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Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
“...mass market consumption offers the facade of social equality without forcing society to go through the hard work of redistributing wealth. Low prices lead consumers to think they can get what they want without necessarily giving them what they want - or need. The ancient Roman phrase for this is panem et circenses, bread and circuses, the art of plying citizens with pleasures to distract them from pain.”
Value
Cheap
Consumer
Mass Consumption
“Government as we now know it in the USA and other economically advanced countries is so manifestly horrifying, so corrupt, counterproductive, and outright vicious, that one might well wonder how it continues to enjoy so much popular legitimacy and to be perceived so widely as not only tolerable but indispensable. The answer, in overwhelming part, may be reduced to a two-part formula: bribes and bamboozlement (classically "bread and circuses"). Under the former rubric falls the vast array of government "benefits" and goodies of all sorts, from corporate subsidies and privileges to professional grants and contracts to welfare payments and health care for low-income people and other members of the lumpenproletariat. Under the latter rubric fall such measures as the government schools, the government's lapdog news media, and the government's collaboration with the producers of professional sporting events and Hollywood films. Seen as a semi-integrated whole, these measures give current governments a strong hold on the public's allegiance and instill in the masses and the elites alike a deep fear of anything that seriously threatens the status quo.”
Peace
Freedom
Belief
Superstition
Liberty
Slavery
Politics
Democracy
Socialism
Trade
Free
Prosperity
Anarchy
Libertarian
Capitalism
Totalitarianism
Taxation
Statism
Voluntaryism
Austrian School Of Economics
Coercion
Free Markets
Non Aggression Principle
After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order
“Page 61-2
... Rome expanded rapidly ... and became master over the entire Mediterranean Basin. It then had unlimited resources in terms of land, money, and slaves. It collected taxes or tribute throughout its empire and was able to transfer to the central capital massive quantities of foodstuffs and manufactured items. The peasants and the artisans of Italy saw their economic base disappear as this Mediterranean economy was "globalized" by the political domination of Rome. The society was polarized between, on the one hand, a mass of economically useless plebeians and, on the other, a predatory plutocracy. A minority gorged with wealth oversaw the remaining proletarianized population. The middle-classes collapsed, a process that brought about the end of the republic and the beginning of the political form known as "empire" in conformity with the observations made by Aristotle about the importance of intermediate social classes for the stability of political systems.
Since one could not eliminate the plebeians, intractable but geographically central as they were, they came to be nourished and distracted at the empire's expense with "bread and circuses."
Page 64-5:
The positive American trade balance, when only "advanced technology" is counted, dropped from 35 billion dollars in 1990 to 5 billion in 2001 and had disappeared entirely to become one more element in the overall trade deficit in January 2002.
This fall in economic strength is not compensated for by the activities of American-based multinationals. Since 1998 the profits that they bring back into the country amount to less than what foreign companies that have set up shop in the United States are taking back to their own countries.
Page 68:
In conformity with classical economic theory, the general opening up of commercial exchange has brought about an increase in inequality throughout the world. This general exchange tends to introduce into each country the same disparities in revenue that exist at the level of the whole planet. ... The compression of worker revenues caused by free trade revives the traditional dilemma of capitalism that has now spread across the globe: low salaries do not allow for the absorption of increases in production.
Page 17: In developed countries a new class is emerging that comprises roughly 20 percent of the population in terms of sheer numbers but controls about half of each nation's wealth. This new class has more and more trouble putting up with the constraint of universal suffrage.”
Democracy
Immigration
Globalization
Free Trade
Mad World: The Seduction of Insanity
“The masses must be politicized before they can become of any use. The elite ply them with bread and circuses to keep them docile. The elite hate the idea of a politically engaged population. They want everyone to be watching TV, doing social media, and playing video games. Keep them distracted, keep them dumb, keep them useless.”
Bread And Circuses
The Illuminati Manifesto
“The one thing Dante never considered is that hell would be a place that the overwhelming majority LOVE. American Idol and X-Factor - these are programmes created by the elite to provide “bread and circuses” to the masses, and how the masses flock to the Colosseum. What they haven’t realised - because they’re too stupid - is that they’re the “Christians” being fed to the lions. They’re watching the annihilation of their hopes of a good life, and yet they’re laughing and cheering! That demonstrates the extent of the elite’s mind control over them. Every second you spend watching junk TV is a wasted second, and if you watch a huge amount of shit, you’ve wasted your life.”
Distraction
Bread And Circuses
Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster
“Tech helped to create this economy, and tech is what keeps it stable by giving us the greatest bread and circuses of all time. Casino owners discovered in the late 1980s that people who gambled on screens became addicted three to four times faster than those who gambled at tables. The rest of America had learned that lesson by 1992, when a third of homes had Nintendo systems. Men without jobs have video games the way men without girlfriends have pornography, and growing numbers of men are finding the substitute good enough to be going on with, declining to pursue either permanent employment or marriage. The historian David Courtwright calls this “limbic capitalism,” the redirection of America’s productive energies into inducing and servicing addictions.”
