentives - central government funding for museums, art galleries, and universities; taxation of drugs and perhaps of sports or similar popular entertainments. These things have a long history but are being undermined by a postmodern view that says that all art is equally valuable, that popular music is just as worthy of funding as experimental music, popular authors just as worthy as literary authors.

In recent years I've seen what feels like a dumbing down of e.g. the Proms - indeed, of the whole BBC - justified on the grounds that it should give the people what they want. And while that's an important consideration - there's no point in a public service channel that no one watches - it shouldn't be the only one. Even as imperfect humans, we should try and help people better themselves, rather than just leave them to what they want.

> In recent years I've seen what feels like a dumbing down of e.g. the Proms - indeed, of the whole BBC

I can't argue whether this is the case or not, because I rarely watch TV. I've heard that BBC4 is quite cerebral, but I've also heard no-one watches it, yet I'm pretty sure this means that no-one would watch its contents even if they were the sole thing on the television. It seems that most people don't find cerebral activities fun.

I went to your typical rough, inner-city, London comprehensive, and saw precisely the 'bottom 55%' being debated here on a daily basis. It certainly seemed to me that these people would never have been interested in cerebral activities even if they would have been offered. Whenever a cerebral activity (e.g., reading Lord of the Flies) presented itself, they diverted across to violence, or gossip, or some other form of utter rejection of the cerebral activity on offer.

I have no reason to believe that it'd be possible -- or indeed positive -- to force these people to play up to the interests of their social 'betters'. I'd rather we accept who they are than demand they play the role of poseur. Like with everything else in life, I'm sure that the place to intercept this problem -- the issue of people wasting their life on entertainment -- is in childhood. One clear consistency among the lower classes I grew up with was that their parents either didn't give a damn about their kids (sadly the case for a huge number of them), or were too busy with the demands of being a single parent to dedicate time to raising them.

If we want a civilization which is more interested in learning and self-improvement than X-Factor, then we'll have to start with making sure that our civilization's parents are willing and able to emphasize learning and self-improvement over X-Factor.

Not sure the pater agent needs to be wiser, not even seen as wiser, more the result of some people psychology not willing to take decisions and happy this way (butler mentality) meanwhile others want/need this position to feel fulfilled.

>in democracies like the US and UK -- where potential leaders seem to primarily be chosen solely on the basis of social class

Maybe that is true in the UK, but that is clearly not the case in the US, unless you are going to try to argue that Obama is a WASP.

"WASP" is not a social class. Obama is a Harvard-educated lawyer.

Obama's father went to Harvard but his grandfather was a cook. Hardly a pedigree.

Obama is president, not his father. He grew up as a lawyer's son, not in a working-class household.

Which only demonstrates that occasionally someone manages to move between social classes, and has no bearing on the argument made above.

For much of the US's history many states had wealth and/or land requirements for holding office.

Obama is as White/Anglo-Saxon as he is African (as if these terms have any meaning at all) via his mother, and he is ostensibly a protestant.

Boo on that social science study. It doesn't offer any illumination as to why people made that choice - or, if it did, you haven't included it. Instead, you're using it as evidence that people can't act in their own interests. Can you really draw that conclusion?

Boo on social science in general.

I think you're doing a disservice to the 'bottom 55%' of society. Ignoring perhaps the bottom and top 5% of the curve, the spectrum of intellectual difference isn't that big. Most people can read a book. Most people can visit a museum. Hell, most could write a book. Most people can understand and enjoy intellectual pursuits. The reason why the bottom 55%'s chief pleasures are "TV, alcohol, taking selfies, incorrect spelling in text messages, Facebook, Instagram, Candy Crush, etc" is because they believe society's lie that they can't enjoy anything else. The overwhelming majority of people are actually very capable of doing intelligent and creative things.

The problem is that intelligence and creativity are a threat to the 'elite' at the top of society in terms of power and wealth - society has been designed to subjugate as many people as possible with Huxley-esque triviality for fear that if people started using their brains that power and wealth would no longer be in the hands of a few. Everyone would be a bit more equal if instead of sitting down to watch the latest Hollywood movie or listen to whatever reality star's new album we sat down and painted a picture or talked about philosophy - there would be no money flowing towards the rich any more.

