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The Importance Of Remembering Our Purpose
Why we need to keep our meta-goals in mind during moments of difficulty
Popular entertainments are rarely an adequate guide to real life, because their purpose is to draw in the audience’s attention with sensationalism of various kinds and thereby generate revenue. In real life, defibrillators cannot restart dormant hearts and people do not generally fall over — and never fly backward — when shot with small arms. DNA is not an incontrovertible proof but merely a statistical probability, and the police are very often not “the good guys.” Memory is not like a videotape that can be rewound and replayed with fidelity, but instead an astonishingly fallible and unreliable mental process that is easily corrupted both intentionally and unintentionally. And James Bond is not a reliable guide to the daily existence of a British government employee.
In our entertainments, people frequently behave like squealing imbeciles, mugging for the camera and seeming to possess little or no self-control. This is due to the lowest-common-denominator requirement to garner as many views as possible, and it leads to on-screen behaviors that at best are woefully inadequate and at worst utterly toxic. Telenovelas and “reality” shows present an extremely dismal view of human nature and persuade ordinary people in their millions…
