Today, I saw the following talk by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel-prize winning author, where he talks about the decline of culture (from his novel, The Civiliza

Today, I saw the following talk by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel-prize winning author, where he talks about the decline of culture (from his novel, The Civilization of Entertainment). English subtitles available. 19 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWDgjPjp1S8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWDgjPjp1S8 Taken from an article on his novel... What he sees playing out across the board, from literature to politics, from religion to eroticism, is a “ludic banalization” of the spheres of human thought and action. According to Vargas Llosa, we live in a “lite society that bestows the same supremacy on frivolity that in other times belonged to ideas and artistic production.” This frivolity “consists of an inverted or unbalanced set of values in which form is more important than content, appearance more important than substance, and where gesture and display—representation—take the place of feelings and ideas.”