Entertainment as a Means of “Deevolution”
This was written by hand in forty minutes, so it lacks some finesse. But it did earn me a perfect score.

Entertainment is an inescapable part of human society, whether barbaric and primitive or highly developed and civilized. The human’s desire to escape the everyday toils of survival is what drives the desire to be amused, which had been a part of every culture in history. The development of technology and society also leads to the evolution of entertainment, but it is thought by some that entertainment will be the “ruin” of society. For, while it is a great leap from Roman gladiators to videogames, are they not all the same, instinctual kind of amusement? Does not the human find a terrible kind of glee in violence and blatant disregard for the rules? As societies become more developed, their idea of what is entertainment does not change—it merely becomes more accessible to the masses who, as their nation becomes richer, have to worry less and less about their survival and can sink further and further into their ‘entertainment.’

It is evident from a close look at history that the rise and fall of powerful nations is cyclic. The torch of world power, influence, and wealth passes from one nation to the next as each predecessor collapses upon its own decadence. Ancient power began in Babylon and moved from there to Ancient Egypt, to Imperial China, to Greece, to Rome, back to China and then around Western Europe. Most recently, the United States has been the world power. But we are collapsing even now, and due to what? What caused the great stadiums and architecture of Rome to fall? What made the Pyramids a relic rather than the center of life in the desert? A slow “de-evolution” of society occurs when a nation reaches the height of its power. Its citizens, no longer constantly concerned with their next meal and where it will come from, are left to grow bored with the daily course of their lives. And so, entertainment is born.

It is easy to observe that, while complex forms of entertainment exist, the massive majority of people want and participate in a more basic kind of amusement, the animal-like struggle to life how we please instead of how society dictates. Perhaps the evolution of a character is intriguing to some, the making of art to others, but most of us just want something simple—a fight to the death, a competition, or a joke at the expense of others, perhaps all of these things. “Mortal Kombat” is a videogame, a highly popular one, which is both violent and a competition. Action movies such as “Terminator,” “Die Hard,” or even “Pirates of the Caribbean,” center on a struggle that produces violence in the form of gun fights, death, and exploding things. Not only does this violence affect the mentality of the masses, it also represents and even more basic amusement: chaos and rule breaking. It’s a subconscious retreat from ordered society and into anarchy without sense, where doing what you want means doing the opposite of what authority would tell you to do.

As the amount of time spent in this world of animal-like instinctual amusement increases with the development of society, the mental capacity of the masses depreciates. In Ancient Greece, Socrates was publicly executed when his government and citizens were seized by paranoia that his continuous mental evolution and further reliance on logic would threaten their ‘gods.’ He had been logically thinking and applying his conclusions for decades, but as Greece slowly grew too decadent, they also retreated from both logic and human sympathy and laid to rest one of their greatest philosophical minds.

Basically and without glamour, entertainment is, for most, a retreat from having to think (which is why television is often called ‘mindless.’) This means a retreat from logic and conscience into instinct, and as a society grows richer is also grows more and more surrounded by this entertainment. So, slowly, society de-evolves from human traits to animal traits, and this lapse in common sense and logic leads ultimately to the downfall of nations.