I said their chief pleasures 'may' be those things - a list suffixed with 'etc'. My aim was to get the reader to have an idea of the kind of person I was talking about rather than construct an exhaustive but useless and pointless list of their activities.

Yes, those people could do the things you say. But they don't. The point I'm making is that coercing them into behaving differently is not practical nor moral.

I have an IQ in the top 0.001%, am relatively wealthy, relatively well educated, and have a bizarrely diverse skillset. I play Call of Duty and enjoy life's trivialities much more than I paint or talk philosophy.

I agree that society can be fearsome for some in the way you describe, but as I said its reflective of its components, and in order to change the scary bits you have to enforce change on those nearer the top of our curve - and I outright reject the notion that they are more deserving of the pains of coercion owing to their status. Everybody will always suffer in a plan to take one set of ideas and force them upon others. History teaches this lesson over and over again. Present government is teaching it now.

Capitalism - the best word to describe our current societal system - is the antithesis of this. It promotes freedom for everyone to do what the hell they want, not what they 'should' or are told to, and prescribes nothing but subscription to capitalism itself which incidentally is not a system imposed on the world by political leaders, but rather a descriptive term for something humans have been doing (or trying to do against a range of government constraints) for centuries: trading 'stuff' they have for stuff they don't freely and openly.

"The point I'm making is that coercing them into behaving differently is not practical nor moral."

I agree that it's not moral, but it is demonstrably practical - business changes the way people act all the time, coercing people into behaving in a way that, in my opinion, holds the majority back and turns them into mere passive consumers rather than the creative, intelligent people they could be. While you say in another comment that you want purer capitalism without government interference, I actually want to go further still - removing corporate interference in our lives as well. Although, admittedly, I have no idea at all how you'd do that.

So there is a conspiracy by the "elites" to make the masses love the Kardashians? This level of absurdity is not apparent to you? Being intelligent is not a perfect defense to confusion.

I think the conspiracy* is modern anti-intellectualism, mocking creativity, and the promotion of the idea that respect, fame and wealth should be something that comes instantly when you're judged better than your peers rather than something that can be earned by hard work. The Kardashians are the result of that rather than the means.

* Conspiracy is the wrong word. I think it's quite transparent how society has be changed in to something that benefits the ultra-wealthy more than the rest.

There doesn't need to be a conspiracy to make the masses love the Kardashians. All that is necessary is for the elites to follow their own drives to meet the demands of their social class and accumulate wealth to retain their position (and there's nothing sinister with wanting this; we all have strong drives to keep or improve our relative positions). The rest follows pretty much by itself:

It is easier to create wealth by feeding the immediate drives of the consumers than by trying to make them genuinely happy and fulfilled in ways that require their potential customers to put in effort and make sacrifices in the short term.

Nice stance! But isn't this apologetic thinking a pattern applicable on pretty much any order of things? "It can be worse" and "don't ask too much from your high-horse" are not the principles I choose to follow nor recommend to others. I agree that the world (at least in the most part) changed for the better from "back in the day" but I believe that it was thanks to that kind of people that use to sit on high horses trying to make their the view a little nicer. Here's an exercise for you too - try to imagine what kind of world do you want for your future descendants. This exercise will tell you by the way, depending on if you could come up with something better or not, what kind of people you are - the sitting on high-horse looking down kind or the rest.

Thanks! I have answered your question in my own mind many times.

I want to live in a world where there is true freedom. I want a purer form of capitalism with heavy reductions in current government control that inhibits the ability of us all to do things today. I want them to live in a world where the very concept that one person or group of people enforces control over others is both alien and absurd, and certainly not their reality as it is ours.

My solution involves only the absolution of control from those who should never have had in the first place, and enforces nothing on anyone.

How will you have "true freedom" in a world where your access to resources is restricted by government enforcement of private property?

What you describe as a whole is tautological. A world where "one person or group of people enforces control over others is both alien and absurd" is pretty much by definition not capitalist in any shape or form. Not only that, but most people who want such a "capitalism" and then invoke reductions in government control tend to want to remove lots of the regulation that reigns in capitalism somewhat to protect the freedoms of the rest of society.

