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if our culture wasn’t dominated by hollywood, people wouldn’t be inundated with hollywood propaganda about how important people from hollywood are.

i used to laugh at the old ST:NG episodes where the captain and some other character would spend time in the holodeck “acting” as if it was some sort of profoundly important activity for people on a starship exploring the universe to do. they would spend days or weeks rehearsing.

and yet, in an emergency, when they needed some new invention from the chief engineer, he’d press a couple of buttons on the computer and magically come up with warp 6.9 or extend the life of the dilithium crystals by 13% (or whatever) for the first time. real engineering feats were treated as trivial accomplishments. but practicing soliloquies from Hamlet... now that’s what the Capt. considered important.

so ridiculous. so backwards from reality. but this shows how the “entertainment culture” worships itself above all else. and this is fed to people as entertainment. 110 years ago, actors were regarded as barely above whores. now, every kid growing up wants to be an actor.

how many times has the media covered it when a scientist or engineer gets an award form something truly important that they’ve done? compare that to how often they cover the Kennedy center honors for an actor or comedian or when the president gives a medal of freedom to an actor. the disparity is shocking. never vs. always.

we. are. doomed.

And I would surmise, the performers of intellectually rich or morally significant classics (e.g. Shakespeare, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin) were viewed ahead of the performers of low entertainment works.

Today it’s a fantasy fusion of low entertainment with claimed moral significance.