Why are bread and circuses considered bad?

Why are bread and circuses considered bad?

Why does every fedora lord on the internet utter "bread and circuses" as if it means something and act like they're saying something insightful?

There is literally nothing wrong with bread and circuses.

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>someone with a whole loaf throws you breadcrumbs
>nothing wrong with that

t. buttblasted commie larper that would have everyone starve instead

What the phrase is trying to say, atleast if I understand it correctly, is that instead of fixing underlying problems, such as the reasons behind why Rome was filled with endless masses of impoverished unemployed dregs that could riot at a moments notice you spend your focus on containing the problem by finding ways to not make them riot. It's good for now but it's just a bandage.

That's a shit argument. Just because a fix doesn't address the root cause doesn't it mean it's not a fix.

Because instead of people acting in their best interest and using their numerical advantage for better representation in government they are distracted by premium cable tv and sporting events while the government passes another bill that grants them the authority to kill citizens with drones.

>Why are distractions from real problems considered bad?

Cast your line somewhere else.

>lmao let's risk large scale societal collapse and possible mass starvation in a revolution, that's so much preferable to cheap food and entertainment

grow up

I never said it wasn't a fix. What I said was that it's just a temporary one.
Also, one could choose to view it as a tool rather than a fix, as the leaders of society can use "bread & circuses" to maintain their own power. If people aren't satisfied with their lives they probably won't rebel.

>food is a distraction
>quality entertainment to make the day more bearable is a distraction

>stop worrying about government just watch your netflix and drink your pepsi, it's called growing up

*are satisifed with their lives
God damn it!

>quality entertainment to make the day more bearable is a distraction
exactly, instead of trying to make the day more bearable by solving the problem you merely distract yourself instead

>I'm gonna risk losing my Netflix and Pepsi to fight the government because of things I don't like and hopefully after a decade long civil war things will settle down again and I'll get my Netflix and Pepsi back and maybe the government will finally stop doing things I don't like

Really polarizes my peanuts

now you have the answer to your question, this defeatist complacency is why bread and circus is considered bad

It's not defeatist complacency.

There is no point to life besides bread and circuses as long as you have both secured you will be happy, nobody is going to fight in a revolution for high enlightenment ideals but because the food supply started drying up and NASCAR was no longer on TV.

why do you imply there are only two options?

>There is no point to life besides [thing]
wew m'laddy

if hedonistic comfort and distraction are the point of life for you it may be time to reassess your values

>awkshully don't you understand there's more to life than having a fully belly and an entertaining way to pass the time

>duuuhh the meaning of life is french fries and xbox duuhhh

Why is this picture so erotic

>heh I am above such mere physical primitive desires I am truly an enlightened gentleman

seeing through meaningless hedonism is not in fact enlightened or esoteric knowledge, it's very basic stuff

Sorry bruh, he has a point.

>… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses

Juvenal is specifically addressing a people who gave up their right to self-agency for the sake of living under an autocracy who basically pays them the bare minimum necessary to keep them complacent.

And considering the staggering deflationary spiral that Rome found itself in, it's not like this strategy is exactly sustainable. It lasted exactly as long as there were people worth conquering. In other words, it worked great until they ran out of other people's money. Once that well ran dry in the late 2nd century, the 3rd would be defined by continuous strife and civil war.

>we can't pay for your bread and circuses any more you're gonna have to earn them now it's different we swear

lmao

>You no longer possess a farm or a means of generating enough income to buy your own bread and throw your own circuses. Here are some state-provided leisure items to help you take your mind off of that fact

Fixed it for you.

And when the Roman Empire could no longer sustain its welfare state, people fled en masse into the countryside selling themselves into legal servitude just for the chance to eat and put a roof over their head. Our word for this kind of arrangement is feudalism. A people who were once "free" became "free*", and were then unfree when their society collapsed due to runaway government agents (generals, in this case) wrecking the empire in their bid to control it.

So you're saying feudalism is preferable to bread and circuses?

ROFL

it's not a fix if instead of fixing the problem's roots and causes goes after the eventual consequences of the actual problem

Get out of this thread libretardian scum, the welfare state is literally as old as civilization itself.

