#Capitalism #Spectacle #Olympics
"Consider the Olympics, an event engineered to draw in the attention of the world. The Spectacle is not just the event itself, but rather its gravitational hold over the consciousness of hundreds of millions of people, whether they are watching it or not...
"The actual portion of people who truly cared about clownish burlesque caricatures of Greek gods or about female boxers before the Olympics is vanishingly small. Now, however, having the correct opinion about each of these determines whether you are a good person or an uneducated fascist — your reaction to these events becomes a stand-in for virtue and a signal to others how they ought to classify you.
"That’s the Spectacle. It is not just the hold these events have over our social relations, but also the apparent instinctual need we seem to have to react. However, those reactions are not instinctual at all, but rather the result of decades of fine-tuning the Spectacle’s hold over our consciousness.
"In other words, our reactions, the internal mechanisms which trigger those reactions, and the compulsion to have a reaction at all have all been engineered into us. We are constantly drawn in, and feel we must be drawn in, and suddenly see each spectacle as the most urgent thing in the world."
