I often gently chastise the wonderful Mrs Post-Carbon Man when I find her with her nose in a gossip mag. You know the kind. It is difficult to understand how incredibly intelligent people waste so much time on such junk. It is like soap operas or chewing gum. I see a pile of such mags in the lunch room at work. I can find them at my solicitor’s and at the doctor’s. They are the lowest common denominator. There is an entire industry devoted to digging up nonsense about celebrities. It doesn’t matter how trivial the gossip of how unfamous the celebrity. It is all irrelevant to life. Richard Heinberg, in an interview, described his utter despair that most people knew more about the personal habits of Brad Pitt than Oil Depletion. Yet which one of these topics will really effect them?

Maybe the more intelligent we are the more time we need to spend on diversions that exercise the dumb bit of our brain. He base-gut part of the brain that deals with sex and survival. As you will appreciate my derision on such topics know no bounds. This stuff is so alien to me that I have no understanding of why anyone would be interested in such tittle-tattle. And don’t get me started on spectator sport.

Douglas Adams included a sub-story in his “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” works concerned Arthur Dent’s first arrival on Earth. Dent knew of an alien race who were cursed with telepathy. Their thoughts were drowned out by the thoughts of others. As a workaround they had to stop thinking. To stop thinking they had to just talk all day long to empty their heads. So they talked about everything and anything, from the weather to the traffic, and soon enough their heads were empty and peace returned. As Dent noticed that humans also talk a lot about nothing he assumed, for a long time, that humans were also cursed by telepathy.

This is a wonderful story. It was Noam Chomsky (and later Michael Moore) who observed that most Americans know more about sport than almost any other topic. It is an opiate for the masses and keeps them happy. It stops them from bothering the politicians with all kinds of silly requirements like a universal free health-care system or gun laws. All kinds of people are able to memorise all the most incredibly useless facts about their favourite sport team. But ask their opinion about anything that really matters and they are clueless. Those with a mind for conspiracy theories sometimes suggest that society is engineered, in such a way, by people with money and power. However, it doesn’t need a conspiracy… It is probably just human nature. I suspect the "people who matter" also watch soap operas and read trashy novels.

Of course not everyone can be interested in everything all of the time. The frustration for many of us is that people are wasting their time on such trivia when there are REAL problems ahead they need to understand. The fear is that the Media is pandering to the lowest common denominator for simple ratings, hence there is a race to the bottom to trivialise life at a time when we cannot afford this. In countries, with a measure of public-sector broadcasting, this is slightly less of a problem. It is extreme in the US. However, most of Europe now has Cable and Satellite TV opening up our choices almost endlessly about what to watch. However, even with all this choice there is still nothing on. I glean the listings of our multiple documentary channels to find a program about Oil Depletion or anything that will challenge our consensus trance. But there is NOTHING. There are endless documentaries about old wars and fluffy animals. There is nothing even vaguely controversial to upset the viewing public. I remember the days when the British Broadcasting Corporation used to produce a series of documentaries called “Horizon” which presented challenges to our presumptions about all kinds of science, nature and history. Now? Nothing. Bland, boring, unadventurous. He airwaves should be bristling with climate change and oil depletion stories. It should be wall-to-wall. These are THE only topics to discuss for the next thousand years. It should be screaming at us. It seems that the bigger the story the more scared we are even to broach it. This is a shame because several great books and documentaries are publicly available for TV Companies to pick up on. Why are they ignored? When the media finds that the real news sells then things would change. However, since their advertisers are not interested in depressing stuff then this isn’t happening soon. Whatever happened to “if it bleeds it leads”? I guess no one wants to know that it will be THEIR pain – someone else’s if fine. Not our own. No one wants to look in this mirror. It is a massive and sadly irreconcilable gap. The public have to be educated for our democracies to work yet the public don’t want to know about the problem.

What can we learn from mass-junk-culture? Occasionally clever stuff meets dumb stuff when a celebrity or sports star mentions the REAL WORLD. They are patted on the head and sent on their way. It is better than nothing. Just how do we make the real world as interesting as the junk culture? Well, isn’t that it’s own answer? We are all very afraid of the real world. It is big, complicated and scary. So we avoid thinking about it as best possible. And when it hurts we will vote for whatever jerk pretends they can take the pain away.

We are all in for a very rude awakening.