No, I'm saying feudalism is what the Roman welfare state decayed into

actually I was implying the opposite, there is no point to life at all

Now you're just being salty. I'm nobody's lolbertarian. I just think that a truly just society is one where the wealth is distributed equally, not horded by an elite and dispersed to the masses in doses large enough to keep them complacent, but not enough for them to actually take risks and do something meaningful with their lives.

Welfare states are all well and good, but not when they're an impediment to true redistributionism

so bread and circuses are alright as long as everyone has an equal amount of bread and circuses

Okay.jpg

>, the welfare state is literally as old as civilization itself.

Its its usually been a control mechanism for urban populations. Why dont we take a look at why we need that, and how much of it we could afford if times got tough, rather than treating it like a purely good thing that will always be there?

>so bread and circuses are alright as long as everyone has an equal amount of bread and circuses

No, lots of people owning their own means of producing and making their own bread and circuses is better than all of the bread and circuses being controlled and distributed by a detached elite.

The bedrock of any truly successful society are strong, protected property rights, and a society which becomes too stratified erodes this concept into meaninglessness because the overwhelming majority of people have been removed from the decision making process, which is what property rights (and citizenship rights) are, in a nutshell.

It's better for the long term health of the economy, it's better for the psychology of the people, it's how you ensure that your citizenry remains politically active and astutely aware of any threats to their self-agency. Remove people from their property and then just paying them to exist causes deflation, population decline, and the gradual stripping down of their civil liberties as moneyed elites fight over the spoils.

>making their own bread and circuses
fucking kek

>Why are bread and circuses considered bad?
Its not that they are bad per say, its that the people don't pay attention to what's actually going on in their government. Think about how many Americans voted for Clinton, despite being an obvious criminal.

>fucking kek
spoken like a true classcuck

>Think about how many Americans voted for Clinton, despite being an obvious criminal.
Or like how people voted for Republicans on a premise of "drain the swamp" and literally their first act as a new congress was trying to gut an ethics committee and they only relented after Trump himself was embarrassed of their timing (but not the fact that they were trying to gut an agency which monitors lawmakers for corruption)

That door swings both ways

Trump ran on Drain the Swamp, not the repubs who opposed him every step of the way.

>not the repubs who opposed him every step of the way.
implying that most Republicans (who weren't running for president or totally dependent upon the media for their paychecks) didn't totally jump on the Trump bandwagon

>have HIV
>perfectly manageable given current pharmacological technology
>doctor prescribes be a course of aspirin to treat my transient fevers
>that's it
>develop AIDS
>die

I still don't get how anyone could possibly be so illiterate of ecology to have positive connotations with the draining of wetlands.
I get the intended purpose metaphor but it's just a retarded metaphor to make.
Seeing people chant "drain the swamp" gave me PTSD.

There's a reason they call them wetlands and not swamps when they're trying to save them.

Swamps will give you plagues.

dont get mad at me because you said something stupid. how are you gonna make your own circus? You need more than one person you retard

I think it means that it's just an attempt to placate the masses and not actually change the underlying problem.

Swamps cause malaria and all sorts of shit. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontine_Marshes
Thinking "draining the swamp" is ecologically illiterate is ecologically illiterate.

Most didn't. Even now it's uneasy.

>how are you gonna make your own circus?
Strong property rights support local community involvement and investment. Rather than distract themselves with pre-packaged lowest common denominator type "circuses" (and I'm not just referring to tawdry clown and animal shows, but preforming arts in general) individual communities are empowered for making their own creative expressions which reflect the local tastes and values.

Community theaters and museums for local art and history are part of the backbone of a local culture.

That's not gonna work, the whole business model of the circus is that it travels. That's how they get people to come. If your circus is stationary everyone will see it once and then be done, and you'll never make any more money.

>That's not gonna work, the whole business model of the circus is that it travels.
stop being so literal minded. I specifically said that by "circuses" in the modern sense I am referring to a much wider variety of entertainment media that what was available when Juvenal noticed the Roman state funding these sort of extravagant performance pieces (which didn't actually travel but were incorporated into the festivities of the coliseum) as a way of keeping people's minds off of the fact that they were broke and on the verge of total destitution.