"Purer" capitalism has been rejected time and time again because of what it implies.

Numerous lives were lost of the many decades US unions fought to get recognition of the 8 hour working day, for example (and May 1st is still celebrated as the international day for workers demonstration partly in recognition of the AFL-CIO's restart of the battle for the 8 hour day after the Haymarket Massacre), because of how uneven the power is and was between employer and employee in most fields: You may have any number of de jure freedoms, but they are irrelevant to someone who will starve to death if they exercise them.

> I want them to live in a world where the very concept that one person or group of people enforces control over others is both alien and absurd,

I'll bite. How exactly is your "freer version" of capitalism going to achieve this, where, by default, a group of stockholders, managers and producers will have tremendous influence on availability, pricing, selection and stock, whereas no safeguards exist against abuse of these powers?

I know I've cited it here before, but this is essentially what the concept of the culture industry describes, were all your freedom is only possible within the pre-chosen, pre-selected limits of production, i.e. you get to choose "freely" between all of the things others allow you to choose between.

Freer capitalism will maximise choice relative to alternatives. You are correct in saying it will not provide complete choice, for example I don't expect there will ever be a day - even if I had all the money in the world - where I could pay every last person on the planet to chant my name at once. Some things despite being physically possible will always be unattainable. Capitalism maximises the set of choices.

You are not beholden to company executives - you simply stop giving them your attention and money. Only in the case of monopoly and oligopoly can you be at the mercy of executives. Such problems are very real and the solutions much more difficult than those imposed by governments and moral crusaders, but they are necessarily worsened by the same. The reason we - at least in Europe - have a horrible banking industry is because the regulation around starting and running a bank is so complex it has the effect of restricting bank ownership to a very small subset of the population. The same is true for the insurance industries and many others. In the case of banking bail-outs mean that no matter how badly a bank is run, it will never go out of business (in Europe anyway). This is truly absurd, extremely damaging, and 100% the fault of people with moral agendas trying to force it upon the rest of us. You could own a bank, I'd love to consider you for my next account, but the incumbents won't allow that. I am beholden to shitty bankers because of the government.

You forget a category of people in the list of what is good. Unless it falls under the "utopia" category, there is the people that wants what mostly what we have today but durably available to a larger portion of the population.

"Brave New World" being a mainstream worry is relatively recent, 20 years ago, it was not. 20 years ago, we thought of our hedonistic society would look like Start Trek. So definitively not despicable. My theory is that it is all those indicators pointing to more misery / less good (depending if you live in the first world or outside) for our children generation is what makes people think we are living in Brave New World. (our children will study more to earn less money, work more, on a earth with less resources, less nature, harsher climate)

Anyway, the defeatist attitude of dismissing people because of their "moral high horse" is tiring too. Especially in the First World where society is definitively not representative of "the essence of humanity" the majority would impose. We enjoy Freedom and Human Rights that are not natural and as everything that has happened since 9/11 has demonstrated, fragile.

We defined freedom roughly by saying you can do whatever as long as it is no depriving others from theirs. That goes against our nature. We should maybe think of limiting pleasure to anything you can have that does not deprive the rest of the world of it.

... has made us all a despicable group of hedonistic thrill seekers. This is universally construed as a bad thing.

Is that really what you take away from this discussion? To my eyes, the notion is that we have become passive and in the process abdicated control over our own lives. You can make an argument that that is a good thing, but that is a very different argument from yours.

Were you frustrated by the lack of public outcry at the NSA's secret activities? The idea here is that people brushed off the NSA's actions because they turned back to Candy Crush et al, which was oh-so-ready to distract them, and it is this that the original author is talking about- not moral criticism of shallow hedonism.

"has made us all a despicable group of hedonistic thrill seekers."

This has been a problem since the Roman times if not earlier- people focused on the games raher than the politics. Humans have been hedonistic thrill seekers pretty much since always, as far as I can tell.

The whole point of Huxley's view was that all these hedonistic tendencies you describe can be used to control people, to box them into tiny little worlds of their own making and keep them safely there, no threat to the ruling powers. If you are only focused on how happy these people (or even everyone) are, then you are missing the point.

