The controversial spectacle of bullfighting has enjoyed many centuries of success for one simple reason: the bull, many times more powerful and deadly than his puny human tormentor, is quite incapable of working out that his enemy is not the little piece of cloth being waved in front of him, but the puny human waving it. This is not because bulls are too stupid to learn, but because fighting bulls are never allowed to fight twice — especially on those rare occasions when they defeat the matador. No bullfighter would ever face a bull that might have learnt the trick.
Bullfighting is a wonderful and very apt metaphor for society. If we think of the greater body of people as the bull and the tiny handful of elites who rule us as the matador, what might be the red cape that so successfully ensures the timeless survival of our tormentor?
It comprises three main components. Part of it is our education, where we are conditioned to thinking the matador is the best friend we have; part of it is the media upon which we rely to keep informed about the world around us and which endlessly confirms that the matador really is our best friend; and part of it is the multitude of leisure activities that are available to us, the device that convinces us the matador’s helping us to have too much fun to spend any time thinking for ourselves, and wondering if we really should trust someone who wears tight sparkly pants all the time.
Education
As soon as we are old enough to learn, we start to learn about our ‘place’. For the overwhelming majority of us, our ‘place’ is that of subservient followers. For a very tiny handful of us, ‘place’ is that of leadership. Just as the majority are conditioned to accept the leadership of others, so too are a tiny minority conditioned to accept their superior status and their right to determine the lives of others.
It used to be obvious to all that ‘place’ was decided by birth. Those born in poverty were conditioned to accept they would never leave it, and those born to privilege were conditioned to accept that lives of pampered indolence were theirs by divine right. The social revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries put an end to all that. A far more subtle device had to be devised to perpetuate ‘place’. So the illusion of democracy was invented.
Founded on the fine ideological dreams of early revolutionaries, modern democracy was supposed to eliminate the gross excesses of ancient aristocratic elites and provide meaningful opportunities to the downtrodden mass of humanity. The masses were taught to believe that if they worked hard enough they too could rise to the top, to lives of unimagined wealth and privilege. The faith was regularly reinforced with true enough rags-to-riches stories, of children born in poverty rising to become famous football stars, businessmen and politicians. If those people could do it, so too could anyone else; all thanks to democracy and the wonderful free society it created. Young people were taught to aspire to be tycoons and university graduates. Producers of food, goods and services were obviously drop-outs and rejects: what happened to you if you failed to become a tycoon or graduate. Thus the new elites became valued and consequently rewarded, fully deserving of ever-rising pay-deals, because ‘you can never pay too much for good people’; as new peasants faced ever-worsening conditions because they were unfortunate ‘overheads’ which always needed trimming. The red cape fluttered and the millions of untold stories of misfortune, injustices and oppressions for every widely trumpeted fairytale of ‘success’, were conveniently ignored.
The Media
Our knowledge of the current events in the world beyond our limited personal experience is supplied by the news media. If we look back at the early war reporting of newspapers and newsreels it’s quite difficult to imagine how the readers and viewers of the time could have been so gullible. The blatant propaganda is so clunky and obvious that we find it impossible to believe that it fooled so many people. Yet we instinctively accept anything we read in today’s papers and watch on today’s TV screens — even though everyone appears to know that ‘you can’t trust what you read in the papers’.
Modern propaganda is as different to its predecessor as modern man to the ape, maybe more so. The subtleties used by the modern propagandist have achieved an art form. From the careful appointments of ‘objective’ editors to the skilfully crafted half-truth, the stories that comprise today’s news are a seismic shift away from those of just one generation ago. Yet with a cynical flick of the red cape our attention is nevertheless simply and skilfully diverted away from the very real and needless suffering of millions, to the non-news of imagined ‘pandemics’, trifling political ‘scandals’ and ejectees from unimaginably banal TV game shows.
Playtime
It has often been observed that one of the most essential aides to the success of the Roman Empire was the Coliseum; for it was the circus that provided the cheap entertainments to distract the attention of the mass of citizens away from the grotesque excesses of their leaders. So too today. In order to ensure that the part of our lives not taken up with trying to survive is not taken up with examining how we are ruled, we are supplied with countless forms of ‘leisure activities’. Whilst it cannot be denied that many of these activities are indeed hugely beneficial, it also cannot be denied that a far greater number are hugely destructive — for they comprise the saddest part of the red cape: that part of the distraction which we choose for ourselves.
For although we can rightly criticise others for the way we are educated and informed about the wider world, we have no-one else to question about how we choose to spend our leisure time.
Watching television probably occupies more leisure time for most first world people than any other single activity. Yet even though there are a multitude of channels to choose from, as numerous as the number of pastimes themselves, none deviate from their main purpose: waving the red cape in front of us, diverting our attention away from our real tormentor and mortal enemy.
Is it any wonder, with so many powerful influences deliberately intended to misinform and distract us, that we, the powerful beast that is ‘the general public’ continually fail, generation after generation, to realise who our most deadly enemy really is? Exactly as fighting bulls are never given the chance to learn how the game works and are thus never capable of winning it (apart from the occasional accidental victory — too rare an event to cause any concern) so too are the general public carefully shielded from anything that might teach them the real rules of the game, and thus how to defeat their most mortal enemy.