Capitalism
Video Games
Technology Addiction
Resurrection: The Origin of a Religious Fallacy
“Social networking is the most brilliant manifestation yet of the elite’s bread and circuses paradigm. Whereas Caesar had to spend a fortune putting on shows for the plebs, the modern Caesar get the plebs to entertain themselves on Facebook, and it doesn’t cost him a cent. In fact, he can become a multi-billionaire out of it. What a result! The elite must always ensure that the masses are too preoccupied to ever think about the appalling world they live in; to confront the realisation that they are degraded second-class citizens in a two-tier society.”
Networking
Social Media
Freedumb and Dumbocracy: Libertarians, Dogs, Goyim, the Internet, and Last Men
“Facebook has an enormous commercial incentive to keep growing its subscriber base. Naturally, it doesn’t want to offend any subscribers, existing or prospective, so its capitalist imperative is to make Facebook as bland, banal and inoffensive as possible – like all other capitalist products seeking to maximize profits. In which case, what’s the point? It’s just another vehicle of dumbed down, anti-intellectual, anodyne, narcotic, sedated capitalism, frying people’s brains with endless junk and “bread and circuses”. This is exactly how the Old World Order operates: bullying, censoring, attacking free thinking, generating endless “Last Men”, with no chests and no fire in their bellies.”
Censorship
Facebook
Ads
Miss Delectable
“Jule's sporadic largesse was part of any tyrant's strategy for maintaining control. Bread and circuses between battles and tantrums.”
Romance
Historical Romance
The Road to Wigan Pier
“Of course the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been a very fortunate thing for our rulers. It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution. Therefore we are some-times told that the whole thing is an astute manoeuvre by the governing class–a sort of 'bread and circuses' business–to hold the unemployed down. What I have seen of our governing class does not convince me that they have that much intelligence. The thing has happened, buy by an un-conscious process–the quite natural interaction between the manufacturer's need for a market and the need of half-starved people for cheap palliatives.”
Capitalism
Luxuries
Working Class
Mass Production
21 Day Target and Achievement Planner [Use Only Printed Work Book: LIFE IS SIMPLE HENCE SIMPLE WORKBOOK
“No matter what happens "Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt". In the Roman Empire, it was bread and chariot races and gladiatorial games that filled the belly and distracted the mind, allowing emperors to rule as they saw fit or to hide the realities.
There’s truth to the view that people can be kept tractable as long as you fill their bellies and give them violent spectacles to fill their free time. #Bread #Circus”
Citizens
Circus
Now-Men And Tomorrow-Men: Why We Are Not Equal?
“with our wider grasp of history, can see the ‘permanence’ of the ‘State’ as much less important than it must have seemed to those of old. We know that States and Civilisations come and go. We live among the ruins of many of them that have disappeared.
We excavate them and try to put the story together from what little evidence we can gather, but most of us do not realise that the foundation of the house in which we live may also, one day, be material for a learned thesis that will earn someone a doctorate.
When something threatens our civilisation, we see in it a threat to the civilisation of the world and we do not see the identity of our great sports stadiums and the replacement of the sportsman by the ‘sport’— and the development of ‘Welfare States’! with the ‘Bread and Circuses' of the last days of Rome. We do not read the total inversion of all our values during the last two to three hundred years as the equivalent of what happened in Greece and Rome and Egypt when their civilisations ran into the doldrums.
To us it seems as impossible that all this will end as it must have seemed to those who lived in the final luxury and grandeur of the classical civilisations.
But both 'Eternity' and Permanence have no meaning in reality. The State and the Government cannot depend on them for survival, even less than the Kings of old found safety in their ‘divine right’ to rule.
The problem of the Government is a ‘consideration of convenience’ as Burke called it. It is the problem of finding how we can best live together in peace and harmony as we are, and not as we ought to be. For this, as we have seen, there must be a supervisor, a Government, for the simple reason that we are imperfect and because most of us are short-futured men with little thought for the days to come—unhappily apt to fall for the delusions of the present.”
Governance
The Address Of Happiness
“We love against the night, burning like stars against the darkness of bread and circuses.”
Love
Despair
Night
“The Romans always wanted bread and circuses-food and entertainement! As we destroy their city, I will offer them both. Behold, a sample!"
Someething dropped from the ceiling and landed at Percy's feet: a loaf of sandwich bread in a white plastic wrapper with red and yellow dots.
Percy picked it up. "Wonder bread?"
"Magnificent, isn't it?" Ephialtes eyes danced with crazy excitement.”
Percy Jackson
Humour
Wonder Bread
Ephialtes
Mockingjay
“It’s a saying from thousands of years ago, written in a language called Latin about a place called Rome,” he explains. “Panem et Circenses translates into ‘Bread and Circuses.’ The writer was saying that in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power.”
Politics
Ender's Game
“Panem et Circenses translates into 'Bread and Circuses.' The writer was saying that in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power.”
Responsibility
Power
“The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’
‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”
Democracy
“I think at the heart of so much restlessness of the day is a spiritual vacuum. There is a yearning for meaningful lives, a yearning for values we can commonly embrace. I hear an almost inaudible but pervasive discontent with the price we pay for our current materialism. And I hear a fluttering of hope that there might be more to life than bread and circuses.”
Hope
Materialism
Discontent
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