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10/20/2003 Entry: "Amusing Ourselves to Death"

A final extract from Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death

In America, Orwell's prophecies are of small relevance, but Huxley's are well under way toward being realised. For America is engaged in the world's most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug. ...An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan. Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us. .. But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? ... What is the antidote to a culture's being drowned by laughter?I fear that our philosophies have given us no guidance in this matter. Their warnings have customarily been directed against ... ideologies that appeal to the worst tendencies in human nature. But what is happening in America is not the design of an articulated ideology... It comes as the unintended consequence of a dramatic change in our modes of public conversation. But it is an ideology nonetheless, for it imposesa way of life, a set of ... ideas, about which there has been no consensus, no discussion and no opposition. Only compliance.