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> Douglas Adams’s masterwork is blithely comic in tone but deeply serious in purpose. I thought it was just a funny book. What is its "deeply serious purpose"?

• deleted 7y ago
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• TimTheTinker 7y ago
  Perhaps to call the Christian worldview into question using sarcasm and sardonic humor.
  • jhbadger 7y ago
    Certainly that was part of it, anyway. Adams was a self-described "radical atheist" before that was a popular stance, and he and Richard Dawkins were mutual fans of each others' works and became personal friends.
  • 76543210 7y ago
    What particular bits?
    • yarrel 7y ago
      Any of the very clealy labelled bits about religion.
• Eyght 7y ago
  The contemporary resurgence of populism in politics feels a lot like the description of democracy in the "Wrong lizard won"-passage. You can read it here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162557-it-comes-from-a-very-ancient-democracy-you-see-you https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162557-it-comes-from-a-very...
  • 76543210 7y ago
    I have questions about populism. Hearing about Roman populism makes me think it's better than Nobel rule. At least occasionally the masses get a policy that benefits them. For instance the Trump tax cuts and Obamacare took money from the 10% and gave it to the masses. (I'm a bitter 10%er that thinks it's time for the 10% to unite) So what's wrong with populism? The class warfare? Is the actual issue demagogry like Trump and Bernie that have fake policy that wins the emotional and uneducated Masses?
    • jetrink 7y ago
      Populist politicians claim that they represent "The People." The problem, as Umberto Eco pointed out, is that The People is a fiction. We have only The Public, which is a collection of individuals with diverse interests and beliefs. We aggregate The Public's will though democracy as it is impossible for a single individual or political group to speak for everyone. But populists claim that democratic institutions do not represent The People, because they are corrupt and controlled by The Elite. Only the populists truly speak for The People and anyone opposed to them is therefore automatically also an enemy of The People. Enemies are very useful to the populist. (Sanders has spent his career railing against the 1% on behalf of the 99% and Trump, of course, has literally called the press "the enemy of the people.") In short, it's a corrosive ideology that works by undermining faith in democracy and dividing the public into friend and foe.
      • atq2119 7y ago
        What if democratic institutions really have been captured by an elite? Regulatory capture comes to mind as a problem that objectively exists. The kind of populism that promises easy answers by oversimplifying the issues is a problem. At the same time, I often feel that there is a deep flaw in modern "moderate/centrist" thinking in not trying hard enough to do the things that would actually be popular, instead coming up with overly technocratic and ultimately flawed arguments for maintaining a status quo that provides bad results for a large fraction of the population. As a politician, how would you call for getting out of that without being branded as the bad kind of populist?
• NicolasGorden 7y ago
  For me, off the top of my head: - Explorations of meaning - Delving into the incredibly strange nature of reality - Musings on the nature of politics and religion and it's relationship to human nature and evolution
  • foobar1962 7y ago
    Some of the shouting I quite like.
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• spongeb00b 7y ago
  He also used the book to explore his hatred of poetry