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5. April 2017

The Last 90 Years of Entertainment

I was reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Land of Mist and it made me ponder the history of entertainment since then.

My estimation of the subject can be inferred from the following chart, which has no claim to any precision, but serves only to illustrate the independence of the two politically decisive factors in entertainment, i.e. the aspiration of the public and the decentralisation of creativity.


The chart tracks the development in the Anglosphere, except from 1933-1945, where I took the liberty to substitute the Germansphere for reasons of comparison.

There is a third politically decisive factor in the entertainment of the last 90 years, of which the other two are probably not independent, namely the invention of television, first demonstrated to the London public in 1925 by John Logie Baird, one year before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Land of Mist.

The truth of the matter is of course that the spiritualist movement was as much about entertainment as about religion. I remember that my mother told me that her mother, who was born in 1906, successfully tried to hypnotise other girls in her youth, only that she then failed to end the hypnosis, which is not much of an end to a story, but that's the way I heard it.

And this basic desire for entertainment was soon later taken over by radio and television. It's rather ironic, isn't it? People in need of voices out of nowhere - first ghosts, then TV.

But radio and TV were not always used to overwrite the opinion of others, there was a consensus in the Anglosphere that at least a part of entertainment should be (a)live, bands mostly, but out of that grew a wider creative movement, namely the Hippy movement, whose momentum in terms of influence on the culture in radio stations and newspapers led to a maximal decentralisation of creativity in anglophone countries at around 1985.

And then, partly because of exhaustion of the creative impulse, partly because of a desire to maximise profits, the empire stroke back: independent critics were replaced by PR offices, and instead of promoting bands, who showed promise, the studios started to create their own bands.

A similar concentration of creative control could also be observed in the general newspaper scene, and in order for us to understand a few things, I shall go back to the 70s and observe something else there.

It looked good for the Soviet Union in the 70s. But the Hippy movement was unable to make a real political difference, because its aspirations had already dropped too much: Sex and drugs don't build a society, people fit for the nitty-gritty looked down their noses and avoided it.

So, when the Soviet Union finally ended, this discrepancy became politically exploitable, by playing to the anti-bourgeois leanings of the bourgeois left, in order to drive it against the vital interests of the less affluent and thus root it out.

What I'm saying is: There are forces, who are quite able to control the narrative, if they see a definite reason for it, i.e. something definite to be gained, and in this respect Germany 1933-1945 is no different from the Anglosphere 1990-2010.

Since 2010 there is a calculated unravelling coinciding with the Arab Spring, which served and serves to discredit the apparent elites as the final stage of their rooting out.

Understandably there are now quite a few people on the right, who think that a general restauration could be worked, but that is quite impossible with the public aspiration being where it is. So instead, we'll see a renewed control of the narrative very soon.

And from there it's by the book (of revelation).

Which is, where it all started:
And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. 
And this is what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saw in 1925:


From the other book:
'At the present moment every nation upon earth is plotting secretly how it can best poison the others. Did God create the planet for this end, and is it likely that He will allow it to go on from bad to worse?'
'Is it you or Miromar who is talking now?'
'Well, I have myself been brooding over the matter, and all my thoughts seem to justify his conclusions. I read a spirit message which Charles Mason wrote: "The most dangerous condition for a man or a nation is when his intellectual side is more developed than his spiritual". Is that not exactly the condition of the world to-day?'
So far it's only gotten worse since, as evidenced by the receding understanding and concern since.

For public aspiration to be reborn, you must do the following:
  1. Clarify your hopes.
  2. Choose a way.
  3. Confront the obstacles.

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