And these are precisely the sort of things that go bankrupt and dry up when local communities are weakened in favor of further stratification

>I am referring to a much wider variety of entertainment media
So when you say "make your own circus," you mean individuals need to just make their own entertainment? But in order to do this, they need "strong property rights" and "local community involvement?" So rather than have individuals take their spending power to the market that provides numerous options, each driven to higher quality by competing for that spending power, you'd have the government create "strong property rights" and force "communities" to create their own "creative expressions?" Might as well put on a big socialist pageant to Ceausescu while you're at it.

>you mean individuals need to just make their own entertainment?
Jesus, fucking Christ, do you think every one else wants to sit in their parent's basement spanking it to pony-porn and never doing anything productive with their lives?

People who are empowered with self-agency don't need those sort of distractions

> Might as well put on a big socialist pageant to Ceausescu while you're at it.
Are you fucking serious, nigger? When was the last time you saw a socialist arguing in favor or stronger property rights?

When government regulation favors local autonomy and regionalism rather than what we have now where an unscrupulous, globalist out of control financial sector is bilking the wider economy and then puts the tax-payer on the hook when they inevitably need a bail out

Whoa don't get all butt blasted because I showed you how your own post doesnt make any fucking sense. Look at this sentence:

>When government regulation favors local autonomy and regionalism rather than what we have now where an unscrupulous, globalist out of control financial sector is bilking the wider economy and then puts the tax-payer on the hook when they inevitably need a bail out

Notice anything? You're missing a whole fucking clause here dipshit. Don't start swearing and insulting people when you can't even fucking type you retarded pinko

there's nothing wrong with that if you're too dumb to steal the loaf

>instead of fixing underlying problems, such as the reasons behind why Rome was filled with endless masses of impoverished unemployed dregs that could riot at a moments notice
that was a feature and not an underlying problem you butt

how else do you provide enough manpower to form the legions

>Can't refute, so I'll attack his grammar

You sound like a NEET who has never lived for anything in his entire bleak life and thinks that spanking it to trap porn on Veeky Forums is the culmination of existence. Congrats, buddy, you are exactly the kind of slob Juvenal was mocking. When the system implodes it'll be guys like you selling themselves into serfdom because you ran out of other people's money.

I'm out of this dumb ass thread. Have fun with your vapid, never-amounted-to-anything life

It's called attacking the symptoms and not the problem.

It's fine for the common cold - but not for cancer.

>itt people getting mad when they realize the only point of the government is to ensure the populace is well fed and well entertained and attacking it because muh fee fees and muh enlightened ideals

where is it written in the fabric of the cosmos that it's "wrong" to refuse to share with you?

where on the quark of an atom does it read "user has the right to more than crumbs from that loaf of bread"?

you're religious.

So, we fix underlying problems first, then can we hand out bread and throw a few circuses?

no, see after we fix the underlying problems, we'll be so enlightened by our own greatness we won't need bread or circuses

"Bread and circuses" implies that the state prioritizes keeping its citizens, the lower rungs in particular, complacent to the goings-on of affairs large and small, as opposed to encouraging mindfulness. It ties in a bit to the mode of a state's government, in a democracy/republic it being considered best for an educated populace to be aware of what's going on in order to best elect their leaders and representatives to represent their opinions. As democracy/republicanism is the sweetheart of the Enlightenment onwards, it's thus considered best to avoid bread and circuses as it has the stigma attached to it of self-serving despots and oligarchs doing their thing and having the rest of the nation stay fat and dumb.

We may not need them, but they're nice.

OP is very thickheaded, uuh.
Its ok, op.
You dont need to "win" everytime.

>implying the dregs of society care or can even comprehend what the elite is doing or why
>implying keeping them well fed and content is bad
>Imma go feed my dog and buy him some toys to keep him happy and stimulated
>Hurrrr Treats & Toys! TREATS & TOYS! U R OPPRESSING HIM AND KEEPING HIM IGNORANT OF YOUR COCAINE BINGES ON THE WEEKEND

I can't refute it because you didn't even make a point you retard. You got so mad you didn't even finish your conditional statement.

>I'm out of this dumb ass thread
Ok feel free to stop posting anytime