In a loose play on Juvenal, "panem et circenses" has become "beer and football." This formula hasn't requiring any retooling for centuries. Keep the masses consuming sensory-dulling substances and mindless entertainment, and you can do anything you want to them in the meanwhile, i.e., taxes, pointless laws, confiscation of property, etc.

I suppose it's neither right nor wrong, moral nor immoral for this to be true; it simply is. However, my older brother, a human geneticist at a major university in the field of breast cancer research, once mused at a gathering of eggheads: "What if we could replace the public fervor for mindless sports with a similar passion for science... salaries included. So many more kids would be reading textbooks than handling a ball, and we'd be so much further ahead in scientific progress." Just a thought.

But nothing will change. The world was ever made for the blissfully self-unaware.