1984 assumed a certain amount of inherent human dignity in each person, and described a world where that human dignity had been stripped away by an all-knowing oppressive power. Huxley envisioned a world in which people are little more than animals and anything that could be called human dignity was rare. How happy the cattle are in their pastures is not what Huxley cared about.

Although it isn't exactly off-base to say that this (article/comic?) is an attack on the current state of society, it IS off-base to equate the attack to the "oft-repeated wail that capitalism ... thrill seekers."

I would just like to remind everyone that BNW (the examples you chose seem to be parallels to BNW rather than 1984) doesn't have much to say about "capitalism." There seems to be a conflation here of capitalism with "consumerism" - consumerism being one of the pillars of the dystopia that the novel imagines, capitalism notwithstanding. You have to be careful where you draw the parallels. For example, the hedonistic thrill seekers in Brave New World were quite literally engineered to be that way - they were born in test-tubes and raised in a finely tuned environment. If anything, BNW is an argument against a utopia, not against a free market and the opportunities it provides. Actually, "opportunity" is unnecessary in BNW, because everyone is already mired in consumption and ecstasy. Nobody wants or needs it.

Whether capitalism is leading to that type of dystopia is another argument entirely, and one not addressed by the book... or even the article/comic.

"I don't think it's off-base to say that this is an attack on the current state of society - the oft-repeated wail that capitalism and the opportunities it has brought (including technology) has made us all a despicable group of hedonistic thrill seekers."

Why just "capitalism"? I think it's way too broad

Capitalism without civil society (in republican understanding), perhaps. It's still very general

"Let's consider the bottom 55% - the kind of people whose chief pleasures in our Brave New World may be TV, alcohol, taking selfies, incorrect spelling in text messages, Facebook, Instagram, Candy Crush, etc. - they're not massively intellectual."

No, but Postman argues that they used to make more intensive use of their brains in the "print era".

Right now I can't find the full text to copy and paste the relevant excerpt here, but I googled up a summary of his point:

http://www.kemstone.com/Nonfiction/Politics/Amusing.htm

"Before going into the details of how and why this is, Postman takes us back to the 19th century and uses the debates between Lincoln and Douglas to illustrate the vast gaping chasm between discourse as it was then and how it is now. The famous debates between Lincoln and Douglass each lasted three hours long, each devoted to one issue, and divided between an hour of speech, an hour and a half of response, and a half-hour rebuttal. What makes this even more striking is that these debates were actually shorter than most normal debates of the time! Crowds would gather around these two men and listen to them speak at length about one subject, carefully constructing logical arguments and parsing through each others’ claims in true analytical fashion. The 19th century mind was habituated to a literary form of oratory, which unlike pictures and film has propositional content—one can say of it that it is either true or false, which is not the case when it comes to images. Even advertising was purely literary, designed to appeal to the understanding as opposed to desire."

My point is that there is no way to viably change the status quo - the merits of doing so are irrelevant. We should accept this and not spend our time trying to change others, or wishing they were different, but rather channel our own energies into things constructive for our own time on this earth.

To say that there is no way is rather arbitary. If people have always seeked to maximise happiness etc., then the status quo can't be solely the result of that

I seached your entire comment for something relevant to the excerpt that was posted and came up empty-handed. What, exactly, does anything you've said have to do with entertainment facilitating oppression?

> The difference is that instead of making use of all things available in the world to please you, you've chosen to spend your time sat on your high horse looking down on them, wishing they were different, so that the view from up there was a little nicer.

I'm utterly baffled. Where was anything remotely like this mentioned?

> I have an IQ in the top 0.001%, am relatively wealthy, relatively well educated, and have a bizarrely diverse skillset. I play Call of Duty and enjoy life's trivialities much more than I paint or talk philosophy.

This clarifies things a little bit. In your eagerness to impress everyone, you lost sight of the topic entirely.

You're putting far too much thought into it. Put it this way, I don't know anybody who actually goes home and just drills into the topics they are profoundly interested in.

99% of people go home, watch some news, and then watch reality tv.

A very small amount of people read or dedicate their lives to living a life of virtue not complacent pleasure.

That's sad. We rather be on Facebook and Instragram and Snapchat 24/7 than disconnect ourselves and feed our brains.