There’s an argument to be made that alienation is so deeply developed in Western capitalist societies and that society has become so dystopian, that people have nothing in reality to identify with. As a result, they identify with the realities presented by their entertainment, i.e. the fantastical worlds they use to escape reality. Be it written fiction, films and series, or even sports.
To put it simply, most Westerners suffering under late stage capitalism, will spend most of their free time escaping reality instead of interacting with each other or the world at large, and the purpose of work, aside from survival, becomes gaining the funds to find new ways to escape.
That, combined with incessant propaganda, cultivated pessimism (widespread political corruption, the daily grind, etc), lack of time to self-educate, and cognitive dissonance (the country I live in and have been taught to be loyal to, can not possibly be that bad) creates a situation where a person’s lens of looking at reality is no longer based on reality. Instead, their escapism is used to explain the world around them.
You can see this when another nation, like Iran, has national heroes that are actual living, breathing people. Westerners get all freaked out by it and call it a “cult of personality” or whatever, because they legitimately cannot imagine having reverence and respect for the accomplishments of a human being, only fictional characters.
There’s an argument to be made that alienation is so deeply developed in Western capitalist societies and that society has become so dystopian, that people have nothing in reality to identify with. As a result, they identify with the realities presented by their entertainment, i.e. the fantastical worlds they use to escape reality. Be it written fiction, films and series, or even sports.
To put it simply, most Westerners suffering under late stage capitalism, will spend most of their free time escaping reality instead of interacting with each other or the world at large, and the purpose of work, aside from survival, becomes gaining the funds to find new ways to escape.
That, combined with incessant propaganda, cultivated pessimism (widespread political corruption, the daily grind, etc), lack of time to self-educate, and cognitive dissonance (the country I live in and have been taught to be loyal to, can not possibly be that bad) creates a situation where a person’s lens of looking at reality is no longer based on reality. Instead, their escapism is used to explain the world around them.
You can see this when another nation, like Iran, has national heroes that are actual living, breathing people. Westerners get all freaked out by it and call it a “cult of personality” or whatever, because they legitimately cannot imagine having reverence and respect for the accomplishments of a human being, only fictional characters.
They can, but only long dead & whitewashed historical ones, which may as well be fictional.