The marriage between a popular artiste and a Datuk was billed as the wedding of the year, or of the decade. The live broadcast of the wedding by a national TV station attracted some 6.8 million viewers nationwide. I am dead sure the live broadcast of the PM's budget speech in Parliament on September 1 would not attract a fraction of that kind of audience.

I tuned to the station by mistake, and followed the coverage of the glittering event for a while. Having been a misanthrope for some time now, I was more than a little disturbed by the media phenomenon that I witnessed. To comment on it without sounding like a gossip columnist is going to be difficult.

In any case, a marriage is one of the high points in anybody's passage through life. It is best celebrated in private, among a close assembly of family and friends. When it is staged for an audience of millions, amidst ostentatious display of pomp and ceremony at great expense, it must evoke in the heart of the disinterested observer a sense of mild revulsion.

I truly sympathise with the couple in question. Given a choice, they would probably do it quietly, to savour their joy in the privacy of their personal space. Unfortunately, the artiste is an icon for her fans, but here the devotees own their diva, and demand her as a sacrificial lamb in this new pseudo-religion of entertainment.

Perhaps the nation needs a supposedly fairy tale marriage to cheer up the spirit of the suffering masses. The haze is back to choke the lungs of city dwellers. The daily thunderstorm this past week has wrought havoc on the traffic, with the mandatory flash flood that caused untold damage. The papers are flooded with tales of murder, snatch thieves, kidnapping and rape. Naturally, minor politicians must parrot their irritating and depressing racial platitude to authenticate their credentials as ethnic champions.

The throngs of millions milling about KL streets do not seem all that interested in the PM's budget, except the prospect that prices of daily necessities are going to spiral upwards out of hand. On winds of higher fee for making passports, the immigration offices are swarmed. The five toll companies are applying to increase their toll charges, again.

No self-critical reflection

In short, the reality of living and working in Malaysia is far from idyllic. Long gone are the days of my childhood, after independence, when life was slow and easy, and community was closely knit. We have taken five decades what some Western nations had taken two centuries or more to achieve, along the journey from an agro-based economy to a throbbing metropolitan industrial society.

While politicians and their patriotic minions bristle and puff up with pride about the great progress of economic achievement since attaining our sovereignty, Malaysia has not had the sort of self-critical reflection that Western societies had somehow gone through. We assume that this rapid modernisation and industrialisation must necessarily be an unqualified good thing, a goal that is manifest in our national slogan of "Vision 2020'.

This Malaysian optimism about development and progress was stated long ago in the West, by the French philosopher of the European Enlightenment in the 18th Century, the Marqui de Condorcet (1743-94). In his work entitled The Progress of the Human Mind, he developed an almost evolutionary view of human development to a future from a savage state of nature to a future of harmony and international peace.

That European optimism in progress and human happiness through the advance of science and technology driving modern mode of material production was thoroughly shattered in the 20th century.

The nihilism of the two world wars shooked Europeans from their complacent belief in the gods of modernity. T S Eliot, composing his great poems in the 1920s, portrayed a bleak picture of spiritual sterility and artistic poverty in such immortal works as The Wasteland and The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.

This sort of artistic and intellectual self-reflection has not even begun in Malaysia. Yet, all the tell-tale signs of the diseases of modernity are here for all to see, not in the way conservative fundamentalist traditionalist groups depict them, but in the way interpreted by thinkers of the West.

Here, in the fast emerging Brave New World that is the Malaysian city, one could say that a certain degree and kind of 'progress" has been achieved. We have indeed been freed from the "savage state of nature", tied to the daily drudgery of looking for the next meal. People have more money and material possessions, and most important of all people have more leisure.

No self-fulfilment

We are told that civilisation is a function of leisure. Human civilisations began in the fertile plains downstream from the great rivers of Egypt, the Middle East, India and China. The ability to store excess food gave the ancient people the leisure to create beautiful artefacts and develop their spiritual wealth inherited by us to-day.

To-day, our average middle -income city dwellers would have the kind of leisure unimaginable to the ancients. By right, our modern civilisation would be far more conducive towards developing our spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual greatness..

That did not happen in Malaysia, as in all other parts of the world. The opposite is the case.

The nature of work has changed. Work has very little to do with self-fulfilment. In this age of mass production, the worker is alienated from the appropriation of production, from nature, from his co-workers, and finally he is alienated from himself.

Work is a mere means to an end, a necessary evil, which one has to do in order to make a living. The real meaning in life is to enjoy all the good things in life in one's leisure.

Having laboured in unpleasant work environments for long hours, in the factory and in the office, and having struggled through the traffic going to and returning from work, all that the average wage earner and salaried worker wants to do in his free time is to shun all activities that require any effort. Reading a serious book for instance, is just such an activity; it is too hard for the exhausted mind at the end of a long working day.

The entertainment industry has emerged to fill to the brim every empty nook and corner of any worker's leisure hours. Driven by exponential advance in information technology, this mega-industry has now enveloped the entire globe with beautifully packaged audio-visual entertainment programmes feeding a global audience hungry for distraction from the reality of living a tough life.

This success of the entertainment industry lies in its ability to sell escapism. They sell dreams, feel-good stories, mirages, fun, and anything else that can numb the consumers' mind to the pain and suffering of daily living. Seriousness is anathema to the box office. Quick fixes for short attention spans form the main fare of films, dramas, features, game-shows, variety shows. Sights and sounds must take precedence over thoughtfulness. Music, especially those of the loudest and discordant kind, must be aimed at overwhelming the consciousness of the listeners.

Addictive fare

Of course, to reach the largest audience possible, the appeal of the entertainment materials must be directed towards the lowest common denominators among all human beings. That means appealing to the basest instincts of the viewers and listeners, especially those that pertain to violence and sex. It goes without saying that romantic love then is degraded to be an extension of the sexual instincts.

Like a powerful drug, entertainment fare is addictive. My guess is that school age children nowadays are glued to their TV screen, their radio, their mobile phones, and their computers for hours on end everyday. Grown into adults, these people will not be able to live without entertainment. To them, the meaning of life is to be entertained.

Like all consumer goods, entertainment is never value-neutral. Their contents, as well as the commercial advertisements that sponsor their accessibility for the market, relentlessly broadcast a subliminal world-view of what constitutes the good life, i.e., more consumption of goods and services. In this way, the logic of capitalism and late capitalism, and its dictate for limitless growth, is legitimated and sustained.

Needless to say, this is a catastrophe for the advancement of civilisation. Genuine creativity is not in demand anymore, because the culture industry is involved in the mass production of standardised entertainment items, to be delivered to the market at the most cost effective speed possible.

So you have it. Malaysia has finally come of age in this itch to embrace Westernisation and modernisation wholesale. Nothing matters in life much anymore, as long as you work hard, to earn the money to afford the entertainment that is flooding the private space of every citizen. All you have to do is to sit back, and absorb all that kaleidoscopic explosion of images, colours and sounds that issue forth from the idiot tube. Happiness is the existence of a giant sponge, on the couch, or in the street. The self will be emptied of its real content.

Karl Marx was wrong. Entertainment, and not religion, is the opiate of the people.